Mobile Phone Blog:

Well, I’ve been building up to it for the last couple of days, but here it is… my full review of SPB Mobile Shell 3! First up, though, it might be useful if I tell anyone who doesn’t know what SPB Mobile Shell is what it actually is…

Basically, it’s an entire new interface and front end for your Windows Mobile phone. One of the big complaints of WinMo, over the years, has been that the user interface is bobbins. And, to be fair, the standard WinMo front end is a bit drab. And fiddly. Well, SPB Mobile Shell is one of the range of interfaces out there (along with TouchFlo 3D for example), that sits on top of WinMo, and achieves the twin goals of making it both pretty and usable.

SPB have a long history of doing that, though, because their Mobile Shell has been around for a good couple of years, now. My X1 even came bundled with version 2. And it was really very nice, but… it was a bit dull, so I never used it.

Now, though, I’ve got version 3. So, it’s time to put it to the test, and find out what this baby can do!

Interchangeable interface

The first cool thing that’s noticeable about SPB Mobile Shell 3 is that you actually get not one, but two separate user interfaces. The first one should be familiar to anyone who’s used an SPB interface in the past, since it’s modelled directly on their earlier incarnations. Yep, this part is called the Professional Home screen, and it’s geared towards using your phone for work, hence why it’s dominated by the BIG clock, the BIG calendar, and strips away the fun stuff to focus your interface just on the stuff you’ll need for, effectively, business communications. Also in the pic on the right, you can see the Weather and Time screens, laid out in the same functional way.

Now, if this was the main homescreen, and this was the only way you had of interacting with your phone, SPB Mobile Shell wouldn’t be worth the money. However, because this is a secondary homescreen, it works perfectly, changing your phone into a dedicated work phone by just swiping your finger up or down on the screen.

But, you see, that Professional layout isn’t the main homescreen. It’s just a nice bonus to have. The main homescreen is called the Lifestyle Home, and it is far, far funkier…

Lifestyle Home screen

Here’s where things get more exciting, because nothing I’ve just told you about the Professional Home (with its static screen, and lack of flashy animations) applies here. The Lifestyle screen’s an entirely different beastie, and… well, it’s chuffin’ lovely.

There was one word that popped into my head when I first started playing with this screen: Android. The way you sweep left and right between the sideways extensions of the main homescreen is out and out Google Android… and that’s no bad thing, because the Android interface rocks. So, what you get here is possibly as far removed from the Windows Mobile standard front end as possible. It really does bring your WinMo phone up to the level of the more user-friendly (at least in the eyes of a lot of consumers) phones out there, like the HTC Magic or the Palm Pre.

Ah, but… it’s not just slick. The similarities to Android go a step further, because the whole Lifestyle screen, by means of the current buzzword in interfaces: Widgets.

Customisation

With the Lifestyle homescreen, customisation’s taken to a level far beyond what WinMo phones have achieved in the past, bringing it easily up to par with the likes of Android or the iPhone (it’s not just about changing the wallpaper, now, although of course, you can still do that too). And widgets are the key to that.

And if you’re wondering what widgets are, the pic on the right, over there, should help. A widget’s a little icon that sits on the screen. It can be a clock, or an app shortcut, or a favourite contact, or whatever. Crucially, though, you can also move them about, and put them wherever you want them. So, the Lifestyle home screen I now use all the time doesn’t just have a custom wallpaper, the entire layout of the interface, and where each widget is, has been built from the ground up, by me.

SPB Mobile shell, like Android, really does take customisation to a new level, and lets you set up not just what your phone looks like, but how you interact with it. That rocks. Big time.

Finger-Friendly, Fast as F……

Needless to say, the whole point of the SPB Mobile Shell is to make an interface for Windows Mobile that doesn’t need you to whip your stylus out to use it. In short, it’s designed to be finger-friendly, with big icons, and kinetic scrolling in menus (you know, where you flick through them with your finger, instead of using a menu bar on the right hand side). It succeeds beautifully, and in the time I’ve been using SPB, I’ve had to get my stylus out only about twice. And that was for when I drilled down into WinMo’s own menus.

The other crucial factor in how luvverly SPB Mobile Shell is… is speed. Now admittedly the Sony Ericsson X1 is a fast and powerful phone, but that alone can’t account for how blisteringly fast and responsive SPB is on it. That’s down to software, and in this case it must be frighteningly well-coded because, as I say, it is lightning fast. I mean lightning as in ZERO lag when, for example, flicking between the Lifestyle home’s three screens. And that’s just on my X1; I can’t wait to see it running on something like the Toshiba TG01, with a Snapdragon processor, since I think it’d run fast enough to take your hand off.

Conclusion

You’ve probably already gathered that I am head over heels in love with SPB Mobile Shell 3. I mentioned TouchFlo 3D at the start of this post, since that’s considered to be the high water mark for WinMo phones. Well, although TouchFlo is undeniably good (and Matthew’s gonna hate me for saying this), I can honestly say I reckon the SPB front end relieves itself all over it. The comparisons with Android, on the Lifestyle screen, are obvious, but is that a bad thing? SPB Mobile Shell 3 takes a powerful phone, and makes it into a pretty and intuitive, finger-friendly phone. It has one or two flaws, like the completely pointless screen carousel (pictured to the right), which you won’t use ever (and which is more or less replicating the Panels interface on the X1, but with just SPB’s screens), but that pointless inclusion doesn’t in any way detract from the other, vastly more important aspects of the interface.

There is really no competition. If you use a Windows Mobile phone (even one with TouchFlo 3D), SPB Mobile Shell 3 will make your phone even better than you already think it is. It’s not that cheap, coming in at $29.95 (about £18.80 in real money), but the price is worth it, and this is about as essential as software gets.

Verdict: it rocks. Buy it. You won’t regret it.

Now it’s your turn… SPB Mobile Shell or TouchFlo? Which do you prefer? Leave us a comment and have your say!