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The Innovative Bell UI for Touch Diamond and Pro

2008-12-11
hey guys its brand a minimun from pocket now calm and I've got something really really awesome to show you if you're using a touch diamond or a touch or any of the variants that are out there and there are a lot it's a new user interface that's kind of like touchflo 3d but I think it's even better now the reason that we're getting all these interface replacements is because companies that are making windows mobile devices know that the windows mobile interface that is you know you go into programs and you get this is kind of drab and outdated and we all know this in Microsoft knows this we're waiting for windows mobile 6.5 when its mobile 7 which will hopefully improve that but until then we have these interfaces and here's one from Belle i'm going to show you i'll post links on pocketnow.com on how to get it and i think it's really really amazing so let me show you it all right so there's a lot of different aspects of the bell user interface and by the way Bell is a carrier in Canada who has who are offering the touch diamond and touch pro with this interface ok let me show you the first thing here if you take your finger and swipe downward from the notification area look what you get I'm getting a text message Wow look at this so this let me dismiss this message this is your notification area expanded this is great so you get your exact battery percentage you get your network status you can see if you're connected to a Wi-Fi network if you click on this center area here we can adjust the volume of the system and the ringer which is cool we can go back this way we can change the alarms we can turn on bluetooth right from here we can turn on flight mode it's just a really cool way to to access all the notifications and what's even greater is that you can access this from any screens so if I do it from the settings area this is what it looks like you actually get a task manager which is super cool in any application and you're also going to see battery life or you can go right back home to the bell user interface now abelian user interface has three buttons along the bottom instead of just 2 i'm going to cover those in the second but what i want to show you now is what is called bubbles and it's kind of iphone esque if you look at the top you can see which bubble you're on by which dot is lit up and bubbles are like many applications that you've run off of your today screen it's sort of like Sony Ericsson's panel interface but a little more light they're more like widgets and what you can do is you can add and subtract panels so if I click on that button up to the top I see all my panels right now or or bubbles as they call it and if I click the edit button i can rearrange these by moving them around on the screen like that and you get this crate animation also what i can do is i can delete certain ones if i don't want them and if i want to add a bubble i click the plus button it shows me the bubbles that are remaining and there are some that i haven't added yet so i'll do sports news it puts it in its place and then i'm going to click done and then back and then i will have all the extra bubbles and right now it's flipping through its cool animation it does any time that you add a bubble so let me go through the bubbles and kind of give you an idea of what you can do so this one right here it's the third one is headline news and you can click on world news or do top stories and you can have it work for your area if we go over to the right we get some stocks and i put in a few stocks there and it's showing me what they're doing right now and to the left of that is news and we're getting kind of a scrolling through of different news stories that are hitting and if I tap on one of these news stories I will be taken into the full story and this actually uses pocket express and and that's a program that is free it's been around for a long time but Bell has decided to interface pretty much everything with pocket Express so it works pretty well if I go over to the right we have music news same thing as the news bubble entertainment news and I think I accidentally opened something there baseball if you're trying to keep track of scores you can switch between the NCAA or MLB if you set that up here's a world clock so I have the time in Abu Dhabi and Alaska over to the right is next calendar appointments this is this would be great to have on the screen most of the time so you can just turn on your device real quick and see what's coming up here's a simple slideshow tasks and sub sports news and if we go all the way back to the beginning we have a link to Facebook unfortunately it's not a facebook application on your today screen like you would find on the sony ericsson xperia x1 but you know if you tap on it it'll take your right to facebook if you're already logged in then you know it's a it's a quick way to access facebook so I'm get out of that now let me show you the menu down here the menu is really well done very beautiful we have last latest applications used listed above here we can click on search to search our device we can go to photos to see all the different things we can do with photos and by the way it's very very touch sensitive i'm not using the stylus at all as you're seeing now by going to office mobile it shows me all of the office applications so really the bell you i gives me no reason to go into the standard windows mobile interface to leave the today screen and i think that's what a good interface should be and that's really what they're trying to do if we go into games we see all the games and you get the point from there very very flick friendly too i'm over to the right if we click contacts we get a sort of a weird looking display of context and I've got several hundred and flicking through them will take a long time although if you go to the side here you get a scrollbar and you can choose the letter which makes it a little easier but still not very as you can see I can't open an on-screen keyboard right now so I can't get right to you know Bob or something so I'm going to click back if we click web it will take you right to upper mobile which is good and something that I found interesting is touchflo 3d and landscape doesn't exist does it exist does Bell you I have a landscape watch what happens no strangest thing I don't know why these interface replacements don't work in landscape but they don't and finally I want to cover these buttons along the bottom the one on the left is contacts you can add favorite people and what's really great is that you can have to format one for text messaging and one for his house and you can have a little icon in the upper right corner so you know which is which so it's a really fast way to to access that the next one over here is a text messages and you can actually have multiple messaging accounts in this screen so you can actually have a consecutive list of you know email message text message email depending on when you actually receive the message that's really innovative here we have a panel for media I don't really have that setup but you can let see launch a radio player streaming radio some of these things don't work in the music player because you have to be a bell subscriber to have them work and finally the one to the right is favorite applique and you remember this from touchflo 3d so we can press plus we can add let's add one note to the favorite applications and here it is down there beautiful so that's it for the Bell user interface it's a beautiful well done completely different and innovative interface for windows mobile it's got fantastic transitions animations it's got transparency on all of these bubbles if you notice that you can see the stars kind of shining through really well done in fact this is so well done and so interesting and fresh that I am using the touch pro is my daily device now I had been using the xperia x1 for a long time since it came out and I'm just so impressed by this user interface that I want to use this device the touch pro or if you have a diamond that works on that too full time again we'll post links on pocketnow.com on how to get this the guys at xda-developers came up with the the way to extract the files from the belleville user interface so that everyone can use this on their device for exclusive content follow us on twitter at twitter.com/nataliealund
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