3D home with SPB Shell 3D

Android users are spoiled for choice when it comes to home replacements. Despite the competition, SPB Software has decided to add its own offering to the ever growing pile of Android UI software.

The firm describes SPB Shell 3D as a ”next generation user interface”. Whether or not that claim is true, there is no denying that SPB Shell 3D  is a pleasure to look at and nice to use.

There are a number of lovely widgets that come “out of the box” – including a weather widget, a couple of calendar widgets and widgets related to SMS messages, world time, clocks, battery life, the gallery and many others.

All of these widgets are very slick – as is the entire SPB Shell experience. Organizing the home screens is done through a 3D interface allowing you to flip through the home screens dragging and dropping extra screens in and out of the final layout.

One of the lovely little touches that you find throughout SPB Shell is that, if you sit and wait with one of the screens at the front of the 3D display, a little animation starts up demonstrating all of the SPB widgets. Not particularly useful, perhaps, but a nice touch nonetheless.

The weather widget is a good example of the overall quality of the SPB widgets.

The main window is an animation representing current weather conditions. Most of the time, the clouds just drift by but, if it is raining then you will see the rain falling.  There are also representations of snow, lightening and others.

One of the widgets that, at first glance at least, provides excellent eye candy is the world time widget.  Initially, it just seems like a simple panel displaying a small globe and the time in 3 cities.  Tap the globe, however, and you will be treated to a much larger 3D globe that pops out.  It shows you where your 3 favorite cities are on the map and sedately spins for you. You can “grab” it with your finger and spin it yourself.

Unfortunately, this is where I encountered my first disappointment with SPB Shell 3D. The globe looks like it should be showing where the sunlight is – but, on my phone at least, it never changes.  The western coast of the US is always sitting shortly before dawn and western Europe is always stuck at around midday. Hardly a disaster, but certainly a bit of a let down.

Another issue, that may seem like a minor one, is the inability to get any fine grained control over widget placement. For example, you can see in the next screenshot, that the standard power widget is a little under halfway up the screen.

The problem here is that my sense of neatness would prefer it to be at the bottom of the screen.  SPB Shell will not let me do that, however.  It always just bounces back to the middle whenever I try and move it.

Despite these niggles, the overall feel of SPB Shell 3D is one of polish. That said, it appears that a higher end phone is needed to really gain all the benefit.  I ran SPB Shell for several days on a Nexus One and found that, on occasion, the system struggled.  I experienced more crashes and system hangs while using SPB Shell that at any other time with this phone. The Nexus One is hardly a super powered phone by modern standards, but it is also not a weak one either.

This and the exceptionally high price ($14.95) will move it into niche territory.  I like SPB Shell 3D and I really want to be able to recommend it to everybody, but it is just too expensive and resource hungry.  If you have a spare 15 bucks and a very high end phone, then you should probably consider SPB Shell 3D. Otherwise, I’m afraid that you will just have to leave it alone.

As I say, I really like this software and would like to give it a 9/10  – but I can’t.  The price, which is ridiculously high in my opinion, and the need for a high spec phone force me down to 7/10

Which is by no means a score to be sneezed at.