Review: Moove
Score:
55%
Ewan investigates Moove, a unique music playback utility for S60 5th Edition phones that claims to offer contact-less music control. Does it work and is the solution ready for the real world? It would seem not, but find out for yourself in his brief review.
Version Reviewed: 1.00
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Now this looks promising in the Ovi Store... Moove, by eyeSight, promises the ability to control your smartphone's music playback simply by waving your hand over the device. Given the amount of travelling I do where devices like the X6 and the 5800 are filling my hotel room (just) with their built-in speakers, this could prove a nice addition to my smartphone.
Yes, this is pointless when on the road or when you have the device in your pocket, but there are circumstances when this could prove useful – a little wave of the hand away from my keyboard to the phone beside the laptop to move to the next track is something I could see myself using.
In practice, Moove doesn't quite deliver on the promise.
It's not because of the waving control, that works as advertised – a quick wave over the phone's proximity sensor in the top of the bezel and you move to the next track on your device, while a longer move, holding your hand steady over the handset, toggles the play/pause button - the problem is that the rest of the Moove application is not set up to be a decent music browser or player.
The first time you run the app, you need to hit the sync button, which then sends the code scurrying around your device building up a single playlist of all your music. And then when you wave play for the first time, you realise that yes, that single playlist holds all your music, and there's no way of editing it. Major fail right there, and it drops Moove back from a viable alternative to a cute tweak of the S60 UI.
It would be nice to have a few more settings, such as controlling which folders to look in for your music, because right now Moove feels more like a tech demo than an actual application – almost as if eyeSight are looking for a handset manufacturer to buy up the software patents to put “waving control” on their next handset.
If that's the approach then its misguided. I think Moove should head out and do a full application that actually replaces the music player controls. Yes, you can sync your music collection, but when you have devices such as the X6 that can hold up to 32GB of music then you need more navigation controls than just “skip forward one” and “skip back one”. And as this is a “don't touch the phone” app, issues like what to do with the sensor when the screen lock comes on need to be addressed. If I have to pick up the phone, slide down the keylock switch, lay it down again and then wave my hand... well there are too many steps there.
My advice to eyeSight is this... great, you have an interface – now build on it and give me something useful I can use in the real world. Do that and you'll have a fan. Right now, I await their next move with keen interest, but I won't be using Moove on a regular basis.
-- Ewan Spence, May 2010.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at