Of course, the Palm Pre is the hottest phone at CES. But lurking at the Microsoft booth here is an unusual Windows Mobile phone, the Mobinnova ICE.
The ICE is unlikely to come to the US, but it’s a striking design: when it’s off, it’s a big, black slab with no visible buttons on the front. Everything on the front is touch-sensitive and only lights up as needed, whether we’re taking about the 3″, 240×400 touch screen, the bar of action buttons next to the main screen or the virtual cursor pad that pops up when you touch it. The phone relies heavily on haptic feedback – vibration – so you know what you’ve touched.
According to Microsoft, this phone is pretty kitted out. It’s running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional on a 528 Mhz Qualcomm 7201A processor. It has 3G, GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 3-megapixel camera, TV out, an FM radio and an accelerometer.
Mobinnova’s put some custom software on here to differentiate themselves from the mass of Windows Mobile phones. “MobiFriends” is a carousel of pictures of your friends, much like T-Mobile’s MyFaves but with eight friends instead of five. Tap on a photo, and you get all the various ways you could contact someone. Mobinnova also loaded in a bunch of custom menus with large icons so you can easily get to various features without having to pull out a stylus.
But alas, press the wrong button and the old Windows Mobile home screen pops up. Not only that, but you can summon a mode where the screen is cluttered with icons in different orientations – it’s hard to figure out which way to turn the phone! Windows Mobile looks, and works, great sometimes, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s holding some of its more innovative licensees back, and it looks downright 20th-century compared to, say, the Palm webOS.
More photos after the jump.
