SPB UI Engine is a promising cross-platform solution for building 3D user interfaces

SPB Mobile Shell has been a favorite solution to replace clunky user interfaces ever since the early days of Windows Mobile and Symbian. The new 3.5 version is probably the best that can happen to your aging handset, with its 3D homescreens, transparent animations and flexible widgets.

Now the company is licensing its SPB UI Engine - a cross-platform modular plugin for building 3D interfaces on a variety of devices. SPB says it has signed up 15 companies so far for its UI overlays, with more than 70 devices coming with SPB preinstalled. The SPB UI Engine is written in native C++, meaning that it takes advantage of everything a chipset has to offer, sailing smooth at the default 60 frames per second, and making laggy performance a thing of the past.

This is all fine and dandy, but what about the battery life to support all this 3D transparency and transitional animations? SPB claims that it has slimmed down and optimized every piece of the code, achieving less power consumption than most OEM overlays out there, and even the plain Android interface in typical usage scenarios.

The UI Engine allows for custom designs, doesn't require experience in 3D coding, and has user experience templates, based on years of research by the company. For now it supports Android, Windows CE, Symbian, MeeGo and desktop Windows. The best part is that you can build your own 3D UI on a Windows PC with the SPB UI Engine, and, by design, it will work on the other platforms as well.

A video is worth a thousand pictures, so have a look at the demo below. HTC Desire HD has one of the fastest chipsets out there, so we can't comment about the performance on an average Android handset, but we'll take SPB's claims at face value for the time being, because this thing looks and feels rather slick.

source: SPB