SPB Online: Your News And Entertainment Portal And Much More
One of the complaints about Windows Mobile is the user experience. Many people have commented that, while it does have a familiar look and feel to a Windows desktop, that it is not the type of mobile OS that a new user can just pick up and get the full experience out of. Lately we have seen the iPhone and Palm Centro start to convert people from dumb phones (typical cell phones) to smartphones. If there is one company that comes to mind when thinking about creating a positive Windows Mobile user experience, it is definitely SPB Software. They have been creating software that has revolutionized the way people work with Windows Mobile devices. So, if there was ever a company that could help create a user-friendly experience that anybody could enjoy out of the box, it is no surprise that SPB Software has taken on this task with SPB Online.
SPB Online is a software package that bundles several online features into a very organized and easy to navigate software package. It gives you access to mobile TV stations, Internet Radio stations, news feeds, weather, online games, and a software catalog that allows you to easily try (or purchase) and install software that will work on your device. SPB has borrowed parts of the UI from SPB Mobile Shell which allows it to be customizable and adaptable to different devices. Read on for more details.
Check out the following from the SPB Software press release for an overview of what each application within SPB Online offers:
St. Petersburg, September 23rd, 2008 — Spb Software, the world’s leading maker of Windows Mobile software releases Spb Online to end-users. Spb Online is a set of attractive online services that share a practical user interface and make superior quality mobile entertainment available on handsets at a single fixed-price fee (no subscription). The services offered include Mobile TV, Online Radio, News, Weather, Online Games, and On-device Catalog — all subject to automatic updates and powered by Spb’s exclusive interface engine and patent-pending TV technology.
Spb Online is robust and easy to use even for novice smartphone users. All of Spb Online services support adaptive skins, smart scrolling, 3D transition effects, and one hand navigation.
TV
Unlike any other solution on the market, Spb’s mobile TV facilitates channel hopping, offers on-screen controls, intelligent video/audio stream tuning to account for broadband fluctuations, doing it all to deliver a genuine TV watching experience — on the go:
- Fast channel switching
- Picture-in-picture
- On-screen controls
- Integrated TV guide
- Export of TV guide reminders to Outlook
Radio
Spb’s radio offers a wealthy selection of the world’s streaming radio stations, allowing users to tune into a news or music source of their choice in virtually any language or location of the planet:
- Huge catalog of the world’s real-time streaming radio stations
- Stations sorted by popularity
- Option to add custom URLs to catalog
- On-screen volume control
Online Games
Spb’s online games let real people play each other in real-time. All games take only a click to start and require no setting up or much of getting used to:
- Play with real people
- Configurable user profile with picture
- Play Checkers, Hexagon, and Reversi
Weather
For any city from a database of 10′000, Spb’s weather service attractively displays FORECA’s five-day forecasts (provider used by msn.com) in one screen. The service allows scrolling between the screens of up to 10 selected cities with a finger swipe:
- 5-day weather forecast in one screen
- Detailed weather screen with morning/day/evening information for selected day
- Option to select units and updates frequency
On-Device Catalog
Spb’s on-device catalog makes it easy to discover and buy additional content directly from the mobile phone. Selected titles are downloaded, installed, and activated automatically:
- The on-device catalog offers programs, games, themes, ringtones
- All titles are 100% compatible with your device
- Secure credit card payments
- ‘My Account’ safely stores all your purchases
If you are interested in trying SPB Online out, you can head over to the SPB Software website and download the 15-day trial version. The full version can be purchased for $29.95.
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Typical of Microsoft to develop a product so flawed and useless that third party developers have to come to it’s aid with their own products to save it from drowning.
This platform is going to the crapp*r, and the iphone and android are coming over with a steam roller to run over it…
Popeye, I am not sure I follow your logic. This is a program which adds functionality to your device. This is not something which was intended to be included with Windows Mobile. At any rate, this functionality is not included natively on either iPhone or (to the best of my knowledge) Android. So, from that perspective, it adds something that none of the major OS’s (including Blackberry, Palm, and Symbian) offer natively.
Doug
Until it integrates more of the OS into its launcher, like Winterface does, it’s going to suffer.
One thing I noticed immediately: Even after you download and install a SPB app from the SPB store using SPB Online, that app doesn’t show up in the SPB Online launcher…
Jonathan,
SPB does not mean this to be a launcher application like Winterface at all. They make SPB Mobile Shell that works more like a launcher. SPB Online is more of a portal to TV, Radio, News, Weather, etc. It will not add downloaded applications to the SPB Online interface, but if you use Mobile Shell, you will see the downloaded application in there when you browse the applications.
I have been playing with SPB Online on and off since it was launched and on the whole, find it to be rather good. The radio is great. I love the RSS reader (I was using Spb Insight already)too.
Obviously the main attraction is the TV player. This is where I am a bit let down so far. Firstly, there are only a few channels available and I see no way to add more, though this will probably change in future. And secondly, my biggest problem though, is after less than 5 mins of watching TV, the program closes itself down. Completely.
I was also interested in the “Themes”. My interest was immediately stilled when I saw that the themes cost $0.99 yet are free of charge if you download them from SPBs web-site.
Don’t get me wrong, I AM an SPB fan and Mobile Shell 2.1 is a MUST-HAVE as far as I am concerned. SPB Online is still in early stages and will no doubt improve in leaps and bounds. However, it’s currently far from perfect. That said, SPB have once again found a market niche that hasn’t been explored so far and have set about conquering it. This is a great start and can only get better.
I don’t care much for it at all.