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Introduction:

A few days ago, SPB released a new update to version 3.5 of Mobile Shell. For those who aren’t familiar,   Mobile shell is a complete overhaul of your phone’s interface. Generally, it tries to make your phone look better, be more usable and more “touch friendly”. With Mobile Shell Installed, you will rarely see your Windows Mobile phone’s today screen or start menu. Rather, most of your interface with the phone will be through Mobile Shell’s GUI. This is a decidedly good thing. Mobile Shell was a very successful product and is on my personal short list of ‘must haves’ on a Windows Mobile device. It did a great job of making my phone easier and more pleasant to use, along with making the phone feel more ‘modern’ by allowing mostly touch based interaction with the phone.

The modding community was also quite fond of Mobile Shell. They found countless ways to extend and tweak the Mobile Shell interface. Some of these tweaks were simply visual, others were more functionally focused. The modding community grew even more fond of Mobile Shell with the release of Mobile Shell 3.0. This version allowed various widgets to be placed on your home screen(s) and gave an even greater degree of customization. It was an excellent update to an already good product.

If I had to characterize the update from Mobile Shell 3.0 to 3.5, I would call it the “good idea” update. It appears that SPB has been keeping an eye on a lot of the things the modding community has been doing and they have rolled the good ideas into this update. The popularity of widgets, in particular, has really caught SPB’s attention and they’ve added a significant number of new ones.

This review isn’t intended to be a comprehensive review of Mobile Shell 3.x. You can find that here. What I’d like to do here is focus on some of the new features and discuss what I do (and don’t) like. Lets get started, shall we?

What I liked:

I’ve gotta start with the widgets.  There are new ones, there are old ones, there are old ones with new features…  in short, there’s a lot to love about the widgets.

New to the widget party are a facebook widget, a twitter widget, a picture frame widget, a tasks widget, a show today widget, an internet search widget and probably a few others.  The facebook and twitter widgets are basically identical.  You can place them on your homescreen and update your status for either of those services without having to launch an app of any sort.  Clicking inside the text entry field starts a nice animation that isolates the widget on your homescreen.  It does a nice job, but, the widget is very basic.  You aren’t going to be able to access any other features of those services from within the widget.  They are strictly for status updates.  Honestly, I’m ok if that means they run snappy and don’t bog down my device (TyTn II)….  and they don’t seem to bog it down at all.

The picture frame widget allows you to display any picture on your device on any of your homescreen(s).  A nice way to have a picture of a loved one or a recent vacation in front of you.  Speaking of homescreens, SPB has added the ability to customize the number of panels you have in the lifestyle homescreen.  You can have just one, three, or five.  In other words, there is plenty of real-estate for all the new widgets.

A very welcome addition is the ‘today screen’ widget.  This really goes to show that SPB is really paying attention to their users.  Back during Mobile Shell 2.0 and 3.0, one of the most common requests was to add the ability to easily get to the today screen.  SPB listened and there is now a nice little widget you can plop where ever you like to take you out to your classic today screen in one tap

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The internet search widget is worth mentioning.  It is as simple as it sounds.  SPB included predictive search in it as well, meaning it attempts to guess what you are searching for as you type, hopefully saving you a few keystrokes.  While it is a nice idea, in practice, I found it too slow to be terribly helpful.  Generally I could have typed out my full search in the amount of time it took the predictive text to pop up.  Maybe it was just my device or connection.

Perhaps my favorite new widget is the improved weather widget.  You can now have a live extended forecast displaying on your home screen.  It works great and shows me just enough info.

SPB has also added several layers of high gloss paint to the application, which I love.  I’m all about the eye candy wherever possible.  All of the widgets look nice and the programs internal menus are well done.  They’ve also created a 3d email viewer and SMS viewer application.  It falls somewhere between useful and pure eye candy, but it is worth inserting a screenshot, nevertheless:

Perhaps my favorite piece of pure eye candy that they’ve put in is access to an online catalog of background screens ready to go for use in Mobile Shell.  BRILLIANT move, in my opinion.  All of them are very high quality and work well.  To access the catalog, you just hit ‘change background’ and then ‘online catalog’ and then you’re greeted with a great selection of backgrounds like the ones below:

What I didn’t like:

This release, while excellent, does have a few things that left me a bit disappointed.  When I first read about the picture frame widget, I was hoping that it would be possible to have it cycle through a folder of pictures.  In fact, you can tap on the widget to have it display a full screen slide show, but the widget on the home screen will always display the same picture.  I really would like to to cycle between pictures.

Also, I was surprised at the lack of integration with SPB weather.  I’m not sure if it was a glitch or not, but, it doesn’t even show up as a point of integration in the Mobile Shell ‘integration’ menu.  Additionally, the built in weather widget is more useful (because it has the nice detailed widget display) than the SPB weather widget is.  The SPB Weather widget (as in the separate program SPB weather) only has a simple current temperature display.  Ideally, I would like the Mobile Shell widget to display in big mode… and allow me to flip through the multiple cities of SPB Weather.

From a stability and performance standpoint, I’ve found 3.5 to be very snappy.  Honestly, it may run faster than 3.0 did, which is surprising.  I did run into some stability problems though.  When I was using the 3d message and SMS viewer, if I returned to the home screen by pressing [X] or ok, my home screen wouldn’t respond to touch input until I turned off the display and turned it back on.  However, if I used the back button in the lower left of SPB’s menu, things worked fine.  I, personally, didn’t find the 3d message viewer terribly useful.  But, to each his own.

Conclusion:

This may sound like hyperbole, but, if I could have only one 3rd party application on my Windows Mobile Phone, this would be it.  No, really.  It COMPLETELY changes the way you work with your phone, almost completely for the better.  If you own a Windows Mobile phone, you owe it to yourself to try it out.  If you already own 3.0, you shouldn’t even be reading this.  Upgrading to 3.5 is free for you and you’ve wasted valuable time already.  Go upgrade.  If you are still on the fence, go download the trial.  Come back and thank me later.