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Freestyl is a familiar-looking, finger-friendly interface for Windows Mobile.  Built upon Flash Lite and the .Net Compact Framework, Freestyl aims to be more than just an iPhone clone, but at this early stage, while promising, suffers from some flaws that will make it hard to prove as the interface of choice for the casual Tilt user.  Find out more after the break.

The great thing about Freestyl is how customizable it is, including a configuration interface that allows you to visually select which button to edit.  Buttons can either launch applications, web pages, or dial contacts, and contain custom labels and icons (selectable from a decent list).  Each page has 12 buttons, with five pages to choose from.  The bottom row of icons are not customizable yet, unfortunately, and neither is the last launcher page.  This doesn’t take away from how easy it can be to customize Freestyl, and its configuration applet makes it the best “finger-friendly” interface in this regard.

Maneuvering around Freestyl is fairly easy.  Swipe your fingers left or right to navigate from page to page.  Freestyl flows pretty smoothly in this regard, although I found it sometimes required an extra swipe or two to change pages.  Swiping down-to-up locks the application and screen, with a nice big clock and a slider at the bottom to unlock the phone.  There were a few problems on this page.  First, the slider was finicky and it often took several times to unlock the device, even with moving the slider left to right at various speeds.  This was a pain.  Also, on this screen you are supposed to see an email indicator at the top for new messages (if you’re like me and use BlackBerry Connect on the Tilt, this is essential).  However, this worked intermittently. 

Unfortunately, these weren’t the only issues with Freestyl (and keep in mind, this is a beta version, 0.1.1.1).  The clock in the launcher would inexplicably become an hour off, typically in the morning, and with no way to change it.  The configuration applet would occasionally crash, sometimes losing changes (save often!).   About half the time, launching Freestyl would result only in a black screen (a workaround is discussed here). 

But most importantly, performance was simply sluggish.  Freestyl takes its time to launch, and once loaded, performance is still Freestyl’s Achilles Heel.  While moving from page to page is usually graceful, there can be some delays.  Launching other applets (such as for configuration) takes time, and this apparently stems from using Flash Lite as the “engine” for the application.  I also could never get the Weather applet to work.  Using the Contacts applet wiped out all of the customization I had done to Freestyl (admittedly, the Contacts applet is in an experimental state).  Perhaps there is further optimization for performance that can be done, but the last update to the Freestyl site was on January 16th with promises of an updated build coming soon.  Two months later, nothing has materialized. 

Freestyl has been my favorite touch interface to be released for Windows Mobile.  The performance and bugs, however, prevent me from using it as my launcher of choice.  Other finger-friendly interfaces can take some lessons from Freestyl’s customization options, but until the developers can devote more time and speed up the application, Freestyl will only remain a pretender, which is a shame.

Doug Smith (301 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook