Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe with pocketnow.com and today i've got kind of a walkthrough and a show-off of what is new and what is fun what you can do in CyanogenMod 7 the final release let's go take a look ok so I am running CyanogenMod 7 final on my t-mobile g2 CyanogenMod 7 is based on a gingerbread so it is version 2.3.3 that's the latest version as of the shooting of this video I've actually gone a little bit ahead of that and flashed and even more up to date kernels so I'm up to 2.6 point 32 point 36 which is they per shoots kernel that doesn't actually come with the point 36 it comes with one just slightly down from that but close enough come down here you can see that my mod version is CyanogenMod version 7.0 point zero vision now vision is the codename of this device the t-mobile g2 now that means a couple things first of all there are other mods out there so if you're running a Nexus One for example you can run CyanogenMod 7 on your Nexus 1 in fact you can run it on a whole bunch of devices head out to at CyanogenMod calm and go to devices to see if yours is on the list pretty much the only devices you can't run it on now or what originally got CyanogenMod and that's the the t-mobile g1 and the HTC magic which is the the mytouch original so it's a little bit disappointing that they couldn't quite shoehorn Android 2.3 on to those devices but for devices that came originally with 1.5 or mine came with 1.6 out of the box it still was pretty impressive but let's get back to this what do we have so let's go back to our home screen over here and it's a home screen just like you'd expect let's jump back into settings really fast so we can see some things we've got CyanogenMod settings over here now this is something that you're not going to happen unless you're running CyanogenMod so let's go in and take a peek and this is really where a lot of the stuff comes into play it's things that you can set up or change or customize that you couldn't normally do for example applications we can allow app moving and I've got that checked by default we can change the install location to internal external or automatic I've got my two external that's the SD card and something fun it is phone goggles now you remember all that fun we had on April Fool's Day well somebody I think their name rhymes with Google you don't have to go check somebody had a phone goggles April Fool's we're basically you know it made you do some math or jump through some hoops to use your phone during times where you might be inebriated well that was just an April Fool's but signage amat actually has that built in as a feature so all you have to do is go into your settings like we have tap that checkbox to enable foam goggles and then here's our default settings now of course you can set custom settings for either the dialer for calling people or messaging does not apply to Google Voice just the built-in messaging app so keep that in mind but basically what you can do is you can filter some numbers you can set when to start goggles mode when to end goggles mode and what kind of confirmation none prompt you hey are you sure you really want to call this person or math problems if you do math problems there are three settings there's easy medium and hard so you know if you end up calling people when you don't want to in the middle of the night or whatnot set it to math hard and if you can't figure it out at least you can use your phone again in in the morning but that's really what it's for so kind of neat that it's something that Google made fun of as an April Fool's joke but it's actually really here in CyanogenMod 7 so really fun next let's go to display now in display we've got basically the same things we have a screen on and off animation I've got mine turned off it helps speed my my phone up and what that is is when you turn your phone off it has the old CRT monitor pinch where the cathode is turning off and you and that line then has a bright flash at the end well you can turn that on and off another feature that I use all the time is rotate 180 degrees so I can flip my phone completely upside down and use it just like that it works just fine in any of the three rotations that it normally does but it also adds that fourth rotation as well so really kind of cool they're automatic backlighting now this takes your automatic backlight that you generally have and it adds to it so you can use an averaging filter to go through and reduce flicker that's the scale up scale down okay so you have my hands right there using this can go through and smooth that out so you really don't notice it quite as much and then I also like setting the allow light decrease which allows the lights to decrease and uses hysteresis I think that's how you pronounce that to reduce the flicker so and you can all kinds of customizations that you can do in there so really kind of cool it doesn't become turned on by default so if you want that you need to go turn it on let's go ahead and look at input in input you now have something you can do with the long press of the home button so down here just like when you long press on search it brings up Google Voice Search long press on home you can now use a custom application and map it to that as well so really kind of neat there you can also just on home press you can change the number of buttons or the number of apps it'll show up in that list if that's what you want your long press at home to be and of course that's what I want mine to be rather than using a custom app so I'm going to leave it just like that search key behavior now you can remap that haptic feedback haptic feedback is awesome you can go in now and customize your patterns I haven't played an awful lot with that but it's cool that you can if you've got a a use for that if you've got some customizations let us know leave some feedback down in the comments below I've got this set to wake my trackball which is really a trackpad but if my phone is off I can push my trackpad and it will wake the device up volume button music control this will let me seek music when long pressing the volume buttons when the screen is off so if I don't like what I'm listen to I just press and hold on the volume up and it will go to the next track and vice versa if I press volume down so kind of duplicating or rather adding another feature another function two buttons that RT exist on the phone without having to add more buttons to the phone I can also set my camera button this is kind of cool so I've got a dedicated camera button on my phone right there not to be confused with the battery door release right there but what that lets me do is I can toggle playback when I long press the camera button when the screen is off now again this is just when the screen is off so when the screen is on the buttons are going to act just like normal so you don't have to worry about that now this is a g2 which has these three little soft keys down on the keyboard that I've never really mapped I've never done anything with but I can do that I have to keep rotating the phone back into portrait mode for you but I can do that I can set the quick keys right there kind of cool so let's go now to the interface power prompt so when I try and turn off my phone it brings up this prompt lets me do a whole bunch of stuff I can set silent mode choose a different profile which is in CyanogenMod seven you guys who use HTC Sense are very familiar with this so I can have an indoor profile and outdoor profile at work profile on that play profile whatnot I can reboot the phone really easily I can even just power it off of course I don't want to do that so I'm gonna hit back here's something really cool it's the notification power widget alright so what's that well if you pull your shade up you can see I've got my carrier I've got my day date and time all my normal buttons and I can now have all of these as well again HTC Sense the newer versions have this as well so you can go in and use quick settings to turn these on and off so here's Wi-Fi Bluetooth GPS and sound so kind of cool then I've got all that right there but wait a minute that notification bar is down at the bottom of the screen and I pulled it up from the bottom rather than pulling it down from the top what on earth is that all about looks coming like a mini tablet with that down there at the bottom doesn't it and if you watched my last video I kind of teased to this I'm trying this for a couple days just to see how I like it and so far I'm really really digging it what it is is right down where did it go in statusbar tweaks right there show clock I can show battery percentage that's not it it's actually hidden someplace else so let me find that and I'll show you how you can move your status bar down to the bottom okay so before we do that let's go ahead and finish up this screen render effect is something that we showed you a long time ago you can basically tell your phone to only display a certain pixel so each pixel on the screen is made up of several sub pixel elements actually about four of them a red to green and a blue RGB okay Y to green because the green pixels aren't as bright as the red and the blue but they each use a different amount of power in fact the red ones seem to use the least amount of power so if you want to only run in red mode you can do that or only in green or only in blue or whatever so you can save some power that way also if you are colorblind as quite a few males are this may help your screen look better to you so you can always play with that and I know you want to get down to the status bar so it'll go really fast render effect we just talked about reflow after pinch in I don't really play with that over scroll effect if you notice down here I get to the bottom see how it's kind of bouncing I can set that that was not the right one over scroll effect I can have it bounce and glow and this theme you can't see the glow very well but it's got a little bit of a glowy line at the bottom some other themes kind of glow up really big and it looks neat but it's kind of bouncing and then how much it bounces is right in here from extra light which is hardly at all - extra heavy which is quite a bit so you can see how that's bouncing at the bottom there so really kind of cool let's move on now we're gonna skip a whole bunch of stuff we can do stuff with the lockscreen with the performance we'll come back to a little bit of those tablet tweaks you can even run this on your tablet even the the part Noble Nook color so they've got this new feature called tablet tweaks now this isn't a tablet but I can still have access to some of these tweaks such as this I can add a bottom status bar and just as easy as that my status bar is now at the top oh look now it's down at the bottom now tablets have buttons and stuff that they put down at the bottom so if you want to have everything all together on the bottom this is how you do that so kind of cool dead zone I can add a dead zone to half the screen I don't know why you'd want to do that if you know go ahead and let us know and then if you don't want a a lock screen you can turn that off now that's because the lock screen doesn't look all that good on tablets because it's a significantly bigger screen it's kind of kind of funky looking if you went and saw my Barnes & Noble Nook Color video you could see that but tablets weeks they're really kind of cool let's go to the lock screen now since that's what we were talking about we can change the style to a sliding tab which is what most of you used to I use rotary which gives you that kind of rotary phone to either change the volume or unlock the device rotary revamped kind of has a bevel to it and then lens is like HTC Sense where you pulled down to unlock so you can set any one of those that you want you can even set a custom app so on your rotary unlock how you have your phone or unlock on one side and your phone volume on the other you can add a custom button in the middle that when you pull down will watch an app so if you're always going into your phone app or your messaging app you can add that so you you unlock and launch that app right away if you don't like it in the middle you can set unlock in the middle to function kind of like the shade and the custom Apple burr on the side and you can do all of that in here rotary arrows are the little hints to show you a you know if you don't know how to use this phone scroll that way to unlock or scroll that it's on the lock screen you've seen them they're just kind of subtle in there but you can do all that kind of stuff so really kind of neat they're widget options you can put widgets on there and these aren't widgets in the true sense this is just informational stuff like I want mine to always display my battery status when my phone is locked I want to display my music controls on the lockscreen including the song name and album art and I want to display the music controls only when I have a wired or a Bluetooth a2dp headset connected not otherwise because I don't want to accidentally start playing the music unless I have my headphones on so that makes sense right and then all this display music if I want to override that you know if music is or isn't playing I can put that in there I just have it off it's personal preference up to you so lockscreen gestures let's do unlock options before we do that this is some of the other stuff how do you unlock it you can disable the slider you can do quick unlock if you have a pin code so that you don't have to hit okay when entering the pin if you enter the correct pin it will let you in I don't like that because it's you know somebody messing around with your phone if you've got it pin protected doesn't have to know oh it's a four digit code go ahead and let him in you know if they get the four digits right they have two four digit and then okay so not my preference but again if you like it that'll save a little bit of extra time when you're unlocking your device menu unlock if you have a physical menu button which this phone does not you can use that to unlock the phone as well and then of course we already talked about the trackball unlock so let's come back here we did unlock action options gestures you can actually use gestures which are basically like little scribbles on your lockscreen tubelaunch stuff I played around with this a little bit it's kind of cool for the first little while but then yeah so if you want to to be able to launch email you can have an e or if you want to launch Google Voice you could write a V on the screen on the lockscreen and have it automatically unlock and launch that app for you so kind of cool you can turn that on set it to show the trails so that you can see what you're writing on the screen or not custom colors in hexadecimal sensitivity and of course the ability to create your own gestures so kind of cool right there now this is getting a little bit long so I want to jump out of settings even though there a bit more that you can do in here including performance sounds you know all kinds of cool stuff like that but let's just take a quick walkthrough of the device so first of all what I've done is using a custom launcher it comes with ADW launcher not IX but just the base one I've actually replaced that with launcher Pro and I've set it to have five rows of icons which you could do even without CyanogenMod so we've come through here nice kind of animation there I can resize my widgets again because of launch or pro and do all kinds of cool neat stuff now this is pretty much what you could do with the custom launcher on just about any device but what you can do with CyanogenMod is this neat little thing right here called theme chooser now this comes with CyanogenMod seven so you open that up and you can now download themes from the market some are free some cost money and using this which is actually we've talked about this before but thanks to t-mobile you can go through and choose a theme and apply that to the look and feel of your device so this is the default one I've installed red remax purple punch orange octane and what I've been showing you is honey cream which is this nice kind of oil creamed honey color it's kind of tan but not brown it's just really pretty it looks professional it looks kind of neat let me go ahead and show you Android ian which is a really cool one well apply that it takes just a minute to do that and there you go now it's applied but it's only mostly applied like Billy Crystal said and the Princess Bride it mostly it funny reference go go watch the movie if you haven't seen it but if you look down here you now see that instead of that kind of cream color I now have this cool green color and if I grab that window shade and pull it up I now have as if you can see right down in here so you know I have a nice looks almost 3d gradient in there over the t-mobile well when I said it's only mostly applied there are some things that I have to reboot the phone to get to apply because it is tying deeply into various components inside the system let's go ahead and try a another one now I'm back over here to theme juicer and I am going to choose to do orange octane I'll apply that you can see really quickly that turned everything orange down there even this is orange with a nice orange glow around it if we come over to some other widgets you can see that that's got kind of an orange glow and orange glow it's change the theme a bit to more orange II if we come in here you'll even notice and this is where you have to reboot but the gmail icon specifically is kind of orange II so with these custom themes you can have a custom set of icons that go along with that but again you do have to reboot to see those take effect so kind of cool you can do though that does however mean that those themes are somewhat large in size and by large you know they can be about 10 megabytes or so they can also be very very small if they're just changing colors some of them are built for devices with other screen sizes for example this one that I was running before I'm gonna apply it anyway that looks great honey cream does and that's kind of my favorite for for this week so it's still kind of cool anyway so kind of a detailed walkthrough of CyanogenMod 7 and what you can do with it on your phone kind of digging into more of the nuts and bolts I'm really impressed with it I really like it I've been running it all the way since it came out with the first night they builds all the way through the release candidates that's a side note they had 4 release candidates this time which is about double what they normally have so this is running really strong really stable I've got it running on my t-mobile g2 and love it my wife has it running on her her t-mobile Nexus One and loves it as well so I think you will too if you want to know how to flash signage seven on your device head on over to pocketnow.com and we'll give you a link that will show you basically a resource of how to do it on on your phone because your phone isn't gonna be the same as my phone there's lots of different ways to get it on there so we'll give you a good resource on how you can do this to your own device and get going on the open-source Android project really it's all kinds of neat so if you like C and this kind of stuff of course give the video a thumbs up if you haven't been over to pocketnow.com recently make sure you head over there and get some of our written articles not just our videos we even have our podcasts over there so you can listen to them as well so for pocket now I'm Joe Levi