TouchFLO
The skin made by HTC was the first to show on Touch handsets that there can be spectacular interfaces created for Windows Mobile. By now Samsung has also created their own (I think I don’t have to introduce Omnia), but I have seen something similar on Airis handsets too, not mentioning 3rd party applications or Sony Ericsson Xperia that has been announced more than half a year ago.
TouchFLO is a user interface that overrides the default Microsoft screens and completely changes them. It could be very user-friendly if it could run at a speed like an iPhone , but it can’t. It’s still faster than the first version software from Touch Diamond that was as fast as a pensioner platform guard, but it’s still far from being good.
If we’re not in such a hurry it’s great. It looks good; we can do all kinds of tricks by stroking the screen. The default screen is a gigantic clock with the missed events below it and in the bottom there are shortcuts to all kinds of functions in a row. If we want to show off we can move between the icons of the bottom row with horizontal and theatrical finger moves, it’s really cool. Vertical strokes also function on almost all screens, I definitely like the weather forecast screen where cities flow in one under the other; this is certain success.
The default Windows screens can be activated from the Start menu, but the system uses large fonts so we can control it easily with our fingers. Scrolling is also active; this provides a nice and fast motion in the phonebook for example. The task manager is always in the top right corner, we can shut down any running program with it.
It’s hard to describe the functionality of TouchFLO. It’s a very well thought-out system, it can be customized comfortably, it’s spectacular, it’s just a bit slow. It’s much easier to have a look at a video of it.
I think it’s evident that TouchFLO is basically a good thing. It just has some flaws unfortunately. It’s quite easy to get used to it. I had some mistaps even after a week, even though I tamper a lot with it. What disturbed me the most was how it handles Windows system messages that pop up in a window. If we don’t react to notifications immediately then TouchFLO simply “eats” them, we won’t see them anymore. I’ll tell an example. I have used two different kinds of iGO with the phone and the software asked me if I want to upgrade as this seems newer than that. I would have liked to but the message just disappeared. It reappeared when I was calling someone; it was just sitting in the background until then. MMS was not set up, but I have received one from someone and so the error message was displayed. I have seen it for 2 seconds and then it disappeared again. And sometimes I have received a nice, fullscreen error message about something that went wrong and asking me whether I want to send it to Microsoft for further investigation. No, I don’t want to, but why does such a thing appear when I use only factory default software?
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
