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Filed under: Audio, Video, Windows Mobile, Apple, Mobile Minute

Anti-iPhone day at Download Squad

FreeStylWMThe iPhone gets a lot of attention these days, and rightly so. It's an attractive phone/media player with a beautiful interface. And Apple brought the idea of an innovative finger-friendly multi-touch display to the masses. But you know what? The iPhone isn't for everyone. There are plenty of things it can't do, or that you can do better with another device. And while the price of the phone continues to drop, you have to pay a rather pricey phone bill every month if you really want to make use of the phone.

With that in mind, Download Squad brings you anti-iPhone day. Throughout the day, we'll be looking at alternatives to the iPhone. To kick things off, I wanted to review some of the posts of DLS past that have already shown that there's little you can do with an iPhone that you can't already do with a Wndows Mobile-based phone.

Program Launchers

Somewhere between the time when Steve Jobs first demoed the iPhone and the day it actually hit the shelves, third party developers decided it would be cool to create an iPhone-like interface for Windows Mobile. Probably the most interesting project is FreeStyleWM, which started out its life as WhoNeedsAniPhone.

But not every third party developer wanted to replicate the iPhone interface. Some were just inspired enough to go out and create their own easy to use, finger-friendly program launchers and other applications. Thus GoodWin and iSwish were born.

Meanwhile, before the iPhone was even threatening your pocketbook, folks were puting out software that takes Windows Mobile and makes it feel like an entirely different operating system. Over a year ago, we brought you a roundup of applications designed to make Windows Mobile look and feel a bit more like Windows XP or Vista.

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Filed under: Windows Mobile, iPhone

iSwish: Yet another pretty iPhone clone for Windows Mobile


While Flick Software's iSwish Project certainly isn't the first attempt we've seen to emulate the iPhone interface for Windows Mobile, it's definitely one of the prettiest, most effective looking. At least if we go on the video above. But if you look closely, you'll notice a few things in this video:
  1. While the demonstration shows a user zooming in and out of pictures by "pinching" the screen, our guess is that the device, which doesn't recognize multi-touch is actually just detecting the motion of one finger.
  2. The program launcher interface is pretty, but at least once in the video, we're pretty sure we caught the producers stopping and restarting the video to make it look like an application actually started up more quickly.
The biggest problem with any iPhone clone for Windows Mobile is that beauty is only skin deep. The software appears to include a program launcher and support for SummerBoard themes, and maybe a program or two. But once you launch your application, you'll find that you've still got the same Windows Mobile software running under the hood. Some of it's pretty, some of it's functional, and some is anything but (Pocket Internet Explorer, anybody?)

Flick's iSwish is due out sometime in May, and should work with a variety of Windows Mobile devices, including older gizmos like the Dell Axim X50, which does not (officially) run Windows Mobile 6. So there's hope if you've got an older PDA or phone.
[via Engadget]

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