Smartphone Thoughts - Daily News, Views, Rants and Raves

"Regardless of the cause, we certainly like the trend of these enhanced touch-screen UIs dominating the high-end cellphone market. Now meet ASUS' GUI slickness destined for their newest touchscreen devices including the ZX1. Starting with a Windows Mobile 6.1 core, ASUS slathers on a new customizable Multi-Home 3D interface meant to simplify access to your today screen, life and business applications. Think HTC's TouchFlo only sexier. ASUS even threw in some "album cover flow" to the media app and the ability to more easily manipulate all your digital media with enhanced figure gestures. You can even drop everything into a visual carousel if that's your preference."


[Video courtesy of Engadget]

As you can see from the video above, this new handset is sporting one amazing graphical user interface. Granted this is a Windows Mobile Professional device and we usually report on things in the Standard world but this is one of those rare times when a product is so cool we just have to cross that barrier. With Samsung's cool carousel based homescreen that we discussed last year as well as HTC's release of their TouchFLO technology as well as the T-Mobile Shadow improved user interface, I think it is safe to assume that we should start seeing more custom GUI's being developed by handset manufacturers. This is a giant leap in the right direction for consumers who for years were forced to use the stagnate default Windows Mobile interface which was been a far cry from being user friendly.

So now that you have seen the video, I would love to hear what you guys thought about it. Personally, I see this as a few of the baby steps we will take on the road to the golden age of Smartphone usability. Now let us just hope that the manufacturers as well as Microsoft can keep the momentum going.

""From today V2R provides SAMs Carousel, a new Active UI based Desktop Plug-in for PPC and Smartphone which can be downloaded from V2R's homepage. V2R Active UI is the first fully graphical animated user interface (GUI) for the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 and Windows Mobile 6 platform. V2R's Active UI platform has been designed in a way to ensure, that the user may use the device quick and easy in the most intuitive and convenient way."



Seems like everyone wants to jump on the visual UI bandwagon. I haven't tried this one myself but if you're looking to give your smartphone a new look, V2R's SAMs Carousel may be what you're looking for. If you do give it a spin, be sure and let us know what you think? Could this be the app to satisfy your envy thirst for the i-whatever?