Ever wanted to change your phone’s looks? Now you can have two multiple customizable home-screens together, useful and arrangeable widgets, super fast and smooth menus, a carousel filled with whole new features and built in applications including weather forecast, current conditions, task manager, SPB Contacts, wireless properties and utilities controllers, the coolest transitions and animations and whole lots of great new features, with only one app. Please welcome, SPB Mobile Shell!
When you unlock your phone, the first thing you face is probably your home-screen. And only one, stiff, Symbian 1 home-screen is certainly not much to look at. But when you have SPB Shell, you are presented with an option to have two home-screens, with 3 or 5 fully customizable pages. Switching between the ‘Professional’ and the ‘Lifestyle’ home-screens is just a vertical swipe away. The Professional one has only got the current wallpaper you have on your original home-screen while Lifestyle can have any wallpaper you like, which moves along with your swipes, like in most Android powered devices. Both can be customized with pre-installed widgets (clock etc), and shortcuts to either the built in functions or your own applications. Tap-and-hold to arrange, change the way icons look, or to remove shortcuts option is also available. It is clearly obvious that the home-screens will hold all your necessary applications for much quicker access.
The ‘Launcher’ is located beside the SPB contacts button on the bottom of the home-screen. Tap or press the middle (menu) button to bring it up. Folders like Internet, Organizer, Multimedia are present here. In the Programs folder, you have all your applications and games sorted out in A-Z format. The kinetic scrolling is the smoothest and quickest I ever seen. Swiping left or right in the ‘Launcher’ brings you to your Favorites menu, consisting of the apps you use the most. Repeating or pressing the corresponding buttons on the bottom brings you back to the Launcher.
A great feature in SPB Shell is the Carousel or Tiling of different applications. You can bring it up by tapping on its icon on the home-screen. It can be used to switch home-screens, have quick access to menus or launcher, open contacts, call log, a very useful weather app and a new type of clock. You can arrange all these into a carousel or have them as tiles. This is altogether very handy and fun.
A simple Task Manager replaces the old one. You keep the menu button pressed and it pops up, where all running apps are listed. Tapping on the big cross beside the listed apps closes them up. Some might have had an issue with the older Task Manager when applications just wouldn’t close or they getting stuck. Well, I can assure you that no application can resists you tapping on that cross and it gets out of your sight immediately! The animations please the most and swiping your finger here and there produces very nice effects. In the settings, you can change the type of animations, like Swiping, Sliding, Flipping etc etc.
Although the SPB Shell offers so much, there are some little things needing improvement:
1: Takes up too much of the phone memory, resulting in closing up of heavy applications like Opera Mobile, and poor multi-tasking.
2: The application takes up about 30 seconds to load.
3: Additional folders cannot be made in the Programs folder. Only A-Z format being available means apps of the same category cannot be sorted separately.
For the official hands-on video, go to: SPB Shell UI
SPB Mobile Shell is $30 on www.spb.com OUCH! But if you get it on the Ovi Store, the price varies depending on the region. Here is the link: http://store.ovi.com/content/40055
Bye the way, some people get confused if they need to revert to the regular UI. Remember, as this is an app, it can be closed too. Just go to Launcher>Settings>Options>Exit Shell! Enjoy your new phone!
