How to make your Windows Mobile touch screen finger-friendly
Posted by Tim Hillebrand on 04/22/08 in Featured Posts, Features, Frontpage Tabs, General, Opinion, Pocket PC Phones, PocketPC, Software, iPhone
Clearly, one of the innovations that iPhone offers is the slick, finger-friendly touch screen interface. It has been heralded and embraced by a public of enthusiastic nose miners. Well, if you want to join the crowd of finger frolickers, and you have a WM touch screen device, don’t despair. There are several ways you can turn your little pocket pal into a finger-friendly navigator.
While a finger-friendly screen is not part of the Windows Mobile operating system per se, several developers have seized the opportunity to offer programs that feature finger flicking screen changing.
What if you wanted to turn on finger scrolling for almost all of your applications that involve multiple pages such as contacts and Websites? What if you could pan a Webpage scrolling up and down and from side to side? This is now completely possible with the installation of a single program that contains this feature.
This application is the award-winning SPB Pocket Plus, which is a Today screen marvel giving you access to the depths of your machine with a tap or two and much more. This is not meant to be a review of all the features of Pocket Plus. I merely want to point out the new scrolling feature it contains that many people are not aware of or overlook. This one feature makes it worth having, but it is an incredibly powerful program that deserves your full attention if you are not already using it.
Go to www.spbsofwarehouse.com to check it out. Download it and try it for free to see how you like it. It costs $29.95, if you decide you can’t live without it.
While you are there, don’t miss the opportunity to check out another program that I wouldn’t want to live without anymore. It’s Spb’s Mobile Shell. It started out as an emulation of the Smartphone home screen with a nine application grid, but has evolved in its new iteration. Mobile Shell offers an array of features built around three main screens consisting of three Now screen with vital information on an opening screen, a 16 grid photo speed dialer, and the Main launcher menu.
The reason I bring Mobile Shell into this discussion is that all of its screens are finger-friendly with large icons and finger gestures allowed. With this program installed, you can scroll around within its multitude of screens. You can also control the animations with which pages display as you would in a PowerPoint presentation. This is something you can’t do with an iPhone.
Mobile Shell 2.0 is available for a free trial and costs $29.95 to purchase. In a recent review of both of these programs, I tried to decide which was the better, but couldn’t. I concluded that while there was overlap, together they make a powerful team with their collective features, not the least of which is fancy finger work.
Another company that has picked up the challenge of making WM devices digitally dexterous is Vito Technology. Vito has developed a whole suite of applications that entertain finger flicking. Check them out at www.iwindowsmobile.com. I think you will be impressed. I have reviewed most of them now and found them fun to use but have suggested some wishes for future versions.
FunContacts introduces scrolling to your contacts list by capturing it and allowing you to zoom around in it with digital delight. The only problem I had with the first edition was that if you had a large list of contacts, it took forever to navigate. In the next edition, Vito introduced an index bar on the right side to speed up navigation, a big improvement.
Goodwin is a handy launcher program with some nice features such as a message notification on the opening screen, a favorites panel of recently opened apps, and then you can scroll down using your finger through all the rest of the programs registered on your machine.
There are some problems, however, in my estimation. The list of programs includes everything in every folder including all the little utilities that just clutter up the screen. The same is true when you finally scroll all the way down to Settings. All the settings items are jumbled together in one big scrollable pane without any apparent organization.
The real problem lies in the fact that you cannot add or subtract or customize the items on the screen, which is a serious shortcoming.
Finally, after scrolling and scrolling, you get to the bottom, and that’s where the menu resides, I would place the menu on the first screen for easy access. But, when you finally get to the menu, it is virtually featureless. About all you can do is change languages here and exit. Otherwise, forget it. This menu needs more functionality to customize the program.
SMS-Chat is another Vito finger-friendly offering that organizes all of your text messages into strings by contact, which is a powerful and welcome feature. Of course, what makes it even better is that you can whiz through all your messages with your finger.
Audio Notes Touch is obviously another finger happy application that is a powerful MP3 player, recorder, and organizer.
EyePhoto takes charge of your entire photo collection. No matter where photos reside on your device, this application finds them and organizes them so that you can zip through them with your finger.
ZoomBoard is a new approach to text inputting with a finger-friendly panel and a QWERTY keyboard that magnifies the keys as you touch them, somewhat reminiscent of the iPhone approach.
If you’re a stargazer, you’ll love AstroNavigator, an old Vito program that just got finger-friendly and added to the collection.
Each of these Vito programs costs $19.95, but you can try them for free. Vito offers a Communication Suite consisting of Fun Contact, GoodWin, ZoomBoard, and SMS-Chat for only $39.95, which represents a 50 percent savings.
Another finger-friendly contact manager that I like even better than FunContact is called Finger-Friendly Friends. It costs $14.95. A free trial download is available at http://www.jotto.no/fff . It will even send your position to contacts if you have built-in GPS. It features the new DRMWY keyboard, which stands for “doesn’t really matter where you touch”.
Pocket Informant 8 has gone finger-friendly with nice big punchable icons for easy navigation. Check it out at www.webis.com. It will cost you $30 if you decide you like it, and why not? It’s one of the premier PIMs and has been for a long time.
The latest addition to the family of finger frolics is TouchBrowser by Makayama (http://www.makayama.com/touchbrowsesr.html) for $14.95 that lets you pan around a full Webpage with the flick of a finger. To see it in action, visit the YouTube portrayal. The program also contains a fullscreen keyboard for easy finger input, but it really does take up the whole scree, which can be awkward. I don’t like it.
For a thorough review of this browser and others, go to http://www.pocketpcmag.com/blogs/index.php?blog=3&p=2593&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1#more2593
The author Werner Ruotsalainen advises against using it and suggests that you will have better luck with the latest scrollable versions of Opera Mobile and Netfront 3.5, and I concur.
Check out Opera Mobile at www.opera.com/products/mobile. You get a 30 day free trial and then you can buy it for $24. Opera Mobile has features that iPhone never dreamed of. For a good video presentation, go to http://youtube.com/watch?v=Cmbdu-YLZsM.
NetFront 3.5 (http://www.access-company.com/products/netfrontmobile/browser/index.html) offers another scrollable browser with innovative features such as fast draw speed, scrolling, and zooming with page map and column rendering.
Observations
The unwashed public seems to have responded positively to finger-friendly applications. While lagging behind, iPhone in this innovation, developers for the Windows Mobile platform are beginning to offer many applications with this feature.
It’s not just the software developers. HTC and other machine providers are going with bigger icons for finger navigation as well.
Perhaps some users will feel that it is unfortunate that you cannot zoom in and out by moving your fingers apart or together. Actually, I found this gesture to be a curse on an iPhone because in doing so, you would often launch an application with a hyperlink when it was not at all your intention. It drove me crazy, and I am pleased that this aspect is lacking so far in WM development.
However, the lack of the zooming feature in most of WM applications is not good, and I hope it will soon be incorporated. The exceptions are the browsers by Opera and NetFront, but both use the more precise control of a stylus and tapping, a much more satisfactory solution.
On the other hand, I really question the efficiency of zooming around on a full-sized Webpage on a handheld sized screen. I find the single column approach much more effective.
By the way, Resco has just announced that its volume 2 developer’s toolkit contains touch scroll functionality. All that is necessary is for developers to check a box to turn on this feature.
If I have overlooked your favorite finger-friendly application, please add it to the comments for all to enjoy.
I imagine it won’t be long before this is a ho hum feature of most WM software and that you may even wish to turn off if it annoys you, which I hope will also be a feature. To tell you the truth, I’m not too keen on people messing up my screen with a booger snatcher; I prefer a more precise and sanitary stylus approach. But, I guess it’s nice to have a choice.
Keep connected!
Written by Tim Hillebrand · Filed Under Featured Posts, Features, Frontpage Tabs, General, Opinion, Pocket PC Phones, PocketPC, Software, iPhone
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Interesting sharing.. but how about FtouchSL? This one programme can actually take care of the many programme you need to install to make your pda finger friendly.
This programme basically allows you to use finger to scroll on the screen instead of using the scroll bar! And a lot more other features e.g. finger gesture to launch programmes!
Visit http://www.ftouchsl.com for more details.
How about the Phraze-It Keyboard? It is the best of breed for typing with your fingers on the screen.