Squace – Is it a game changer?

Rating: Missed Opportunity.

I was pleased to receive my handset, the Sony Ericsson W910i with Squace pre-installed on it as I had been excited by the press blurb. Thanks to Randeep Gill @ Sherpa Media for sorting this.We Say: Just as I received my handset, my esteemed colleague Tony Dennis was also testing Squace, unbeknown to me. Typical work by a PR company getting two people from the same place to try the same thing! You can read Tony thoughts here, and he makes some good points.

Sqauce aims at making the mobile web as simple to use as sitting at your desktop and is “designed for people who rely on the Internet as their primary source for news, information and entertainment, and want real-time Web content anytime, anywhere”.

From my initial impressions I agree somewhat with Tony. I sat there slightly bewildered as I powered the phone on and ran Squace for the first time, it is not a natural pick up and use experience. The application looked great and was snappy in its operation.

After the app is running you are faced with a grid of squares. Each square can be a newsfeed, web site, tag or widget, or in fact any URL based web object. Some squares have a letter in them, this represents user added content. When you add content to a square it assigns the first letter of the name you have given to the URL, and the squares appear in alphabetical order. As you run over the squares a pop up shows the name you have assigned to it.

At the bottom there are a line of squares with pre determined content from Squace, their pick of useful website’s and one square that says discover content. This links to another page which as Tony pointed out is like putting your hand in a lucky dip, as none of the squares here have a letter assigned to them and some of the pop ups were in Swedish, as Squace are a Swedish company.

There is also a place called the garage for temporary storage of content. Next to that is an flashing version of the Squace logo which changes colour when the application is processing something.

There are two ways to add content to your MySquace page, either as mentioned above via the Squace Discover Content square of you can add content via your MySquace page on their web site. Unfortunately, this is not a great experience. No where does it show a current list of your squares, so you have to go into the edit list to see what you have added. It really needs to show your current MySquace content, listing all the website’s, or whatever you have assigned to each square. Either have a web interface or don’t, at the moment I feel its half hearted and trying to remember what you already have added, or what has added is a drawn out process, and frankly puts me off at the moment.

I love the concept of Squace. New UI’s could really make the mobile web much easier to navigate. But is Squace really game changing or brings a desktop experience to the mobile web, alas for me, right now, no. It’s much faster and easier to just have any number of social bookmarking sites as your home page on your mobile and at least when you add them to your desktop solution your mobile gets updated too.

At the moment, I’m sorry to say, because I really wanted to like Sqauce, it feels like an application where not enough attention is being given to the user experience and more to the actual technology behind it.