Video Review : Pointui Home for Windows Mobile
January 01, 2008 [Pocket PC phone] | By Edward J. R.
There are several attempts by commercial and free software developers to create programs for Windows Mobile that would imitate Apple iPhone or in other words: that would bring higher usability and fancy screen effects to Windows Mobile phones.
Pointui Home from pointui.com is yet another attempt to bring better user interface, with fancy screen effects and more finger-friendly, to Windows Mobile! Here we are reviewing this FREE program in video (to achieve clearer presentation we use here digitizer pen from a Tablet PC - and not a finger):
Interestingly Pointui Home has nice demonstration mode - available by clicking on the Help icon - that shows various features of the program - as envisioned by the developer:
Advantages:
fancy screen effects (although not consistent - sometimes sliding is possible but sometimes not and user must press "go up" virtual button)
speedy operation
nice screen lock feature
Disdvantages:
no support for VGA displays (640x480): not only scaling is not working (things are extremely small) but also not everything works in that high resolution
EDGE and HSDPA are not indicated - so that users don't know whether they can access cellular data over faster connections (i.e. not GPRS and not UMTS)
the part of the program that shows running applications can switch to them but can't close them - very big drawback considering that in Windows Mobile users have to be very careful to close unused applications as soon as possible UPDATE (credit: Gears from CoolSmartphone.com): apparently one can close applications after all : you can close apps in PointUI, you need to tap the bar at the top - for example if you're in "Calendar" just tap the blue bar that says "Calendar" and you'll get the chance to force close - shutting down the app
the application sometimes hangs (but not crashes) and one needs to start external task manager to stop it
Applet Ribon not extensible with independently developed applets
only small number of Windows Mobile functionality implemented and in most cases Pointui Home is just calling standard Windows Mobile applications
phone application cannot be called from the virtual button on the home screen - we had to press hardware key
Conclusion: all in all Pointui Home constitutes nice attempt to improve usability of Windows Mobile although we must admit that approach of other companies that try to replace individual applications of Microsoft with more finger-friendly applications may be more effective one. In other words: Pointui Home promises to be whole user interface replacement but in reality it is just a thin layer over standard Windows Mobile... however it may find some fans who would like to have more attractive view on resources of their Windows Mobile phone.
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