Gadgetory

hey guys are you looking for something to give you more information on your Android display whether that's your smartphone or your tablet I've got just the thing let's go take a look we've shown off beautiful widgets in the past and it's well just like its name implies it's quite beautiful has a lot of themes that you can get for door skins that are made by all kinds of people you can even submit them if you want to build your own and even have ways to donate money however isn't there something else well yes there is it's called HD widgets and really it's saving grace is the fact that it's so high definition it's very very pretty there are lots of different settings that you can use although not necessarily skins like you may be familiar with with some of the other widget packs so what we've got here this is my galaxy nexus running jellybean this this widget is really optimized for ice cream sandwich based systems in fact the recommendations are that you're running a 1.2 dual core system a really high-end specs however I've had it run just fine on other phones as well so let's go ahead and take a look at it this is what I call the the main icon this is what you want to have on your screen it's a widget that has well the kitchen sink it's got your clock it's got your current weather got the current temperature the expected high and low and what the the weather is expected to be like in my case sunny 97 degrees if it only gets up to 97 today i will be happy it was quite a bit hotter than that yesterday it's got the the day of the date and of course the city so that you make sure that something didn't happen to your gps that thinks that you're someplace that you're not which does occasionally happen and then you get you know forecast for a different area over here you can see the forecast widget does exactly what you'd expect it to do this is the three-day forecast they do have a five day as well and then over here are some examples of the toggles and the to buy ones so i can turn my Wi-Fi on and off you can look at my battery status right there don't know why it has an an off feature on that because I really don't want to turn my battery off just curious about that a very small widget to tell you the essentially what the weather's like if you want to have a smaller more compact one lots of different clock styles that you can choose from so how do you get this to work if you're using ice cream sandwich you want to open your app drawer and go over to widgets from there you've got a whole bunch of widgets to choose from with the caveat the first time you install this it may take a little bit of time for the widgets to show up if you want to speed that up just restart your phone work just fine this took about eight minutes before it updated on my phone some people in the market have complained that there aren't any widgets to choose from well you got to run in the app first and then the widget show up in a little while just a little tip for you there so you'll notice there aren't a lot of widgets to choose from there's only five at least on this phone because it's got this display on tablets which I'll get to in just a minute there a couple others and they're really kind of neat so let's say you want to do to buy one because I had a whole bunch of those on there we could you know what let's choose a four by four cuz i already showed you that one we tap and hold obviously i can't drop it there so let's try and find a screen that i have room on to drop it i dont have space anywhere so we're just going to put it right there next to my facebook the first thing that it goes into now is your selector what kind of widget do you want this to be well i can either do a full screen four by four like this or I can do weather like that whichever one I want one with see if I can tap one with the the time and one without let's go ahead and do it without the next thing that I get to choose from is my background and they've got all these different types right here with a live preview of what it's going to look like I kind of like really transparent stuff so I've been choosing this one down here of course if I want to I can just hit something random and it'll pick something at random let's go ahead and come back and select what I want once you've got it selected you've got what you want picked hit the check mark and that will drop it right onto the screen and have your widget added successfully very very nice now if you're running Ice Cream Sandwich and you've got extra stuff on the screen it will scooch it up and resize it so that it will make room and fit so you can go back in and and make changes you can also change this up obviously that doesn't look very good but you can resize this to your heart's content really kind of nice go ahead and say ok on that we're good lots of different things you can do lots of styles the stuff you can do with it is almost endless let's see what it looks like on a tablet now remember I told you that it wanted ice cream sandwich or above well that's the case however it will run on Android at 2.2 and above this is honeycomb this is my samsung galaxy tab 77 and you can kind of see here what I've done there are some other widget options that you can choose from on honeycomb and below to add a widget press and hold choose widgets same thing goes here you'll want to make sure that you watch the app and wait for a little while before these widgets tiles show up on a tablet you've got some other options in addition to the four-by-four a full screen that I showed you on the phone you've got a four by seven half page which is really optimized for 10-inch tablets eight by one small header and an eight by two large header let's go ahead and select that one again it takes you in here to the chooser and let's see if we can find that same really transparent when there we go we can change our clocks tile let's try that one you know what let's try this is honeycomb let's do the honeycomb clock there we go we can change the clock background we don't like that we can choose something else however we want it to look feel like Bob Ross a little pretty little tree right there there you go can change the clock color let's make it something weird the clock color too because this has two different dimensions to it go ahead and do that that looks good and then a sidebar whatever we want over here we can either have our or we can have our weather let's go ahead and do toggles and that brings up some options here where we can pick our switches let's just pick one at random pick that one and then we can change our switch color because that green doesn't really match with our color scheme here so there we go let's choose that one hit the check mark says save and now right there not at the top so let's put it at the top we've got our widget edit looks beautiful nice high definition when we rotate it things are going to get a little bit more compact western auto rotation on it compacts things up quite a bit but even still it looks really really nice just docked to the top of the screen so that's HD widgets a little bit more detail than you'd normally expect just to show off widgets but there's a lot more things that you can see and do with this then well what we could cover in a very short video let us know what you think is this going to unseat beautiful widgets as the reigning king of the the widgets on Android or does it still need room to grow as far as skins go this has only got one this is the HD tablet skins but there are going to be more coming soon that you can get right from the app itself if you like this video might seeing this in this level of detail make sure you give the video a big thumbs up you've got questions or comments head over to pocketnow.com and leave those down at the bottom of the article where we will be standing by to help out along with everybody else who's watching and has recommendations and suggestions for you for pocket now thrown off cool widgets I'm Joe Levi you you