Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe pocketnow.com last time in launcher wars Brandon showed you launcher pro today I'm going to show you atw launch your ax let's go take a look alright so in the last video Brandon showed you launcher pro and to be honest that is one of my favorite replacement launchers for Android in fact I've got a license key to the premium version of that just like Brandon does and its really really nice however i also have a license key to this this is a TW launcher ii x now the e x is the new version that has some of these kind of hyper real page-turner animations you see how it kind of folds in and folds out just all kinds of really cool stuff and this guy Anders Webb was really one of the first people to do that and it's just really kind of cool and lets you show off your Android above everybody else's but cool looks aside let's go ahead and get looking at the the head-to-head stuff that we talked about in Brandon's last video first and foremost this is a t-mobile g2 I am running a cyanogenmod nightly so it's a gingerbread version which really is kind of nice for this series because Brandon showed us his Nexus S which is also running Gingerbread so the operating system is pretty much the same also the same is the nexus s and the g two are both coming stock with what's called the google experience of android there's no samsung UI there's no xperia type interface there's no HTC Sense it's a stock vanilla very fast implementation of of the core android OS so that having been said you can then throw on to it all kinds of stuff like these custom launchers really kind of cool so Brandon showed you kind of really fast stuff he turned off all of his animations on except for his background wallpaper is live wallpaper and you can see here I've got a live wallpaper running in the background as well I've also loaded this up I've actually got three widgets on my main home screen but we'll come to that and just a minute I however have left my animations on except when that we get to the app drawer and Brandon likes a fast opening app drawer so do i so let me go ahead and show you mine open the app or see if I can get a good tap on it and bam it's open just like that BAM it's closed you can set animations to that and all kinds of neat stuff but while we're there let's talk about the app drawer in adw.launcher there are lots of different things you can do Brandon showed you and launcherpro you can change the number of icons and pack them in tighter I've done that to you can do that in launcher pro and ADW launcher so I've got five icons going across and one two three four five icons is going down so I've got 25 icons in addition to my dock icons right there you'll also notice I've got these little itty bitty dots across the top to help me know which page I'm on and I've got just a whole bunch of icons on there now you can do the infinite scroll where you scroll it up you can do an infinite scroll where you scroll side-to-side fling that there's lots of stuff that you can do in the settings I kind of like this because I can look at just one page of icons at a time and when you've got this many apps on your device finding them is kind of a little bit difficult so I like being able to look just at one screen rather than we know was it that or was it that when you can do the scrolling you can get between screens and then you end up looking at the same thing twice which that's not what you want to do when you just want to get in and quickly launch an app so really kind of cool there you can change and theme the background of your drawer in this case i'm running a gingerbread theme now themes may be free or they may cost extra money in this case it was 99 cents and I really been quite impressed he's pushed it out a lot of updates that primarily include all of these themed icons you can see here soundhound here is my setcpu my rom manager google talk and they're not the stock icons neither of these down on the bottom there icons that come with this theme so if you want to make your android look like an iOS device you can do that you want to make it look Windows Phone you can do that if you want to make it look windows 7 you can do that at least with the icons and can you I hint alright so going back home Brandon showed you the sense UI previews and you have that over here as well it's a little bit slow because I'm on this really resource intensive live wallpaper background and that's just beautiful live wallpaper from levelup studio so that I've showed you in the past their new OpenGL version once you put a nice picture from your gallery behind it and kind of adds a little bit more personality to your device so really I like that that update it is available free in the market if you want to go get that again level up Studios live weather wallpaper search for that you'll find in the problem anyway you can see here I've got a total of what three four five seven home screens and I do that mainly because I like having a whole bunch of homescreens I have them organized and I've got some full screen widgets on here that they take up a lot of space but just by pressing and holding or excuse me just by pressing the home button on the homepage you can get to that or if you want to pinch you can get into that as well and then you can quickly jump to any one of those so we'll jump over here to my my voice screen which you've seen in my voice videos in the past now Brandon showed you that you can resize widgets in launcher pro you can do the same thing over here in well they grabbed on to it a little bit better in ADW launcher and I'll show you what you just saw there in just a moment so we're going to tap and hold on it so that it knows that we don't want to interact with it we want to actually change the widget itself and I didn't tap long enough let's try a different spot here Andy and there we go so now we get these three little options popping up in this action bubble we can either remove it from this screen we can edit the widget or if it were just an icon we could it edit that as well or we can uninstall the app I think remove an uninstaller kind of worded poorly but you know that's just me now normally if you want to remove something you tap and hold and you drag it to a trash can icon on the screen I've turned that off in my option you can do the same if you want but from here let's go ahead and edit this and you can see I've got these little gravities I can make this wider if I had more room here I can make it taller since I don't I kind of boxing it in here but I can make this real skinny I can make it real wide I like what Brandon's done he's got three so we're going to leave it at three and to get out of this you hit the back button and there you go I've resized this widget which is normally a 4 x 14 tiles wide by 1 tile high into a three by one and then I've got my voice search button right off to the side of that to make things a little bit quicker and easier so resizable which is really kind of cool next up we've got the dock now I'm with Brandon on this the doc is the dock and it should be the same regardless of what screen you're on so if I'm over here on my social networking and new screens I have the same dock you can set up a second doc which isn't as many as in launcher pro but you can have a little gesture where you flip up or flip down and it will get into basically giving you another set of icons across the bottom I like having consistency across everything so I have it set right there you can also style this dock you can add icons customize it anything you want maybe you want your your launch or your little app drawer button over here on the side you can do that not a problem the icons down here you can customize those when you drop them in or you can get a theme pack like I have that automatically changes it for you so I've got google voice on the side I've got my dialer got my my browser and then over on the side I don't know if you can see that very well on camera I've got my ways icon that's not really a ways icon that's Google Maps Navigation but I like it better than the the ways i found which is just the blue one and i kind of want to go with the green theme down on the bottom so really kind of cool all right so I've shown you the screen transitions I've shown you what getting into the app drawer all of those are configurable and that's in the settings so let's go ahead and take a look in there first i want to show you this i'm on my far left screen so if i go into menu i have settings that's going to take me to my phone settings but i also have a more button that will let me the lock the desktop or go to atw settings I'm not going to do that right now instead I want to roll all the way over here to my home screen my main home and if I do the same thing you'll notice now actually I guess he's fix it in this update there used to be an ADW launcher settings there as well which it was kind of inconsistent but it looks like that's been changing in a recent updates oh hey woohoo all right presets you can go in and I can't left tap for some reason and set this up however you think somebody else might want so if you want just the default which is really fast really cool there you go if you want it to be kind of iphone e you can do that if you want to be like a nexus you can do that or if you just want fast so they're just some kind of presets I'd recommend you choose one get to like it and then go in and customize from there rather than starting from default and and customizing everything at least until you get the hang of of changing all these look we've got an awful lot of settings in here so Brandon didn't touch on a backup and restore it is available in launcher pro but I recommend that once you get everything set the way that you want it to you backup your settings okay and then you backup your desktop configuration okay as easy as that now it's all backed up with one caveat you cannot back up widgets you can back up their location but you can't back up their configuration or their settings or anything like that so if you're going to go and do a you know custom home screen like I've got where I've got three widgets on there the placeholders are going to be there but you're going to have to readd the widget so it's a lot better than not having anything at all especially if you're wiping your rom frequently like I am with cyanogenmod nightlies you can restore your system back or restore your UI back the way you like it very quickly and then just replace in your widgets so to wrap this up speaking of widgets launcher pro has some very HTC Sense like widgets that come you can unlock that's cool it's awesome in fact to be spending an awful lot of time working on those widgets ADW launcher is not doing that and the widgets aren't cross compatible one launchers widgets don't work in another launcher which is kind of disappointing so what I've done is I've gone out and I found what widgets I like best so this is plume which is a Twitter client this is my pure calendar widget these guys are both from level up studios and they're beautiful widgets pack over here I've got facebook I've got feeder and I've got this is just the google news widget so i put the widgets that i like on there then yes they're not as HTC Sense like as what comes with launcher pro but i don't need them you know this is my phone so the way i like it Brandon's got his phone he's got all the way he likes it it's all about customizability and what you can do so here I've shown you ADW launcher ii x it is available in the market it is available i believe in euros so it's going to convert to your currency i believe i paid about three and a half US dollars for it three maybe 384 is coming to mind well worth every penny there is a free version just called adw.launcher that doesn't have all the cool page animations like this does so try that out if you don't want to spend the money up front both very cool if you want to see more of these launcher wars definitely give this video a thumbs up let us know in the comments what launcher you use so we know what you'd like to see next four pocket now I'm Joe Levi