Mobile Habbo Hotel - Mini Friday

On yer mobile ? Good.
Mix presence, chat, a little social networking and a great gaming type interface and you get mini-friday.

Sulake, the makers of Habbo Hotel have done great job of bringing the interactive Habbo Hotel to the mobile. Screenshots are from the N95 (they seem to have most 2nd edition and 3rd edition S60 platforms covered) and the interface is the familiar isometric avatar-based view.





















Set up of an account was super-easy and the interface meets two things I look out for in mobile apps like these :

1) simplicity (dpad and select + softkeys only - the zooming function on the softkey works well). There is no "help" option that I could find - and it's not needed, it's that simple to figure out quickly.

2) in-line context.. when you start chatting to someone it doesn't bring up the entire text input screen , blanking out the entire screen, (so you can't relate to what's happening in the room) , just a popup at the bottom to enter text. ie. keeping within context. Nice.

As a bonus it looks great and is fast... (an application like this would be unusable if the interface was like treacle) - wonder if the speed is maintained when there are lots of people in a room /stuff going on and you're on a 2.5G connection rather than 3G or HSDPA ?
The rooms I visited didn't have many English speaking folk in, so I could'nt check out the full IM type experience... maybe it was my dancing skills :)... I also had trouble as you can see getting served at the bar !
One of the better mobile applications I've seen recently and one I am sure to reuse. It's fun and simple offering an interesting mix of small social networking and chat/IM.

See you in there ...(I'm mjs if you bump into me).