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I have been using a pre release copy of Mobile Shell 2.0 for a few weeks now and wanted to post my thoughts after having some time on it since it was released yesterday.

From the Spb website: “Spb Mobile Shell introduces the next generation user interface while keeping all advantages of a Windows Mobile device. Enjoy your Windows Mobile phone!”

My initial impressions are that this is a wonderful application. Mobile Shell has offered me a better way to navigate my phone, while adding a fantastic appealing interface with beautiful transitions and utility.

Lots more pictures and review after the jump.

I’m going to run through each of the pieces of the interface and highlight the features. At the end of the review I’ll chime in with some things I either haven’t figured out yet or would like to see added to Mobile Shell

The first panel of the shell is the Now screen as seen above. This has a really nice big clock as well as showing your calendar and upcoming appointments. It gives a quick glance of the state of your mail/sms/phone counts as well as the ability to quickly change volume profiles from standard to vibrate or silent. Touching the weather screen brings up a full page view of the current forecast for your chosen city as seen to the right.

The lower row of the Now panel offers quick access to the Menu panel/Contacts panel and a close which will dump you back to the Today screen. The Menu panel is a very nicely presented view of your installed programs and control panel applications. The presentation of the items is extremely nice to navigate with a fingertip. I should stress that the entire interface of Mobile Shell is finger tip driven. No need to go digging for your stylus here everything is easily done with gestures and touches.

The Menu panel organizes your program menu items into a folder view using large icons to categorize the items. Settings contains a nicely organized control panel listing. Programs contains a list of all your programs that you would find in the normal programs menu item. Tools contains a link to some quick actions such as screen rotation, task manager, file explorer, phone profiles, soft reset, and lock device. The screen transitions are all beautifully animated and very fast transitions. There is no feel of lag when changing screens. The top rows contain a list of recently used applications and “pinned” applications. You can hold down on an icon to pin it for quick access or enter the “manage pinned” screen to select applications that will appear on the top row at all times for quick access. Below are a couple screen shots to familiarize you with the look and feel of entering the settings screen.

The Contacts panel is next up and contains a full screen grid of available quick contacts shortcuts that target a specific contact in your contacts list to give you one touch access to 15 contacts and the 16th slot takes you to one of my favorite provided features of Mobile shell the contacts search interface.

The contacts search feature fills a void for me that I have felt since switching from smart phone to the tilt. One of the nicest ways to search for contacts in the smart phone is to enter quickly on the number pad a users name for instance entering 547 will quickly bring up “kip” and kirk” as both would be possible matches for all the letters on the 547 keys. At least for me this is a very fast way to find contacts without scrolling through my massive list of contacts and without having to slide out the keyboard. This feature alone being integrated into Mobile Shell makes it worth the price for me personally.

Mobile shell has some nice integrated gestures to get back at one of the three main panels from within any application. This is best seen via a video demo of the feature as screen shots don’t do it justice. There are nice videos of each panel at the Spb website.

The included today screen plug-in includes quick access to mini versions of the large panel pages. Below are a few screen shots of the different views of the today screen. The “pinned” applications from the Menu panel translate to the today screen plug-in which is very nice.

I find myself not using the today screen at all since I have installed Mobile Shell. The ease of access to everything through the panels make it unnecessary to use the Today screen provided you don’t have any today screen plug-ins you cant live without.

Lastly I’ll mention that there are many customization options in Mobile shell that are far beyond the scope of a review. There is a demo to download as a trial and I highly recommend you check it out for yourself. For the curious I’m including screen shots of the settings screens below.

After using the application for several weeks I don’t want to live without it. There are really only a few things I would like to see changed or added to Mobile Shell. I’m going to provide this as feedback to the software developers and will follow up if they return a response. The three things I would like to see added are:

1. Web links on contacts panel for quick access to web sites featuring a thumbnail of the site.
2. The ability to pick the default mail account so clicking the mail icon on the Now screen would go to a specific inbox instead of the default mail box which I don’t use since I’m configured for gmail imap.
3. Picking “spb menu” from the Today screen should let you select the Now screen as an optional screen for the default so when you launch into Mobile Shell it starts on Now instead of Menu.

Download the demo at SPB Software

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