[P3300, MDA Compact III ROM Development] d-signet:
downloaded and tested for a day or so now

the titanium is better than in previous versions, seems to run smoothly and integrates well at last...good to see the clock finally making a propper appearance in there

also the first chance to play with the new honeycomb interface.

unfortunately the jury is still out on this one.

my view is that it's more of a hinderance than anything else at the moment.

This totally replaces the start menu. Click on the start button and you're taken straight into the honeycomb interface. I wasn't expecting this behaviour from it...i thought it would be more of a today plugin replacement or something, and if it's going to behave like this on new roms it needs to be

a)quick

and

b) easy for you to find your programs or settings that you want.

Personally i dont think it does this yet.

You can click and hold to bring any app into the "favourites" part of the comb, which means you can now "pin" your favourite apps...mcuh like your last used apps used to automatically appear at the top of the start menu.

Unfortunately i think finding anything more than you favourite 5 or 10 progs would quickly become a real pain in the ass.

let me give a quick random example

on a "classic" style rom, let say you want to go to the "SMS SETTINGS" app....you'll go to start , settings, hit the communications tab at the bootom and choose SMS SETTINGS

on this i'll go to start, straight into the honeycomb. From experience i know that it's not in here (which is good becuase this is now a looong page to look in) so i choose the SETTINGS cell. now all i can see is 7 cells and remember there are no tabs here anymore so this is ALL of your settings. I've got About, backlight, bluetooth, buttons , certification, and clocks and alarms. Anything else i have to start randomly scrolling and searching so i start moving downwards. Eventually find it on the 12th cell on the left That's 12 'Down clicks'. If i wanted WLAN SETTINGS or something i would have to do a lot more scrolling. Everything is alphabetically sorted which helps, but it's a 3 colum system and so you still need to read ALL of the available options and you need to know EXACTLY what that app is called (is it TOMTOM or NAVIGATION? Is it under T or N ? etc...you get the gist)

I hope they are still experimenting with this interface becuase i think it looks good and COULD, if done right, be a really nice feature for the WM6.5 system...but it still needs some fundamental work before it works well. Remember how, from the concept art, we through it would be a 2d scrolling 'intellingent' list...it's not. It's stricly up and down alphabetical.

I can't quite put my finger on what it IS that's wrong with it...but there is SOMETHING...it just takes too lonk to find what you need at the moment. Maybe it's just unfamiliarity and it'll all become clear after a few days use, after all i've had 5 years of experience with the old system...the same as lots of people switch vista and XP's interface into win2k mode becuase they know where everything is. I always plead with those gus to stick with it and learn the newer systems becuase they usually DO make sense....but this time i cant see it yet

The new lock mechanism also needs some work. they've obviously tried to emulate a slide-to-unlock mechanism without making it TOO similar to the iphone....unfortunately this means that you get the small blue slider we've all seen on the screenshots at the top-center of the screen and sliding it 1cm or 2 to either the left or right unnlocks. I personally think this gives too much scope for accidental unlocking. I mentioned in another thread a while back about how a "shake to unlock" feature would be self defeating. the point of a lock is to make sure that when the phone wakes up becuase of incomming texts or whatever the phone doesnt totally wake up and end up accidentally resetting all of your calendar appointements or calling people while it's in your pocket....you need it to be HARD to unlock accidentally, but not hard to unlock intentionally. The balance is not quite right here either, same as the honeycomb.

it's still in beta and hopefully the whole thing just needs those last few "tweaks" to the functionality and ergonomics before it too "makes sense" but right now i'm more than willing to switch back to dhee's last manilla rom....it's just easier to use. I hope i'm right and that this rom is in BETA for both reliabiliy AND functionality reasons.

theres a lot of potential, but it isn't there yet.

these comments are ALL down to the mew 6.5 system, NOT dhee's rom, which seems to have done everything it can with what it's been given. Considering the clumsyness of the new interface etc this is as good as i could hope for a 6.5 beta rom to be, and i will install his next rom without ANY hesitation.

for anyone wanting to try the new features out, this is the rom to go for, but i wouldn't blame anyone for not keeping it for too long

thanks again dhee for a great rom, i just hope you get an improved system to pass on to us next. I'll probably leave this one for another day or so to see if it grows on me, jstu like i gave XP and vista's new interfaces a chance.