I was lucky enough to get an invite to beta test Squace today and thought I would share my thoughts on it so far.

First up if you’ve not heard of them - have a quick look at the website and see if you can work out what it is they do. The website states “With Squace ­ mobile surfing becomes just as fun, interesting, quick, and useful as it should be! - For free”. I thought the idea sounded fun and the picture of the grid looked innovative and interesting - but how will the web become fun interesting, quick and useful?

The beta registration seemed a bit rushed - rather than individual emails - the beta testers were sent an email as a BCC and this contained instructions saying that to login you just needed to use your email address and the we all have the same password. This didn’t seem like a great idea to me - as everyone will know each others password - I assumed that they had decided to save costs on emailing here, and thought that the first thing on login I would get was a prompt to change the password - but this did not appear and it took me a while to find the settings page to change it manually. Not a great first impression - makes me think that if they view security like this, they will certainly not get any trusted information from me.

Installation went well - they only seem to offer the client for a small number of Nokia phones, but I think I had to tell them my phone when I registered for beta access so mine was on the list. An sms later and installation took place on the phone.

Within the web part of the application I could view a list of bookmarks which had usefully already been populated for the average person who is interested in the America’s cup, World Health, Science, International Football and Dilbert - not really me - so I had to first clean this list out - leaving 15 or so for me to see what the software would do. There is also an applet on the page that emulates the phone interface - this should be an optional addition as it slows down the page and I don’t know why I would use it.

On the phone I was looking forward to seeing the fun, interesting and quick internet. I loaded the application and signed in (it is not Java certified so I have to go through connection prompts each time) what did I find? Well little of surprise as I had already seem the screen within the web application.

There is a grid and your bookmarks are organised alphabetically from A in the top left corner  you can navigate around the grid and then get options for each “pixel” in the grid - there is also a letter to mark the change when bookmarks starting with one letter become bookmarks with another letter B and  C etc.

From the menu for a pixel I could choose to load the data  - for the RSS feeds this would bring up another grid with the items of the rss feed in each pixel, to which I could then navigate to see the details. Are you following? if not have a look at the demo on the site.

From these pixels I could then get to see the items - thorough the browser implementation that they have created.

So what do I think? well I think the interface has the beginnings of a really great idea - it could provide a whole new paradigm for navigating data on a small screen. Unfortunately it is not there yet, and I think it needs a lot more work.

I think that I should be able to tell more about the information in the grid by looking at it - which RSS feeds are new since I last looked at them - how many items etc. In the rss detail screen I should be able to do similar things. This kind of thing could al be done with colour. Ordering of the grids should also be possible, but colour could be used for tags and other data. I’d love to have time to write down all of the things it could do and how I think it could be better, but I should really do some work today.

As an RSS reader this needs a lot of work - next item etc is not possible - as a bookmark tool it could be interesting - but I think it would need to have a better web based version and it seems crazy to implement another browser where you will compete with Opera and others.

When all is said and done this is a beta, but I think it is going to need a lot of work doing to it before they can hope for widespread adoption.

I really like the basic idea and think this could be the start of a new wave of interaction for non-iPhone users - so best of luck to them - but at the moment it is not ringing any bells for me. I’m not sure how they will make money out of it - so I hope that they can get the patent that is mentioned on the website - a clear way forward would be to work out the issues with this and then licence it to Nokia, Opera or Apple.

I hope they will include me in the next beta though!

Popularity: 23% [?]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 3:58 pm and is filed under Technology, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.