Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe for pocketnow.com and honeycomb is the big news in android today specifically that honeycomb android 3.0 is only going to be for tablets not for smartphones of course we never let that stop us before so let's take a look at honeycomb on your smart phone okay this is my t-mobile g2 and it comes out of the box running Android 2.2 also known as Froyo I've shown you in previous videos Android 2.3 Gingerbread via a custom ROM called CyanogenMod ROM specifically CM 7 the 7 is what makes it gingerbread vs. 6 which is a an Android open source project build of 2.2 or Froyo so that out of the way if you take a look at this it looks like honeycomb and honeycomb is Android 3.0 and we've only seen that on one product that's the Motorola Xoom tablet and in the Android SDK for developers but you can see up here I've got a little bit of an interesting blueish color to my notification bar icons I've got this neat little Tron style analog clock widget I've got these guys up here these are a couple of widgets I'll show you what they are in just a minute you can see that I've got the the honeycomb font up there with it's folded paper look to it coming over here I've got very blue themes in fact you can see blue around there in fact if we come into the settings come over here into the phone settings and look at sound you'll notice up here that these little dropdowns have a blue hint to them in fact if we come in there to volume you can see that there's this blue glow around the outside of that modal dialog box with this nice blue underline to it I still have some green remnants now why do I have a green remnants in there instead of the honeycomb blue simply because this is not honeycomb now honeycomb Google has hinted to us without saying it specifically is not going to come to smartphones now that doesn't mean that Android 3.0 won't be ported or or deployed to a smartphone it's just not built or designed for it instead what we have here is a feature of CyanogenMod 7 which is called right down here theme chooser now theme chooser is an app that well it's named appropriately so it lets you choose themes now these themes aren't like the themes that you're used to for example on ADW launcher we've got a video coming up very soon that shows you some theme ability on that so you'll want to make sure that you subscribe to our video channel so you don't miss that one it'll probably be out this Thursday of course if you're watching this sometime in the future it might already be out but subscribe to the channel anyway so you can make sure you don't miss that but what this feature does is it lets you download and install apks either from the market or from other sources and sideload them and that's what i've done here that let you redeem everything so here is a theme called system here is honey bread that's what I'm running right now here is cyan bread and droid Ian's he's a really cool guy I like his stuff but today what we're talking about is this honey bread theme all you need to do is go onto our website at pocketnow.com find the article associated with this video it will be entitled honeycomb on a smartphone or something to that effect and download the apk now of course prerequisites you do have to have CyanogenMod 7 at least nightly 22 if you're running on the t-mobile g2 like I am you can tell if you are not because if you aren't you'll have that that theme chooser app and if you're not then you won't so that's the first prerequisite second you'll need to download this from the link at the article third you'll need to install it fourth you'll need to come to the theme chooser app and select it now here's one thing I don't like about the theme right now take a look at the button down at the bottom see that apply button it's hard to see isn't it yeah especially when out here it's even hard for me to see off camera we're gonna go ahead and apply it now watch when I press it because there's another gingerbready thing see that that was nice and blue nice and blue kind of an indigo so kind of cool now what it's done is it's just applied that theme and because I've already applied it in the past that's all I have to do but if I were applying this theme or another theme for the first time then I would need to reboot my phone because some elements specifically the UI elements up on the top that are core to Android can't just be replaced while the phone is running so they're all ready to go I just have to reboot to apply them so I've already done that in this case so I don't have to bore you with that but from that point there you go you've got it it looks very nice you can see the really cool honeycomb like wallpaper the honeycomb like coloring up there now you notice that nice cool screen transition this is launch or pro yet another launcher that you can download from the marketplace Brandon's going to be doing a video on that in the next day or so so again if you haven't tuned in to our channel and subscribed now is the time to do that next up this widget the analog clock comes with it so all you got to do is drop it on there new Sonic cool little animation that goes around so it's not just the hands that animate it's the whole clock really kind of cool next is these guys now these you've seen before you just haven't seen me running these skins on them first off is you've got beautiful widgets and this is their their new super clock with the new battery status indicator and I'm sorry guys I know how you guys like seeing 100 percent battery stuff but I've been doing this all day and haven't had a chance to charge up so I'm at 36% with very heavy usage but you can change out the weather icon with a battery icon which is really kind of cool down underneath it I've got a four by one weather and I've got a weather skin on here that lets me choose or lets me see it in kind of a more gingerbread style to change that you go into weather skins and the one I'm running now is called glowed which looks really kind of neat on there and of course you can choose any of the others you can even download stuff just directly to your phone so really kind of cool I like how they've done that but very very much into into the Gingerbread theme so that is pretty much all of it of course we want to see what you do to make your phone look like honeycomb rather than gingerbread and I think I said that wrong just a minute ago but we want to see how you make your phone look very honeycomb like so please take some pictures and comment on our article over at pocketnow.com if you want we would love for you to shoot a video and show us what it looks like on your phone in operation and just tag those on his video comments to this video very cool stuff give this video a thumbs up if you like seeing stuff like this and of course head over to pocketnow.com to read all of our android articles for pocket now I'm Joe leave