PointUI 2 – User Interface Review

It has been a while since I wrote a user interface review – and I sure missed it, so today I will check out the hot stuff PointUI has been releasing with the new version of the PointUI shell for Windows Mobile.

The ‘home’ screen of PointUI includes 2 main areas:

The applets area:

The applets area (located at the top) includes few applets that can be easily navigated using left/right finger gestures or the selection panel beneath them.Among them you will find the usual weather applet, email, images, and Tasks.

moving between applets is fun and work smoothly using D-Pad or finger gestures. It can also be done dirrectly using a special context panel just beneath the applets area.

Want to read more? Check it out by jumping after the break!

The primary navigation area:

The primary navigation area (located at the bottom) which acts as a simple launcher of 4 useful windows: calls history, favorites applications, favorites contacts (quick dial) and emails.

In addition to those main areas, PointUI includes a main menu that opens a nice window with some useful shortcuts to a task manager (running applications), customized settings list (finger friendly settings list!), all programs and more.

Here’s some examples:

Programs list and the customized settings lists:

It may sound like there’s nothing fascinating in here; same old stuff: emails, weather, calendar, quick dial, quick launch…

But the thing is – it’s well designed! It is actually fun using this sweet application: it has some cool animations, it works extremely fast, the finger gestures work great, and it has few advantages:

Speed:

This thing is working extremely fast! I like it, it does not choke your device like other shell apps do (without mentioning names…TF3D… errrr… sorry…. won’t happen again…)

Tasks applet:

At last!!! I love having my tasks in front of me, most shell applications don’t have tasks support, PointUI has it in a beautiful way.

Landscape support:

There are many great If you are following my Shell applications for Windows Mobile, but not all of them support landscape mode. Since I’m using the Touch Pro these days, landscape more is a must for me.

PointUI has a great landscape support, and to make things even more powerful – it has a nice animation when switching between modes as if the developers are saying: “we knew you will check us out – here’s a nice animation to make you happy…”

There are 3 things I didn’t like in PointUI 2:

1. Navigating through really long lists (such as the contacts list) is a bit hard and not accurate. It’s true that all the PointUI lists have that iPhone style scroller which jumps between letters but I think a text lookup and of course integration to a QWERTY keyboard (if exists on the device) would be much better.

2. There’s no customized connection manager so unlike the TouchFlo3D, you have to go to the “regular” settings in order to enable / disable connections.

3. Some of the add/new/more buttons in each applet are not completely finger friendly (just too small). I guess it will be much better on bigger devices like the Touch HD (the best WinMo device I ever encountered), but on my Touch Pro it’s a bit annoying.

According to the website, the Pro version (which costs money of course…) has more applets (9 instead of 6), more customization options, auto lock and haptic feedback. Cool.

That’s it for this short review of the PointUI 2 user interface.

I think it’s a very good software – go ahead and try it out – it’s free!

To download – visit the PointUI website.