Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com one of the cool things about android is the ability to customize the look and feel really everything that is your android just by changing out the launcher app and that's as simple as going to the market downloading and installing one well in the past we've shown you ADW launcher which is an open-source just really cool really fast launcher based on the the Nexus One launcher and it's really nice we recently saw technology demo that was just insane with page transitions and just all kinds of cool stuff well today that technology demo is in an actual launcher and that launcher is a TW launcher ii x let's go take a look so i've shown you an awful lot of launchers in the past and this is yet another one now this is similar to one that i've shown you in the past and it's one that is similar to what comes stock with cyanogenmod so if you guys are running cyanogenmod out there you're probably familiar with ADW launcher which is an open-source launcher and that's one of the reasons why it's included with cyanogenmod my other favorite is called launcherpro and they both have benefits they both have advantages and disadvantages well one of the biggest disadvantages with ADW launcher has been its settings and really that's because there are just so many of them well you'll notice here a little simplified version of of that no longer do we have a launcher settings and a phone settings now it's all incorporated into one universal settings to get to phone settings you tap on that and then come into phone settings so one step a way to get to your phone settings but for everything else here are all of your nice and iconically representative menus you can go into and change for the launcher itself now this launcher is called ADW launcher ii x and a while back we showed you a really really cool technology demo that showed some cool page transitions well a lot of those are now included in this presets presets lets you come in here and change it to something default the way that it comes stuff ah commander web and iPhone ish Nexus ish and fast if you've got a slower phone you want to choose fast because well this is a fast launcher well if you've got a fast phone like I do this is the t-mobile g2 you don't need that and you can take advantage of some of the more whiz-bang stuff so let's go back and talk about a couple things really quickly are you ready for this first and foremost you have this nice thumbnail preview just by touching the home button from any one of the screens that will show you all of the screens in this case it comes stock with 5 and I've been able to up it to seven I've got a couple of blank screens in here and I have those they're primarily just for padding it doesn't take up any more memory or slow your phone down to have them there as long as they're empty and it's nice to have a place to drop a widget or some stuff when I'm doing videos for you guys so you may want to stick with five or three or one or whatever suits you it's customizable they can be rearranged which is something new to this version and that's a really big feature being able to move say this screen down here that screen over there change which one is your default screen by painting it there very very nice I mean that right there is worth the upgrade but you can go right to the screen by tapping now the second thing that you're going to notice is this looks an awful lot like the Nexus S which is running Gingerbread what with all of the little green hinted icons then in fact we can come over and look at other stuff and I'm kind of showing off the the next feature that I'll get to which is the page transitions but before we go too far this theme with these icons which goes a little bit further you know it goes into your dialog boxes it goes into your app drawer and all kinds of stuff but it's a theme this does not come stock with a launcher in fact this theme costs 99 cents it's available in the market and I forget the name of it it's an 80 w nexus s theme i believe and all it does is it lets you select a theme that then applies these various rules and it makes this which is still froyo look like in this case gingerbread which is kind of nice I don't have to install a half-baked version of gingerbread on my phone and make it look like it I can get the best both worlds by doing it this way now the reason that I bring that up is one it's really cool not only can you customize your launcher but you can also phim it and that's been around a while but the reason I bring it up now is this is an entirely new version of the launcher I mean it's not quite from the ground up because it's based on the ADW launcher open source core but it is a radical new version it is not free in fact it costs about three and a half dollars in the android marketplace and it's well worth it in my opinion but it works with all of the old themes that are out there for the old version of the launcher so if you've got a collection of themes that you've purchased or downloaded before don't worry they should work just fine so really cool next I want to show you just because you guys are going to ask this is beautiful widgets by levelup studio and you'll notice over here I've got a nexus s theme on that as well so I get the nice hint of green in there so I know you guys are going to ask so there you go this is a calendar widget and I've just chosen a green header on that to make it look green but let's get to the really good stuff okay switching between screens I'm going to just tap and drag and if you notice can you see this this stream that the default screen is kind of getting smaller and it's fading out that way where the new one is getting bigger and it's kind of rotating in from the other way they see how cool that transition looks that's my favorite but let's look and see what some of the others are now this of course takes some 3d processing and you know it's it can get pretty hefty so if you find that your phone isn't as isn't as fast as you'd like to be choose choose a different way to do it that's a little bit nicer on your phone of course you'll want to choose whatever works best for you so this is in general behavior we go into settings and then general behavior and then animation and effects now these don't have any any names really so let's go into screen transition effect and I'm on effect for now what is that you don't know I'm hoping a next version will will come out with some names for these things and maybe the developer will hold some kind of a contest to name them who knows of course submit your recommendations to the developer and and perhaps you'll get some some kudos in the credit or a free copy of the software who knows anyway so normal Scrolls normal scroll it's the the TV vol behavior it's probably one of the fastest ways if you have a slower phone the fact one is kind of cool so let's do that we'll tap there we'll go home and now to switch between them okay to swap between them you just tap and slide and you can see this has kind of a rotating effect will just go through a couple of those pages so you can see it and it's really quick I've got widgets I've got I cons I've got all kinds of stuff on there and it just kind of folds in like you're looking at sides of a cube from the inside but let's not delay let's go ahead and check out another one so back to general behavior and again doing this on a flat table sometimes the taps don't work but that's that's because of the orientation that I have it not because of the phone or the theme or the launch yourself so back to transition in fact let's go to effect two and we'll just kind of buzz through these really quick so you can see them this one kind of explodes and fades out and the other one zooms and fades in a little bit slower on this transition but that's more for effect than anything else so let's go back in to our general behavior animation and effects transition effect 3 and there are a whole bunch of them and I'm not going to go through all of them but just to give you an idea this is kind of one of the more intense ones you grab on and it rotates that out of the way and it rotates the new one in you can kind of see the side of it over there so really cool now i'm going to set this back to four just so you can see where i was before which again is general behavior animation and effects and transitions and to number four for the others you're going to have to go out and grab a copy of this from the marketplace that you can see how this is really quick and kind of has a nice bouncy effect when I land on it so just really cool now of course if you want to try this the android market now has a more limited trial feature it's down to just 15 minutes so if you're going to try it download try it and and if you don't like it go ahead and ask for a refund and you do that by uninstalling it it's really not that bad but we're down to 15 minutes instead of a full day to be able to do it once you try this on your device I don't think you're going to want to return it it's really nice it's really fast and this has now become my stock launcher in fact for three and a half dollars I think us trends and currency translation rates was three dollars 33 cents of course that may vary depending on what the the currency exchange rates are and what not the theme is 99 cents and it's really worth it for four less than five bucks you've got a customized phone that you can do all kinds of stuff that your friends phones can't do or can't do until they get the app really cool i like it a lot i would recommend you go out and get it but i'm interested in your thoughts what do you think have you tried adw.launcher if you try to atw launch or e x which is what this one is do you like it better or worse than launcher pro is there another launcher that you like better than these or are you the kind of person that just likes the stock launcher and doesn't want to make any changes and if so why what advantages does that give you we want to know leave that in the comments down below if you haven't subscribed to our video channel yet make sure you do that in fact we've got a whole bunch of videos that focus just on the t-mobile g2 or use them as our spokesmodel as the case may be so make sure you subscribe and catch up on all the stuff that you may have missed so showing off ADW launcher ii x4 pocket now i'm joe levi