Winterface - light weight Mobile Shell Interface for windows phone | Best Windows Mobile Games / Windows Phone Apps Review

Dec 30, 2009 Posted by Bishnoo in Tools, Utilities | 11 comments

Winterface – light weight Mobile Shell Interface for windows phone

Developer : VITO Technology

More Apps from this Developer : Click Here

iWindowsMobile Communication Suite Goodie Bag : Take a seat folks, ‘cuz this is in fact a review series of many products not one. A Mobile Shell UI, a contact manager, an SMS application, an SIP and throw in a weather manager for good measure – WHEW quite the mouthful.

Winterface 2.04 – Mobile Shell for Windows Mobile

In this day and age when user preferences and experiences play a vital role in product design and upgrades – how would you rate an application that provides very limited customizability and yet packs a wallop in sheer strength of functionality? Would it be your first choice?

What its not

Winterface

Make no mistake – Winterface is not for the “customize” junkies that believe in tweaking their apps to suit their moods. The base skins that come with the app are alright and quite clear. There are a few options on the official website but nothing to write home about. You can set backgrounds with any image of your choice but you cannot alter the layout of the selected skin. Customization includes skinning, full screen mode (hides the top and bottom bars on WM), including headings and background images. Primary visual elements are the background and skins. Why then review, you say? Well – the pure uncluttered functionality of making a finger friendly today screen, truly makes this app worth the buck (at least to ones preferring functionality and willing to compromise on form). At around 2.4MB, this app scores well for the ones who prefer stubby finger-friendly simplicity without the urge to ‘modify’ something everyday.

The installation of the whole suite takes a while but you can cancel out of the other applications (reviewed later) if you like and just install the Winterface module first. The app took about 10 seconds to load (on a Hermes which is a really old device, it should be much snappier or new devices). This module includes a S2U2 style lock screen with a large digital clock, a today plug-in and a rudimentary tasks manager. The base skins are dark, panel and bright (and they suit their labels to a T). The task manager is quite simple and the lock screen has no bells and whistles – but we told you that before. The app comes with a basic scroll view for the calendar displaying the next three days of meetings (Today. Tomorrow and Day After) – again no way of setting how many days of meetings you want to view or if you want to view all day meetings. Clicking on a single item takes you to that day’s meetings. It’s definitely not a meetings manager but provides a clear view into the meetings. Tasks are not handled by the app but it just provides a view into how many are pending. Clicking on the icon takes you to the WM tasks manager.

What it is

Winterface

Now onto the features part of it – or rather the “functional”ity part of it. This is basically an app that lets you organize everything into tiles on your screen. These could be smaller size tiles with the dark theme or HUGE ones with the bright/ panel theme (my personal favorite!). Pure function over form, no-nonsense approach to today screens. The large tiles have a 9-tile per page layout and the smaller ones have a 16. You can add as many pages as you want and just about anything ranging from contacts, settings, apps, files, favorites – to these pages. Simple – right? The stuff you add gets neatly settled into these tiles that can then be shifted into any page as you choose. Just press and hold on any of the icons and the entire set starts to jiggle a la mode iPhone and you can then move these around by just dragging them across pages or remove the ones you don’t need. Neat! The number of notifications associated with each type is neatly spelled out with the tiles as shown and overall gives an uncluttered feel to the screen. Even the tiles to add the apps, settings etc are large and finger friendly and the scrolling is quite slick. The app uses the normal windows notifications on the screen without trying to reinvent the wheel. Shifting from a 16 tile to a 9 tile layout retains the original sequence of apps that you had set. The app lets you choose whether you want to retain the settings when you uninstall the app as well.

What really made us sit up and take notice was the lightness of this application. The other finger and gesture friendly today plug-ins that we have worked with left us with very little RAM to play around with and constantly scrambling to close the last app where as this one had us comfortably cruising without any complaints. The visuals aren’t too bad either. The scrolling between the screens is smooth; the apps load quickly – all at a very comfortable RAM usage level.

In conclusion, If you just got a new device from a manufacturer like HTC chances are you will not be looking for a Mobile Shell app coz HTC Sense pretty much covers all the needs. but if you have an older device with less resources then this app is worth checking out, we recommend this app for those who aren’t looking for bells and whistles and who are happy if their phone functions to its best capabilities. An SPB MS3.5 its not – but it more than makes up with its pure function and frugal use of resources.

Winterface ScreenShots: ( some of it from the previous version )

Pros:

Extremely Finger friendly UI
Simple operations that are easy to learn
Good inbuilt light lock screen
Uncluttered view
Very very light on resources
Loading time is a definite improvement over the previous version
No jazzy features to confuse you

Cons

No jazzy features to impress friends
Skins support is there but no customization of skin layouts
Few glitches exist with the lock function and sometimes notifications and calls aren’t visible
a little pricey for the lack of ‘cool’ value
dumbed down Calendar function

Possible Improvements

Improved skins support through layout editing or even make it open. I saw a contest out there but it looks like it’s only for the icon images.
Improve the lock screen to display some more information
Maybe pack in a few more skins
Maybe add a few more transition styles

Windows Mobile App Review : Winterface

Price : 19.95

Version Under Review : 2.04

User Interface Rating:

Features Rating:

Ease of Use Rating:

Re-use Value Rating:

Overall Rating:

Winterface comes with a price tag of $19.95 but the iWindowsMobile Communication Suite is only $24.95 and offer a lot more

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11 Responses to “Winterface – light weight Mobile Shell Interface for windows phone”

Eric W says:

December 30, 2009 at 2:07 pm

Dude SPB Mobile Shell is the best custom Shell out there PERIOD, everthing else is a joke.

Reply
Bob says:

December 31, 2009 at 11:53 am

The most fundamental flaw of Winterface is hardly mentioned in this review. Winterface is not a complete Today Screen replacement. After installing, you are still sent to the Today Screen when you press the home button. Winterface relies on a touch gesture for activation, but the gesture is awkward and interferes with normal operation of some applications.

Reply
PPCInformer says:

January 1, 2010 at 12:00 am

Hi Bob

thanks for pointing it out. While our reviewer try to cover as much pro and cons of the app, we might miss a few . We are actually hoping users like yourself can fill in those for us… ^_^

Reply
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