Even if your handset of choice won’t be eligible for upgrade to Windows Phone 7, there’s no reason you can’t enjoy the look and feel of Microsoft’s latest and greatest with a well-executed skin, right? Looks like Jaxbot’s Windows Phone 7 Series Theme is available in passable beta form — great news for any and all of you jealous WinMo 6.5 users who might be reading this — and it can be had right now (as in now! ) at the XDA Developers forum. Want to see it do its thing? Peep the video after the break. Continue reading Jaxbot’s Windows Phone 7 Series Theme now available in beta (video) Jaxbot’s Windows Phone 7 Series Theme now available in beta (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Mar 2010 23:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds .

Maybe it’s the lack of a banging soundtrack , but we’re finding ourselves somewhat underwhelmed by these first video appearances by the highly anticipated Symbian^4 user interface. What we’re shown is a now familiar layout for touchscreen devices, with a trio of home screens that can be customized with widgets and live information trinkets such as a clock and a weather app. It is, as promised , very touch-centric, but it is by no means revolutionary. Both videos are titled as mere “first glimpse” offerings, however, so the eternal optimist in us likes to believe that there’ll be plenty more to get excited about as we move closer to that early 2011 launch. See them after the break and let us know what you think

It’s hard to believe this homegrown home screen actually runs as quickly as the video demo (posted up after the break) shows, but even if it’s just 89.877 percent as fast, we have a good idea we’d be interested. TAT Home is a gesture-powered 3D home screen for Android , and it relies heavily on cascading windows and finger flicks in order to improve your navigational efficiency. Clueless as to what we’re referring to? Jump past the break and mash play, and then surf on over to the source link to sign up for the preview program. [Thanks, Jesper] Continue reading TAT Home: the gesture-powered 3D home screen your Android device has longed for TAT Home: the gesture-powered 3D home screen your Android device has longed for originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:40:00 EST.

The Astonishing Tribe , the design firm that more or less defined the look and feel of Android the first time around, has built an entirely new homescreen interface for the OS, in 3D. It’s alternately beautiful, gratuitous and bizarre. What you’re seeing in the video is a recording of a live demo; TAT Home is a real piece of software, and one that I’ve seen in action on a handset before the concept was made public. My feeling now is the same as it was then: There’s a lot of eye candy here, and some concepts that could definitely stick—I’m thinking about the homescreen switcher, in particular—though a lot of the widgets and concepts go a little overboard. What’s exciting whether you like the UI concept or now, though, is how close it shows we are to full 3D cellphone interfaces, and how well current hardware could run them.

Tablets today are thought to be made in one of two ways: Upsizing a smartphone or downsizing a laptop. Many of these new tablets are decent, but both methods render something less than the perfect tablet. These tablets —not the convertible laptops of the past decade, but real single-pane slate-like ones—are in various stages of development, and have various operating systems. You have your iPad, JooJoo, a bunch of Android tablets, HP’s slate, the as-yet-unseen Chrome OS tablets, the equally mysterious Courier, and the Microsoft-partner tablets that currently run a reasonably full version of Windows 7. You can easily categorize nearly all of these into two basic design philosophies: The iPad and Android tablets come from platforms originally designed with smartphones in mind; the Windows 7 tablets fully embrace the traditional desktop-metaphor OS; the Chrome OS and JooJoo strip out most of the desktop, leaving—perhaps awkwardly—just the browser. But what about the Courier?

It seems that we’re getting a first peek at what a Google Chrome OS based tablet may look like. Glen Murphy, Google Chrome’s designer, posted this UI concept video along with some images on Google’s official Chromium site. There are several things to keep in mind about this mockup though. For starters, it’s only intended as a “visual explorations of how a Chrome OS tablet UI might look in hardware.” Google Chrome OS is not tied to a single device as far as we know. This would mean that there wouldn’t have to be just one single Google tablet such as the concept shown in the video.

At this particular point, 50-something days away from the earliest iPad deliveries, we doubt too many people are up in arms about the iPad’s ability to act as a jumbo iPhone . On the other hand, if we told you you can take pretty much the entire iPad experience and distill it down to your iPhone OS device, well you’d probably care a lot more, wouldn’t you? To get that extra 3D flavor to your UI, including the fetching iBooks shelf and other iPad-specific touches, you’ll need a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch, access to the Cydia app store, and the manpower to click past the break for the full instructional video. Come on, you know you want to.

The iPad is a gargantuan iPhone, perhaps more precisely than many hoped. But, if you look closely, you can see hints of what’s truly coming next. There are a few new scraps of gestures and interface bits, all thanks to the larger screen, which you can see sprinkled throughout the keynote video: • True multi-finger multitouch Two finger swipes, three finger twirls—multitouch gestures that weren’t really possible on the iPhone’s tiny screen, unless you’re a mouse. This is what people were excited about, and we only get a taste. Though, the gesture Phil uses to drag multiple slides in Keynote, using two hands, looks a bit awkward and belabored. • Popovers The most significant new UI element of the iPad vs.

The iPad is a gargantuan iPhone, perhaps more precisely than many hoped. But, if you look closely, you can see hints of what’s truly coming next. There are a few new scraps of gestures and interface bits, all thanks to the larger screen, which you can see sprinkled throughout the keynote video: • True multi-finger multitouch Two finger swipes, three finger twirls—multitouch gestures that weren’t really possible on the iPhone’s tiny screen, unless you’re a mouse. This is what people were excited about, and we only get a taste. Though, the gesture Phil uses to drag multiple slides in Keynote, using two hands, looks a bit awkward and belabored. • Popovers The most significant new UI element of the iPad vs

Oh, Meizu , how do we love thee? Let us count the ways. The KIRF -rooted company has released a promo touting the UI for its M8 phone. If any of it seems familiar, just remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.