PointUI Home 2 Free
First let’s have a look at the less known contestant: PointUI Home 2.0. The developer company is called PointUI, it’s from the “never heard of it” category, although they were the ones who have created Bell UI (quite known in the industry), and they working together with Telstra on the user interface of Touch Diamond. It’s a good start.
The www.pointui.com website is not very convincing, it looks like as if they have put a PointUI logo on a free website template – it’s probably how it happened. Still, the PointUI software is a kind of small wonder: a spectacular, fast, well though-out user interface for Windows Mobile, for free. Let’s start with a video, this might tell you the most.
As you can see, PointUI is colorful, good-looking and extremely fast. It is a Today Item, after installing the nearly 1 MB cabinet file we can turn it on/off in the Settings/Today menu. It is structured in three parts, the top part of the display is for the Applets, we can have at most six of these on-screen, and they can be scrolled horizontally. In the middle there is a menu with four buttons, while on the bottom there are the three softkeys.
There are five Applets by default. The first displays the to-do list and expected weather for today and tomorrow, and we have a row for an actual new item from Google News. There is a to-do list with non-timed events, and a world clock with major cities (clicking on them displays the local time and weather). We can also put a messaging and a photo viewer Applet on-screen and we can download thousands more from the PointUI community website.
There are four buttons in the center, the left one takes us to the call log and warns us of missed calls. The second is the list of favorite applications, it’s really spectacular, we can freely change the icons, it’s great. The third icon takes us to a speed dial interface with pictures, while the last one is the shortcut for messaging – Outlook – and it’s icon shows if we have unread messages.
The first of the three icons on the bottom always brings us back to the main menu, if we’re not already there – if we are then it pops up the PointUI community site, where we can even order a t-shirt. The other two have no constant function, if we’re not inside any menu, the left one takes us to settings, the other one to the contact list, which is a PointUI list, it’s easy to scroll, but searching is not really good. In the settings we can find a task manager with the list of currently running programs, the list of Windows settings and PointUI customization options, as we can change a lot of stuff regarding the design of the program, from wallpapers to the order of Applets.
The Home version of the software can be downloaded for free from here, and it runs on any handset running Windows Mobile 2003 or newer and having a QVGA, QWVGA, VGA or WVGA resolution. There is also a PointUI panel for Sony Ericsson X1, and a Pro version, which has some additional features (for example it supports nine applets instead of six), and it has a business card view, some people might miss this one from the free version.
This part is not included in the Home version
The only thing that is really missing from PointUI Home is a music player tab. Still, I dare to say that this is currently the best free application, which is much better than many GUIs from other manufacturers, developed for huge sums. I highly recommend everyone to try it!
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
