Zumobi, formerly Zenzui, is a spinoff from Microsoft research. I have heard about it and watched the demo video for almost a year now. Finally I installed it on T-Mobile Dash last night and played a little more today.
My impression on the zooming tiles?
if ((touch screen || 10 digits keypad) && performance is good) {
a great navigation UI;
}
But it is not working very well on the Dash. The UI is very sluggish. One key stroke could get feed back immediately or take up to a few seconds. As a product of which the key feature is eye-catching UI, its UI design definitely need more polish. Let me take a few screenshots as examples.
(1)
If you did not notice the one pixel off between the header image border and content border, I might be too picky. But I do not like this design for two more reasons:
- No scroll bar: Zumobi seems do not have vertical scroll bar anywhere. But it is really needed to indicate how much content a particular page has, and what is current position the user is on that page.
- Ads takes too much space. The banner ads on the bottom is perfect ok on a portrait screen phone. On a landscape screen like Dash (w320 x h240) , it just looks bad. It is even worse because it refreshes itself, so it is very distractive (that might be designed on purpose). The real content on this screen are 3 links, which take about 1/3 of the entire space.
(2)
For this screen, that black loading message covers too much on the original screen, which does not look good. A nice loading animation might be good enough.
(3)
Very often, you will need to leave the application to browser to read more HTML content. I guess Windows Mobile really needs an embeddable web view like Google Android. If MicroSoft can not embed Pocket IE rendering engine to display web content, nobody can.
(4)
For the Amazon tile, I input “Java” in the search box, did a search, scrolled down to view the search result, and then scrolled up. Now I saw two text input boxes:
(5)
For the same Amazon application, I tried to search “mobile”, it loads result on background and keeps adding new items on top to display. Yes, that is ajax style. But I noticed that previous searching result item on “Java” shows alternatively with new searching results. As you can see from the screen shots, “Head First Java” is not a result of searching on “mobile”:
I do not want to sound too negative. But comparing to slick products like Microsoft Live Search for Mobile and Yahoo Go, Zumobi has more work to do.
A few interesting projects were mentioned in this entry such as 
