PTPT shows off wild Android UI skin, we go hands-on
By Joanna Stern 
posted May 26th 2010 6:11PM
posted May 26th 2010 6:11PM
You can simply select an individual person -- you can import contacts from a variety of sources, including, Twitter, Facebook, and so on -- from the halo that appears, and then drag them up to a specific time to get various updates or e-mails from that person. The custom predictive text keyboard in the e-mail interface was very snappy -- it's also just nice to see a change from the stock Android input. Then, you can drag that person to things to see pictures of them. And just like in the original demo, you can then move the pictures icon to a point on the timeline to see pictures from that time. Though the phone and tablet demos we saw didn't have widgets on the homescreen, we were assured that they can be added. We promise this is all better explained in the demo video below, so mosey on down after the jump. We'll be here, wondering what Android devices this software may pop-up on.
Just leave Android alone. After 2.1, it really needs zero modification. All what you're doing is blocking future updates or needlessly delaying them.
@TareG Not all skinning is bad, sense is an enhancement imo.
This works nicely as an experiment but I couldn't see anyone really using this day to day as their phone UI.
@TareG
Yea, you clearly took time to think through that reply.
@TareG If you think stock Android 2.1 is better than Sense UI then you clearly haven't compared them properly
@lookseehear @tobsmonster @benjybaruch
Sense can be the greatest UI ever, TareG still has a very good point: Custom UI's shouldn't be a reason to delay an update (very long) or don't update at all.
I prefer the new stuff from 2.1 and 2.2 above being stuck on 1.6 or lower because of a custom UI like sense.
@benjybaruch
That said, I think Sense is terribly outdated (except for the overview addition, maybe). It was nice and sweet a year ago, with Android 1.6 which looked like a cheap cartoon. But post 2.1, it's all sharp and elegant. I don't need this awful "+" sign to add widgets on the homescreen, lingering there all the time. The phone icon? Solved in 2.2.
Let's just move on and keep Android 2.2 on all devices from here on. It'll save companies a lot of time and money, and devices will be able to ship with the most advanced version of Android.
@TareG this is not really intended as a skin, it is a knowledge and media managment engine and we have a touch UI for it. Licensees can take the engine and develop their own UI. Manufacturers need a possibility to differentiate, plain Android UI makes them undistinguishable.
@TareG
Fail.. No one will ever use this..
@lookseehear et al
that's what home replacements are for - custom ui's shouldn't be built in to the firmware, but released as plug-ins
Looks like my printer GUI.
maybe this will be an app...
@masta vaan yes, we may implement this as the homescreen app. Have to decide yet. The Android version is just a port from the 10 inch PC version and we certainly need to adapt to the screen size of phones.
@assadollahi
"we"? does this mean you made it?
@masta vaan
Oh, crap nevermind, you're the CEO... How dumb of me...
Original Android UI looks better. I like the concept for a tablet but not a phone.
@Ruck Fules
This UI would work fantastic for Hollywood but I cannot think of any real life task it makes simpler. Super to play with for a day I guess. Then you wish you had your windows, folders and scroll lists back.
@Ruck Fules yes, we intend it for larger screens. However current porting is done on phones as there are no snappy Android tablets available right now (e.g. using the Tegra2 from Nvidia). Computex next week may change that.
Very nice. Will it be able to run custom roms soon? http://www.androidtechnical.com/romlib.html
that video has like 3bit colors
@Xstream
Yeah it's barely even watchable...
Kind of disappointing imho.
@Xstream
I was more irritated by the reflection of the lights on the ceiling actually but this combo is a fail indeed.
We need another Android skin as much as we need another Linux distribution.
@(Unverified) If it's optional and installable through the market... why not?
@(Unverified) I think Ubuntu is actually a very worthwhile distribution and afaik they were not the first ones to "fork" the distro, right? I think competition in the desktop space would really help a lot.
Crap quality video recording.
Can we get the engadget staff some better gear please?
Cat-e-gree's!
"...CEO Ramin Assadollah"
I'm pretty sure you've been trolled, Engadget.
@McKeegan
ROFL, I didn't even notice that. I just saw a middle eastern name that I didn't want to try to pronounce and skimmed over it.
@McKeegan no, sorry, that's my real name. actually, there's an "i" missing at the end, but hey, it's long enough anyway, right?
@assadollahi middle eastern people using their last names as user names unite!
@Fadakar
If i used my last name, you wouldn't be able to pronounce it.
Looks horrific.
Sorry. This looks like ass.
why such a bad quality recording?
also, awesome effort from the new startup guys.. but it did not excite me much . .
I bet this will get pretty annoying to use after a while with constantly dragging things left and right...there is so much wasted space in the UI that certain elements should just be integrated together or expanded more
Is it me or did it just seem forever to find Joanna's name?
@hyadav17 to find Joanna's name took three taps on the letters. The system adapts to the frequencies of usage. As Joanna is a very recent contact, it took longer to find her. People I work with daily are working their way up the list and will eventually be shown at the top six so that you can tap them directly.
@assadollahi
i like how now with these new UI features, like in Sony Ericsson's timescape feature, you can get a lot of information simply by clicking on a contact...does the software allow for, say, dragging a contact into the time bar and viewing all pictures, videos, IM messages, etc related to the person? a simple feature that (i dont know exists elsewhere off the top of my head) i think is powerful would be able to tag photos you have stored (like in facebook) for easier, filtered access later
but the problem with this system is that increasing the amount of data = more cumbersome on processor = sluggish software
@hyadav17 yes, you can do exactly that. You simply drag a contact to the timeline and get all the info presented independent of the source or application. And then you can filter ontop (which is not possible in, say TimeScape) by dragging "Apple" to that and will see what info relates to "Apple" and that contact: e.g. their tweets, emails about that.
And yes, you can "tag" everything, e.g. dragging out your pictures from your car and associate them with a thing that represents your car. By this you can re-retrieve them very easily. All of this using your finger and no context menus, query languages whatsoever.
The problem of clutter is actually the one that we're trying to address. Our current system runs with well over 20000 entities (emails, music files, pictures, websites). With PTPT we're trying to address the information and data overload that everybody has. And we don't want to have "mindmaps", "search fields", "folders" and so on, we want it simple and universal.
Hmm, the tablet used for the demo is branded Hanvon, an e-reader specialists that recently announced a Windows 7 tablet by smashing a Apple ice sculpture. This is obviously a different tablet as the demo'ed UI is based on Android.
@ywk69 you're totally right, we developed the first version of PTPT on windows and are porting it in parallel to Android. The Hanvon BC10C is just a beatiful device to show the software on.
This UI looks very gimmicky. It looks cool, but it seems it adds unnecessary steps to bring up relatively useless information. If I want to bring up mutual facebook friends in Android, I just pull up the Facebook app, it's a bit simpler than tap..select..drag..release..select again..drag back.
@rkmj we're trying to cross-associate all sorts of info, facebook is just one source of information. Convergence is another feature, the software brings the info of a person from various sources to one (mostly) consistent representation. So the picture would come from facebook, the phone number from outlook, the email adresses from your IMAP account and so on.
@assadollahi I appreciate what you're trying to do, but this isn't the first UI to attempt that, in fact, Sense UI does that already. My problem is that the UI seems like it needs a whole lot of steps to do things that are much more streamlined on other UI's. I also understand that recent contacts take longer to locate, and the people you contact most move up. The thing is, with stock Android and with the other UI's new and old contacts take the same amount of time to be found. There's no delay for the person who I added just 4 minutes ago over the person I added 4 months ago. For the target audience of Android, and by proxy, this UI, new contacts are entered on almost a daily basis, and that "top six" you refer to will most likely end up changing quite often.
@rkmj okay, sorry, i wasn't detailed enough. certainly we're adding "recency" to "frequency" so that people recently added, will get a chance to be shown first. and i was not trying to state that we're the first to do data convergence, a lot of other solutions do that. what we're trying to do is to help people have a view an all of their data using these for broad categories. they are so universal that all sorts of interactions can be reflected here. at the same time we're keeping the structures that the imported data had, for example the trees of the directories when you import word files or your imap folders. with the finger you can then use the conventional structure but also the "retrieval by proximity" that i showed early in the video. and as this works across categories, applications and data sources, it is a very powerful tool to get a synthesis of you data.
I hope this thing can be used in portrait mode? Looks like a brainstorm child, hopefully in a year or two it will evolve for daily use.
@lsword indeed, it works in both orientations. texting is better in portrait, for example. unfortunately, we can't show the full power in the videos because we have quite an amount of sources and use cases implemented already. the whole interaction with the browser is missing here, for example. the closed beta has started and we're getting lots of feedback from people to make it more usable and efficient.
Looks terrible.
Just terrible.
Seems like it would only slow me down, and kill multitasking anyway.
This is the MOST user UNfriendly GUI I ever seen! Everything is only few hundred drags away and it's irritating to watch, I bet it's horror to use.