Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe of pocketnow.com couple of you have asked if you can run the older launcher apps like launcher pro an ADW launcher on a phone running ice cream sandwich that's a good question so let's go take a look this is the Samsung Galaxy Nexus it is a running ice cream sandwich which is Android 4.0 and one of the main things that comes new with is this a new launcher now what I mean by launcher is your home screens that holds your app shortcuts and your widgets and also your app drawer which in this case is this new horizontal paginate adverse and it also has nice little previews of your widgets and a quick launch over to get it to your market so you can buy or download new apps so a few things we don't like about this well this is kind of ubiquitous it's everywhere and it doesn't need to be the Google search bar we've shown you in previous videos and articles how you can get rid of that but it's not really ideal another launcher app can get rid of that easily for you and that's really what we're going to talk about today another thing people haven't liked is there's a little bit of lag here in switching screens which just is kind of slow and not fluid it still works it looks nice but for some of us we want to be able to speed that up in the past we've also done that with custom launchers to custom launchers in particular ADW launcher and launcher pro now you'll notice this is the e x version the e x version is a little bit higher end than the free adw.launcher version which by the way comes pre-installed as the default launcher on the majority of cyanogenmod roms at least the recent ones and of course launcher pro that we like so let's go ahead and take a look there are really two questions here one is can you run them and two does it look good on this larger screen so let's answer both of those atw launch or e x you can see we have our stock search widget there no more the the ubiquitous ubiquitous widget that kind of sits across the top if you notice I've got my nice little animations to to roll the screens in and I can choose which transitions I want it's no more of this one size fits all there isn't a grid to drop things on with a little plus signs but if you can see the little blue highlight behind adw.launcher does its best to try and imply that little grid not quite as smooth as the default ice cream launcher our ice cream sandwich launcher but it still is a good job your app drawer you can change how it looks I've set this to be a horizontal paginate it so it's very close to what the Ice Cream Sandwich launcher is like but still very fluid very fast you can customize what you have down here and if we take a look at this we'll go ahead and put books out here you can even drop them together and make folders that look very very much like the Ice Cream Sandwich launch your folders so very nice very handy very easy to use and you have all of the benefits of adw.launcher at your fingertips you'll also notice you have a menu button down here so you can get into that and jump right into your settings that's the system settings or the ADW settings which let you do a whole bunch of things let's go ahead before we go to launcherpro if you notice this is a much larger screen but it works very very well I there's no resolution problems or anything at all like that so really cool let's go to launcherpro open this up and of course if we want to pick one by default we put the check box right there to say use this for the default home action from now on since i'm showing you these i'm not checking that but you could do that launcherpro also looks pretty much the same as what we're used to it works well you can theme your tray down at the bottom just like you could with other versions your app drawer is still very responsive you don't have the widgets in it like you do with the the launcher pro but if you tap and hold it's right there it's the same thing that you're used to in accustomed to and it works just great also you've got the menu button down there at the bottom so not all of the been fits and all of the features that the new launcher from ice cream sandwich has but it's fast it's slick it's what you're used to and really can do some other cool things like those page transitions when you're switching around on the home screen both of them work well on the larger 720p screen of the galaxy nexus and both of them are fast and responsive so I hope that's answered the question for you can older gingerbread or froyo launchers work on an Ice Cream Sandwich phone absolutely do they work on the larger screen size yes they do as well and I can only hope and really I expect that both ADW launcher and launcherpro will start adding in some of the new ice cream sandwich features that we've seen in the launcher and make their their launchers even better one questions left to remain we know that there's hardware acceleration behind ice cream sandwich is that hardware acceleration built into the launcher as well yes it is is it built into launcherpro an ADW launcher ii x i don't know i wasn't able to find that answer out so if you know please let us know down in the comments of course if you like seeing this kind of stuff make sure you give the video a big thumbs up tell your friends about it and head over to pocketnow.com so you can read the right up on this video and see other articles and news all about not only android but other smartphones as well for pocket now showing off alternate launchers on Ice Cream Sandwich I'm Joe Levi