Today, I had a chance to spend 15 minutes on the ACER latest Shell 2.0 User Interface (UI) on their latest launch ACER M900 unit. This unit comes with a keyboard. My focus here is on the UI. By now, everyone should know that a good Windows Mobile phone must come with a good UI. ACER mentioned that they are still tweaking the UI and I expect more improvements on their UI soon. BTW, I am not sure why it is called Shell 2.0 (do they have 1.0?).
First Impression
The UI looks like HTC Dream UI. I has 3 main panels that you can swipe the finger left or right. There are widgets on the three panels. BTW, the 3 panels looks like a desktop where you can place them around.
The scrolling is smooth (better than I expected) but of course not as smooth with those phones that has capacitive touch screen.
There are 2 other panels (Task Panel) that you can actually use your finger to swipe from bottom and up. In the task panel, you can swipe right to another panel.
So, in total 3 main panels for the widgets and 1 Task Panel (with 2 pages) for activating programs.
The User Experience
As a new user to ACER Shell 2.0, I seriously cannot comment too much as I am not used to it. However, there are some things that I thing ACER can take a good look.
For example, the Task Panel is very slow to appear when you swipe your finger. The picture viewer can only view pictures. I may be wrong but I asked around. Seems like I am not able to call up the video that I had taken using the Picture viewer. Changing the folder to the exact one also did not help.
To view the video, you have to go to program and run the album application. From there, you can watch the video.
The widgets on the desktop is limited to the few of them. You can remove them (by pressing and holding on the screen, you can drag them into a taskbar). I wonder if the background can change to our liking or not.
The Contact is pretty nice. Very smooth. But there are not pictures example on the one that I played with. I am not sure that with pictures will I get the same type of smooth experiences or not.
The Calendar is the standard Windows Mobile 6.1 calendar.
The Weather function is quite cool. Again, I am not able to try it because there is no WiFi available and the phone doesn’t have a SIM card to use the data to download. Nevertheless, I still can add countries and it look pretty cool.
Finally, the camera is a 5 MegaPixels camera. I did not have chance to see the quality. However, I do see lag in low lighting conditions and I guess it is nobody’s fault as this is how the camera sensor works.
I tried the video function. Maybe my setting was wrong but the output of the video is very small. Anyway, there is no way to see the quality with the short time with the handset.
Remarks
Overall, the UI is quite nice. ACER has mentioned that they are still improving it. I am sure in the next release, the UI will be much better.
Watch this short video of me meddling with the M900. Enjoy.
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