SPB Mobile Shell review

Benny Har-Even

We review SPB's Mobile Shell 3.0, an intuitive and attractive shell for your Windows Mobile phone

Published on May 26, 2009

It says something about the state of a mobile phone operating system if there are third party companies making money out of replacing it. However, SPB certainly isn't going to be complaining when you cnsider the fact that the company is on its third version of the Mobile Shell application – a front end that sits on top of the infamously clunky OS that is Windows Mobile.

We tested SPB Mobile Shell version 3 using HTC’s Touch HD, which already features HTC’s own Touch FLO 3D to hide Windows from the user.

This means there were two layers of interface running on top of Windows Mobile 6.1 itself, which could go some way to explain the occasional poor performance and freezes.

However, most of the time SBP Mobile Shell 3 worked a treat and if you’re a long term Window Mobile user, we’d recommend forking out for it. It currently costs $29.95 (£26.60) and works on Windows Mobile 5.0 and above. Ironically then, it means that the more basic you phone the more value you’ll get out of the program.

The idea behind Mobile Shell is to make the information, functions and applications of Windows Mobile much more accessible to the user.

As a default, the Mobile Shell offers a ‘Professional’ Home screen, which presents a wealth of information at your fingertips. The time is displayed in large text at the top, and beneath this the date, and then four icons giving direct access to your mail, your text messages, your recent call list and profiles. You also get your upcoming appointments and beneath that your calendar.

It’s all very ‘work mode’ but if you fancy something different you can flick your finger upwards to replace the home screen with a ‘Lifestyle' screen. This features a relaxing wallpaper as a background and is free of icons save for a clock. You can then move the whole screen to the left or the right, with an extended desktop metaphor that clearly nicks the idea straight from Android.

You can then add ‘widgets’ anywhere onto this desktop area, giving yourself quick access to what you need without the usual faffing about. I placed my Twitter app, web browser, weather, video player and camera app on the desktop and I was set.

To move things around, simply hold your finger down on the widgets to bring up a menu and move the icon where you want. Though it’s not a slick as the wobbling effect on the iPhone, it still provides a lot of freedom.

At the bottom of both Work and Lifestyle home screens are icons called Launcher and Contacts. The former brings up a screen with icons for six favourite applications at the top and a list of recently used options underneath – thus almost everything that you need is unlikely to be more than a couple of clicks away, which is much faster than the usual Windows Mobile experience.

Next to the Launcher application is Contacts. This has a grid of 18 squares which can be assigned direct access to contacts, with six larger ones at the top. In a neat touch, if you don’t have a contact’s image on your phone you can sign into Facebook, and it will pull in the image from there – even letting you crop the image to fit. There’s a tab for the recently called list and if you need to dig out a contact, the search is T9 enabled.

What Mobile shell also offers is a number of different screens, which are accessed by pressing a dial-pad icon at the bottom left. From here the screen you’re on recedes to display a 3D carousel which can be rotated round with your finger to display all the available Mobile shell screen, with a number of different panels such as Time, Weather, and Agenda.

There’s no doubt then that SPB Mobile Shell is an essential purchase and the slickness of the effects is impressive, besting what the manufacturers themselves are coming up with. If you’re a Windows Mobile owner, it's $30 well spent.