Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe with PocketNow today I've got our third installment of launcher wars this time it's go launch or e.x let's go take a look okay to introduce things a launcher for those of you who don't know is the app that runs on your system that launches all of the other apps it also takes care of your home screen your dock bar your app tray just all kinds of stuff that it does and we've shown you recently launcher pro which is a very nice launcher we've shown you a TW launch or e^x and just recently we showed you a TW launcher - which was an early beta of the the total rewrite that they're coming out with well here it is I've been using this for a few days now as my my stock launcher and it's been great there are quite a few little caveats and an awful lot to dig through so let's go ahead and show you now just before we dig into that I want to give a big thank you out to our viewers there were several of you who recommended that we added this to our launcher wars series so thank you for that participation it took a long time coming because I wanted to wait for one of the updates to come out and that just came through this morning and I also had to have some time to dig into it so without further ado let's go ahead and take a look first of all this is a launcher just like any other launcher it has home screens it has nice transitions I'm using the windmill transition it's got the little which screen of my on indicator dots up at the top and it's got a continuous rotation so here I'm at the end if I keep rotating I'm all the way over on the other side so very nice feature very fluid and I like it quite a bit this is where it gets a little bit interesting I've left this screen open for us so let's go ahead and open up the app drawer now you noticed a kind of a pinwheel effect animating into the app drawer that's one of the cool things it does now you can set that to be pretty much any animation that you want they've got four dozen or so then it comes preloaded with I just chose that one because it kind of showed off what this could do you'll notice that this is tabbed and it's paginating let's go to tabs first so right now I'm looking at all of my apps if I tap that I can go to my recent apps and you can see which apps I've run most recently and then you can see which apps I have running and in this case you can even see what my free and total memory are so it's really nice and really kind of well-thought-out to give you more information than just okay here's your apps blah but since we're back here let's go ahead and talk about this one of the things that I don't like about the Stockham Android launcher is when you've got a lot of apps in here this list becomes very long and when you scroll down through it it's a big long list of icons that's not all that friendly and you can get lost really easily for example if I scroll this did I already see this row once it's up here or did it get off the screen it's hard for me to take in everything that's on one screen because it's just all over the place so that's why I kind of like this this is a paginate 'add view so if I go ahead and scroll over you can see now I'm on page 2 page 3 and the little dots up here tell you what screen you're on it is a horizontal pagination rather than a vertical scroll so that might take a little bit of time for a few of you users myself included to get used to but it's very nice because now I can look at everything on this page decide whether what I'm looking for is there or not and move on to the next one so and I launched that inadvertently so let me go ahead and get back alright so that's where we are now the app drawer and the home screens interplay very tightly for example let's say I want to take this Pluralsight app and put it on my home screen I'm gonna tap and hold now you'll notice kind of vary iOS ish once I've tapped and hold held on that all of these little guys are now wiggling to tell you that I can do something with them kind of to prompt my interaction with them very very much like what happens on the iPhone so let's go ahead and long press on this down here at the bottom you can see that message changed now it says move to screen so we're going to change down there we're going to just drop it now that takes this over too and doing this in slow motion is relatively hard so let me talk to you through it I tap on that I drag it down to where this home icon is which will change into move to home screen it will then bring up a series of thumbnails of my screens where I can choose which screen to put it on and even the positioning on that screen so that's what I'm gonna do just really fast because I can't narrate and do it at the same time okay just like that now that's one of the easier ways to do this you can put anything that you want from that app drawer on to any one of your screens quickly easily it's a piece of cake does take a little bit of time to get used to but it's still nice nonetheless now when I long press on this you can see that I can either replace this I can rename it I can delete it or I can even uninstall it from here which is very similar to what we saw previously with ADW launcher to the early beta there are a few things that that does that this still doesn't but you can see with stuff like this those two launchers have really had to step up their game and we're still waiting to see what launch or Pro does in response to this but let's move along what I've got down here is my little gmail icon while I was filming this you notice I got a new gmail and I now have an unread Gmail indicator down on the bottom so I can go ahead and tap that and go into my gmail it will do the same thing for missed calls and for text messages and whatnot so very cool but that's not included in the launcher in fact that's where this launcher is kind of interesting but we'll come back to that first let's go into our preferences so we tap on menu settings as the phone settings preferences is the the settings for the app so we can change display settings we can hide the status bar we can hide the icon labels we even make our grid size tighter we can make it 5 by 4 or even 5 by 5 where the default is 4 by 4 wallpaper scrolling we can either have the wallpaper fixed and everything float on top of it or in traditional Android sense we can have that wallpaper scroll with us this is where I mentioned that you can rotate between the screen so once you get to the furthest on the right you swipe again and it will take you to the further screen on the left so that's very nice transition effect that was the windmill effect that I showed you can see there's a whole bunch here that we can do very nice let's go ahead and change it to flip and we'll see that in action in just a minute the fling speed I've bumped that up to maximum so it looks more responsive elasticity I've also bumped that up so it's very elastic screen indicator up on the top and auto hide the screen indicator I don't want to see it all the time so I've got it set to auto hide so that's the display settings screen settings basically it takes you to your thumbnails of your screens if I want to add a new screen I add a new screen if I want to add in your screen I add a new screen just like that and I can keep going and going and going so very cool there's even another page where I can add more this is the first time that I have seen something where you can add more than seven screens and I don't know why one would want to but you can which is really kind of cool so to remove them it's just as easy just tap on the little X up there and do the same thing and if you tap on it right it will work right and if you tap on it wrong of course it'll take you back to the home screen so there we go I've got ahead and put that back to the same way that we had you can also change if you want your home screen to be that one or that one and again my fingers are a bit bigger on camera than anywhere else but I can just tap that little home button and make that screen my home screen so really kind of nice next let's move into dock settings now the dock tray down at the bottom is very nice Brenda and I both like it static meaning I want the icons in that dock to be there regardless of what screen I'm on that's kind purpose of the dock however you don't have to do that I can have up to three rows so I can just swipe left and right to get more and more docks down on the bottom and and I can have basically three times as many icons down there as I normally would there are various different styles that you can set either the default style or transparent I've got transparent because I kind of like that the dock background I can set a custom background if I want right now I just want it to be transparent and then loop remote if it were in if I had more than one dock down at the bottom keep going there's lots of stuff in here but it's really really well thought out so scrolling orientation this is how the that app drawer Scrolls and I showed you horizontal page by page we can do vertical continuous I'm kind of disappointed that they didn't do a vertical by page as well but that's a feature request that if they're watching this video they can go ahead and do for us we'll keep it horizontal page by page we'll come down here again we can change the grid size we can even set a custom background we can show the labels or not show them we can hide the app icons if we want this is very convenient if you've got bloatware on your on your phone if there's an app or a bunch of apps that you don't use you can hide them which is very nice you can change the icons sorting to alphabetical the latest installed earliest installed seems kind of redundant here because we have those tabs I'd like to see this done more on those tabs rather than in here but it gives you the options which is very nice transition effect this is when you open the app drawer what transition will it do well I showed you windmill there's also zoom and random so zoom and random will kind of do either default windmill or zoom it'll pick one out at random we'll go ahead and change that to zoom just so you can see it and then show locked apps if we want to as well we won't go too deeply into that operation settings we can enable or disable screen rotation I don't like screen rotation on my home screen because it takes up you know extra computer cycles to be able to flip that screen around into landscape versus portrait orientation and usually I do it accidentally so I have that turn to off the pop-up quick menu that's what happens when I push and hold on the icon it has that quick menu of things that you can do we can map the HOME key have it do whatever we want from that list the glide up action so there's actually a gesture where you can glide up or glide down and you can set up what you want that to be well go ahead and leave that as it is go ahead into advanced settings assistive persistent now that's something that most modern launchers allow you to do but they do have this warning says it's experimental and may cause instability basically your launcher is just an app which is a good thing and a bad thing it's a good thing because you can install a new one just like you can install a new app it's a bad thing because it's just like other apps it can swap in and out of memory whenever the system needs more memory okay so what does that mean if I'm in the Facebook app and then I want to switch over to the plume app I can go ahead and do that and if I don't have enough system memory to be able or enough RAM if you want to use that term to keep both of them in memory at the same time it will swap one out which is fine basically it's kind of closing that app but remembering its state until I want to switch back to Facebook and then it has to go back and reload Facebook and apply that and where did you leave off information so it takes a little bit of time to do that versus if it were actually still in memory it would just swap over - it wouldn't be a problem well apply that to your launcher so if I launch Plume and then I go back to my launcher if for some reason I've got enough stuff running in the background that I've run out of memory it could have swapped out my launcher to give me extra RAM for whatever the foreground app is whatever's running right now so that can add extra time when asked to pull that app in and populate it with all the screens and widgets and icons and whatnot so it can take you know not very long but even still a second or two when you're just trying to your home screen is relatively long so if you're running into that type of condition you might want to try the system persistent which will basically make your launcher apps stay in memory even if you know it needs it now that means that other stuff is gonna have to swap out but if you do a lot of work on your home screen and going back to it quite a bit you may want to try that out if you're noticing that it's closing and reopening so next thing is prevent force flows this will attempt to prevent force closes when running out of memory it just kind of goes hand in hand and that's something that I think should be kind of built into the operating system but for some reason they give you that option right there clean rubbish data obviously a more Queen's English translation this I believe is a Chinese company that's making this and we'll talk about that in just a minute but this will go ahead and check and clean for overlapping shortcuts or widgets on the home screen so it just kind of cleans up things when you start getting into tighter grids at five by five you can get stuff overlapping and this will attempt to clean it up as I understand font you can change your font to pretty much whatever font you have installed on your system it will go through and do a scan to show you what fonts you have it's found four so far five total and I can then come in and I don't know what that does change my font so there you go they're the fonts that it found I can leave it at default or change to one of the others this is where I was mentioning before so I can display an unread text message account or a missed call count or an unread email account but to do that I have to have these separate apps the apps are free in fact everything that I've shown you so far has been free you can go out to the Android Market and get it or head over to pocketnow.com and I'll give you links to get you started but you go ahead and go out and download and install these and it extends functionality of the launcher to include that so let's see what else we've got there's also themes that you can do backup your configuration so if you need to reload like I do a lot I'm flashing all kinds of roms and whatnot I can restore that configuration and then all I have to do is reconfigure my widgets because you can't just restore widgets so kinda kind of neat and interesting then of course there's a reset to default but let's get back over here so here's this you can see my new transition that I put into place now you can see the zoom effect on the app drawer so kind of cool but now since we're back here let's talk about widgets now you've probably seen a couple of widgets on here now here is my my feeder widget here's my news widget my plume and Facebook widgets and some other stuff this is called go whether it's by the same company and this is actually a let me back up just a minute one of the things that you can get with a custom launcher is custom widgets and those custom widgets can do all kinds of neat things HTC Sense probably being the the best example where they've gotten this animated flip clock and all that animated flip clock and and other widgets that come with HTC Sense take advantage of stuff built into HTC Sense and extend it to be able to do cool things in the widgets but those widgets only work on HTC Sense well launcher pro widgets only work on launcher pro ADW launcher widgets only work on ADW launcher Samsung's TouchWiz widgets only work on TouchWiz Motorola's motoblur widgets only work on motoblur well this has the same thing let me go over here to a blank area and you can see I've got a go widget section so I can tap that to either load up my contacts widget or task manager widget and that's really all the the widgets that come prepackaged with this launcher but you can also load up other widgets for example this is you know I've forgotten the name of that so let's go ahead and take a look this is separate from the launcher itself it's called go weather and there are three different styles a 2 by 1 4 by 1 & 4 by 2 so let's go ahead and put a 4 by 1 on here just because it looks a little bit different than the 4 by 2 on the other screen now it's just a regular old widget this will work on any launcher you don't have to be using go launcher so there's the smaller one there's the bigger one and it looks an awful lot like the HTC Sense widget or beautiful widgets or whatnot looks really cool but here's what's cool it comes with go whether it's not just a widget it's an app that has widgets with it so let's go ahead and launch it and it takes a minute to fire up which I don't like but once you're in there this just got an update this morning like I mentioned so let's see what's in here bug fixes fixed a video display defect other minor fixes and UI adjustments yada yada yada okay and it's the mobile so that's cool okay and if you look now you'll see I'm flying through the clouds it's a part of the cloudy day it looks really cool last night when it was raining I was looking at a rain puddle this is what it looks like at night view and it'll automatically select between the two so really cool effect there I was looking at a rain puddle with the the rain drops hitting it and I was seen the reflection of stuff above it so it was really really cool I can come in here and get more information including the parameter all kinds of stuff I can pull that drawer up so I can see what my detail local forecast is so lots of cool stuff really cool the way that they've done it and then of course that information is fed forward onto the the home screen so really neat what you can do okay that's a ton of stuff I mentioned that this isn't just a launcher there's lots of plugins forum and just to try and wrap this up for you if I come in here to my dialer you can see and I've left this on not defaulted if you will so you could see normally it's gonna launch my phone app but I can install go dialer which is also free in the market which kind of Reis kins my dialer and you can see it looks very very different in here my contacts also look different my groups so I couldn't get down to that are cool now I can go into friends family co-workers businesses all kinds of stuff right neighbors co-workers so lots of cool stuff and I can go into favorites as well very different view from what you used to but it's starting to now turn into less of just a launcher and more of a an entirely new theme or skin to the Android experience they're doing it bit by bit by bit let me see if there was one other thing that I wanted to show you is that's what I wanted to show you so let's go ahead and see what I'm gonna do here go ahead and fire up Gmail and we'll compose a new message now in this new message there's my on-screen keyboard now this is go keyboard they also have a keyword again this will work with any launcher so if you like this kind of keyboard it's skinnable it's the mobile so if you apply a theme to one part of of go launcher it will apply over here to your keyboard into your other stuff your widgets and apps and whatnot as well so everything has a consistent look and feel to it really kind of a cool approach to go in and systematically replace bits and pieces of the stock Android experience with the new go experience for lack of another word so fabulous great I love it now let's get the things I don't like in the list is very short number one this one I tap on letters doesn't always do a screen vibration in fact this is the first time that it's done a vibration for me I don't know why I don't like that it's kind of intermittent Sega when I'm up here typing in an address bar I don't have a space I have a dot-com button which is nice unless I need a space and then I've got to go in a switch I would much rather have that button split or have a dedicated button because when I'm doing a google search from the address bar I might want to do Jo space leave I instead of Jo calm Levi that just doesn't work and yes I have done a couple of those searches and they've not worked well next thing translation isn't great okay they've they've gone through and translated some of the stuff and it's very obviously not English native speakers who are doing this translation that's going to improve with time of course and that's about it I mean for those two little nitpicky things the launchers fabulous it's really really good it's something that really definitely warrants being included in our launcher wars it's not quite up to the same level of completeness and polish as launcher Pro an ADW launcher but it has bells and whistles that those two don't so it's very worthy of inclusion in this sorry it took me so long to get this review out there but as you could tell this is a long video because there's a lot of stuff not only in the launcher but in the widgets and the other apps that come along with it and I didn't want to just rush through and do a quick review I wanted to get in and get deep and really do this launch or justice so for those of you who recommended adding this to our launcher war series thank you very much we appreciate that kind of feedback if there's something that I missed in the review and I'm sure there is please leave us a comment down below so that those who either read the article or watch the video after you can be enlightened with that information as well and of course this is just one version stuck in time they're going to make improvements so if you see this in the future and they've improved on on a feature or fixed one of the bugs that I've pointed out please go ahead and mention that for us as well so there we go launcher wars part 3 now complete I need to know what you want me to do for a launch or worst part for go ahead and send me a contact request over at pocketnow.com just go to any one of my articles and click on contact Joe Levi's right there on the article in the byline and that you can then send me a message saying hey launcher wars I want to see this launcher and this is why and I will go ahead and dig into that and see if it's worthy of inclusion in our top Android launchers and see if we can shoot a launchers war video for it as well if you like seeing this kind of in-depth stuff go ahead and thumbs up this video of course if you haven't already subscribed to our video channel you need to do so now you need to recommend it to your friends and of course leave those comments complaints or requests down in the comments below for PocketNow showing off all kinds of cool alternate launchers I'm Joe Levi