Review: PointUI Home

Posted by Nathan on Wednesday 6th August 2008 at 20:38Hello there! This is my first review for the site, and I hope you enjoy it!

I'm going to be talking about PointUI. PointUI is an amazing shell for Windows Mobile, and it provides a complete shell for the touch screen and Smartphone phones.

We all know how much Windows Mobile lacks design and personal touch, and that's where PointUI comes in – changing the way you look at your mobile.

It is a unique design, and very unlike the iPhones interface (which is black and white - oh and black oh and a bit of blue here and there…). It weaves colour with style.


There's several different 'home' styles:
Home ScreenCalendar - Home screenWeather = Home screenHome - AppointmentsHome - Tasks
above, are the clock, the calendar, the weather panel (which automatically updates when you dock, amd you can set times during the day for it to update), the tasks and appointments panel


All the different home screens can be accessed by a swipe of a finger (left or right) and tapped on, to get more information. The 'dock' at the bottom of the screen is extremely useful as it displays 4 rather large icons to send you to recent calls, SMS, email and favourites.

The shell is incorporated everywhere apart from the SMS, and email interface. This is a shame, because I would personally love to see PointU'Is approach at an SMS interface, as I'm sure it would look absolutely amazing. I actually think they are secretly doing just that, because on their homepage they have announced different products (which I can’t wait to have a go at). Unfortunately, I’m almost certain that they will charge for these – and to be quite frank, I don’t blame them, since creating and maintaining a program like PointUI is very time consuming and costly! Another pointer is the fact that on their downloads page PointUI is hinting the fact that there might be a paid version coming soon due to the 'home, free' column.

Anyway you’ve just had some information which isn't totally relevant, but maybe it will interest you!

PointUI replaces every Windows interface, it eliminates the use for a start menu, incorporates its own today screen and organises your Windows Mobile. Everything is so much easier to get at:
Program List flick your finger up to go up the list, and flick down, to go… wait for it… down!

Granted, it’s weird to begin with, but it’s different and straying away from the iPhone route. It takes some time to get used to but is very nice to navigate with. If you swipe your finger left or right on a folder, it will open the folder in a cube (or, if you have it enabled, slide) like fashion.

It even has its own (if not limited) task manager – which does draw you out of the PointUI interface, so you can close the program. Personally, I would have preferred this to have a hold down gesture, meaning you hold your thumb down on the application you want to close, and it gives you a list of options.

The memory footprint (how much memory it uses) is, (for me) 4.2mb. To be fair, this is a lot if you’re limited to 20mb of ram from start-up, or if you like to multi-task, but 4.2mb of ram is seriously worth it.

(Shh, don’t tell anyone – but my HTC Touch actually crashed when I tried to close PointUI. I doubt it had anything to do with the program though, as it's usually Active-Sync (which really lags my phone).)


Anyway after a quick reboot of my phone, I get back to work.

I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been using PointUI since they released their first version – and I have been on the ball watching their site with an eager eye ever since, anticipating a new version. Heck, I even contacted the admin and asked if I could design their site (they said no, though – they had a design already).

Oops, I keep going off-topic, at this rate we will be here all day… I’ve decided my phone needs a new ROM flashed to it, it’s really unstable at the moment…

PointUI comes with a volume changer, a locking device, battery status – which I would love to see them add a “remaining battery time”, instead of a percentage. And a settings panel:
Settings
I could go through every little detail of pointUI Home – But I think you can see now that it is indeed an amazing program and that you should download the latest version now

>> Download HERE
>> PointUI home page



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