Handy Shell Takes Over - and Impresses

[slitchfield]

Since the dawn of time (ok, about 1995), developers have been looking to replace the default home screen of PDAs and smartphones. Epocware's new Handy Shell seems pretty comprehensive for S60 and so we asked Ewan to install it on his main device and run with it for a week... The result? A narrowly missed MegaApp. From configurability to stability, Handy Shell seems to do a lot to live up to its price tag.

Read on in the full article.

[ares]

or they can use gdesk, that is completely free...

[Rafe]

GDesk takes a slightly different approach IIRC - great for power users. But its probably something we should cover on AAS at some point.

[Hih]

Hehe! I uninstalled it after 2 days.

Before anyone rushes to try this, note that the mail indicator does not work with MfE, RoadSync, etc.

[tatoo1000]

E71's Quickdialer is faster and better than Handyshell's.

I used the app for 2 weeks with my E71, but the mail notifier and the dialer forced my to give up. May suite better on a N series.

[ares]

Rafe, 100% agreed. Its time for you guys to give some love to Gdesk. People are doing some amazing stuff with it on uiq3 AND s60 v3

http://frenchanitya.blogspot.com/

an i imagine it will be amazing as a free solution to customize s60 v5 too...i´m sure Gary will be porting it

I'm not sure I'd like the new interface...but I would sure love the quickdialer function. My E61i doesn't have it like the new E71 does. Are there any standalone apps that do that?

[slitchfield]

pfunk: as mentioned in the text(!), Google for SkyeQuiKey.

[sandy_1988]

For me, Tracker (by Smartphoneware) does a better job in all respects, be it customisability, be it performance. Only area where this one scores over Tracker is, the quick dialer. And the price of Tracker is less than half of this one.

i still don't think you can beat jbak taskman

[talhamid]

Guys, also try t9Nav (t9nav.com). I think it is better overall than SkyQUickey with more features.

AS for Handy Shell - that second row of shortcuts is nice. That's about it. I don't like the way the softkeys have been locked, as well as the only option for a task switcher is Handy Task, which is not that good. I hate it when a program forces itself upon you - in a way it becomes more irritating than the default S60 shell.

They'd be better off had they just concentrated on adding widget/panel functionality to the S60 standby.

[Williamoni]

Epocware programs are great - I have most of the Handy series. However, I think 45 dollars is too expensive for this product.

[entwisi]

Whilst initially impressed I found it "got in the way" too much to be useable for me

e.g. when answering a call I often switch to loudspeaker, this is almost impossible when Handy Shell is working as it grabs the soft keys over the standard ones.

I have handy shell with the handy weather plugin. I love seeing my 5 day weather forecast on the start screen!