Pointui Home - Quick Impressions
Posted by: PatrickJ on Jan 01 2008 - 1,625 views
Home is the first of many products we aim to release to make your device simpler to use and more functionally rich.
Pointui’s Home product has now launched, after generating a fair bit of buzz and comment round mobile tec
h sites in the last few days.
I installed it this morning on my 8525, and have played around with it for just a little while. So here are some very quick impressions on it:
- Looks pretty for sure, but very disappointing so far in terms of usability.
- It feels slow, feels as if it has slowed down the 8525.
- If anything, it highlights the limitations of touch screens on Windows Mobile, and on smaller screens. The places where you are able to scroll with a finger - like the list of running apps, or all the apps on your system - are awkward to use - scrolling is at best uneven and jerky, and at worst just doesn’t happen if you don’t place just the right bit of your finger in just the exact right places on the screen. Similarly, the return to home bar (that little orangy bar at very top right is in a position that is especially awkward to tap in the right place first time.
- The list of running apps does not present an easy way to close any of them - that’s a big miss.
- It appears to also disable existing plugins, in my case iLauncher’s Task Manager applet - which I want there in order to close running apps etc.
For me, the one word description of 15 minutes playing with Home is … frustrating. Looks pretty, feels promising, but doesn’t deliver. Maybe it will grow on me and erase the bad first impressions. I know it’s very harsh to judge an app in 15 minutes - but honestly this one just feels as if it’s got about another 30 minutes of exploring tops, and it’s uninstall time.
Coming from months of iPhone usage (the user experience model that all these sort of products are striving to imitate) this just serves as a reminder of how great the bigger screen is, and how excellent the Multitouch interface is. It’s painful trying to use this after using the iPhone.
There you go - very snap judgements. What do you all think? Am I missing the boat on Home? Anyone loving it so far?
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I was anxious to try it as well, but it won’t even run on my Tilt. I suspect it has something to do with the number of plug-ins I have running.
Like Patrick - having played with the iPhone for the last week - I covet a bigger - and flush-fit screen to make the no-stylus thing work on my WinMob phone.
[url="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/209178918/"]TechCrunch{/url] are calling it another case of iPhone envy
I’d have to argue against that. I’ve had enough time to play with my friend’s iPhone to get the gist of the interface. It is gorgeous. Big buttons. The keyboard works well enough (though I like PocketCM more). Everything just seems well integrated and pretty consistent.
However, I’d argue that PointUI is really taking a step in the right direction as far as improving upon the WM UI. To quickly address the points you made:
1) Slowness — It was slow when I first put it on my WM6 TyTN, but ever since I hard reset the device (users shouldn’t have to do this of course, but I wanted to) the software has been as fast as shown on the YouTube videos
2) Usability — I’m used to using SPB Pocket Plus and Pocketbreeze for all of my day-to-day task switching and PIM but I welcome the change that PocketUI brings about. I love how everything just looks good (the animations are fantastic) while maintaining basicaly lightning-fast speed. And the memory usage is still decent enough that I can run all my programs together, including Pocket Player 3.5.
3) Disabling iLauncher — yeah, it basically does. It seems to paint its top bar over the default start menu, which is where iLauncher lives. On this and the whole customization issue, i just put my faith in the dev’s. It’s january 2 now and they’ve released an update. I hope they can continue to support the product.
VITOs latest foray into the finger-friendly software certainly looks good, but it really is (even with version 2.0 of Contacts) too basic for my purposes when compared to ilauncher and PocketCM Keyboard. Then there’s all the cube mania that’s got the XDA devs forums in a tizzy — again, all of it looks great, but it’s still just one part of the OS and you leave it again very easily.
I love the consistency of PointUI in comparison. I never really feel like you’ve left Home with PointUI. That is, it rewrites the top bar and makes it so that you can always reach it with just a click of the top-left title menu. It makes the system feel different and fresh, somehow. And I feel like I’m someone who isn’t easily impressed by flashy software without any depth.
Anyway, I’ve been reading JAMM for months now and just thought I’d comment. I read the blog daily and enjoy what you people post.
Cheers.
Ragart,
Thanks for your thoughts and welcome to the JAMM community. Glad to hear you are enjoying yourself here.
Doug
Ragart - thanks for a great first comment. Glad to hear it’ quicker for you after a hard reset - like you’ve said, that shouldn’t be needed, but hey I might give that a try if I decide to play with Pointui a little more.
Usability = again, glad to hear you’re liking it. I like a lot of the look and feel of it, enjoy the button bars extending across the screen and so on, but I can’t say I preferred it to Spb Mobile Shell plus iLauncher so far. Disabling iLauncher is a big ouch for now, but I agree it is very encouraging to see a quick update from the developers already.
Very glad to hear you’re enjoying JAMM - we’ll do our best to keep it that way
I only just now found out it’s an australian company that released PointUI!
Fair Dinkum!