Over the weekend, after a long flight back from the US, I got particularly frustrated by my HTC Touch Pro device – the Today screen basically crashed and required me to take the battery out in order to restart the device.
<Rant>
Before I go much further can I state publically that I think that the current HTC devices (namely the Diamond (from other’s feedback) and the Touch Pro) are some of the worst devices I’ve seen. Whilst the HTC customised UI is “nice” something doesn’t play nice on the device causing all sorts of issues. This coupled with a complete lack of any support from either HTC or eXpansys Australia has left me very disfranchised about the device that I paid >$1000 for. I have purchased a number of devices from eXpansys UK but this was the first and only device I will ever by from the Australian subsidiary – the lack of any real support on the issues with this device means that I would discourage anyone from every purchasing from eXpansys Australia.
</Rant>
Ok, enough of me ranting. What I did want to cover was the Point UI Home 2 interface. Like so many other interfaces this uses a series of icons and gestures to try to optimise the layout of the home screen. I’ve included a number of the screens:
Unfortunately it seems that Pocket Controller-Pro doesn’t seem to be able to capture the higher resolution on this device so the images are a little grainy. In the second image you can see the transition between Date/Time/Weather view and the Task list view. This is done by sweeping your finger across the top part of the display.
At the bottom you have a series of buttons that can be used to bring up Call history, Favourite applications (you can specify 9), Favourite contacts and Messaging.
All in all, I think this UI is much easier to use that the default Touch Pro interface and a significant improvement over the default Windows Mobile 6 UI. In fact I’d almost say, based on the screenshot presented from WMC that it is more intuitive than what’s coming in Windows Mobile 6.5 with the Honeycomb start interface.