Gadgetory

one of the things we love about Android is its ability to customize its look and feel just by installing a new app specifically a launcher so popular and there's so many out there we've got our own launcher Wars series today we're going to talk about lunch or wars 7 the Regina launcher I'm Joe Levi this is pocket now let's go take a look the first thing you're going to notice about Regina launcher is how heavily into 3d it is to see exactly how deep all you've got to do is start looking at your home screens now take a look at that I'm actually feeling a vibration as it changes to each different home screen in the panel there this is what they call their cover flow version you can also change this in the settings to a circular carousel if you want to do that but very 3d like very nice very fluid does take a little bit of a time a little bit of time to initialize to get into that but even when you're just flipping from side to side you have nice animations nice transitions not quite as fast but then again it can't be if you're going to experience those nice animations and transitions in there something else you can do if you don't want to wait for that you can drag your bar on the bottom left to right just to switch between them works really well really intuitive as well I was quite impressed with how fluid and easy it was help how simple it was to change different home screens in three different manners that I've shown you here let's go ahead and look at some other things you'll notice that we've got kind of an integrated whether with current time clock actually showing the time as being zero 559 which means it's 5am even though it's 1759 so it's not respecting the the time settings as much as I'd like it but you can come into the settings notice the nice 3d animation effect there we can change the hour mode over to 24 hours right there and that should take care of my issue we'll go back now and it should update to the time now you also noticed an iced rotating animation everything about Regina launcher 3d is 3d it is animation really kind of nice again nice fluid transitions and animations I've got my calendar down here for some reason it's not pulling in my calendar events but I can tap on them to get into it really kind of a weird bug there but I think it's because I've got multiple calendars set up let's look at another widget this is my to-do list now these widgets are kind of there and they're kind of not to get advantages with all these extra widgets you have to go to the the play store and download and install them it's kind of a pain that you have this cool launcher then you got to go and get no another four or five or six widgets to make it look really cool but you know that's what they did whether you like it or not that's what we've got some other stuff is the the app manager widget and if we want to add something let's go ahead and long press you'll notice I've got this new interface really kind of cool i can add regina widgets this is what I've got installed or i can add regular Android widgets shortcuts or folders I don't know if you can tell all that well we've got a tab here and we've got another tab on the bottom so we can edit we can edit a work space wallpaper in this case I've got just this nice wood grain wallpaper and I can change the workspace name now workspaces are kind of interesting I can have an entire workspace setup for home one set up for work one set up for even secret if I want to let's come on back over here let's just go ahead and add a shortcut now you are kind of familiar with this it's the the old gingerbread style let's add what do we want to add here currents let's put that on the screen so we'll just select that and there we have it we can pick it up and move it to wherever we have these nice guidelines show me where I can and can't drop this so really kind of cool we'll put it right there in the middle you see that nice ripple effect whenever I drop something not really when I add it but when move something around to another location now all of this is 3d and we talked a little bit about wallpapers you'll notice this is not a live wallpaper and in fact this is not compatible with live wallpapers at all so if that's something you like I'm sorry you're out of luck but it's because there's too much of an overhead to do all of this cool 3d stuff and a live wallpaper all at the same time so you just kind of have to live without it and if that doesn't suit your fancy there are other launchers you can try let's go ahead and take a look now in our app drawer will open that up if you can tell in the background you have kind of a ghosted silhouette of your home screen that you just left and then a nice animation up here on your paginator it's got some nice 3d tilting action going on really quite quick I can flip through really fast and go back home really quickly so that's about all it is if we want to go in and look at settings there are a few things in here there's this secret menu that we were talking about you can either set a password or just hide it you know if you have I don't know your android fan by fanboy secret area I guess you could have and you'd want to hide that from all of your android friends but you can do that workspace transition effect again coverflow is what we have now circular rail will switch it to that I can only do that in the pro version now the version i'm showing you is free there are some limitations that's one that you just saw another one is you're limited to five workspaces you want more than that go ahead and pay it's about three dollars us to get the professional version but the the standard free version is every bit as functional as long as you don't want either one of those two things that was really all i could see the difference in vibration if you don't want to have vibration you think it's a pain I like it you can turn it off you can backup and restore you can turn on and off various different reflections to help speed things up magnification you can do that as well turn it on or off anti-aliasing to smooth things out scroll effects these are just speed if you want more speed or if it's being a little bit too slow and you want to speed it up to you know a tolerable level go ahead and play with though restart the launcher and of course reset to defaults which I really like once you've customized something and mess around with it you might want to just start all over again from scratch well this lets you do it really easily version 1.2 is what we're showing you right here it's very nice I've been running this for some time now and other than you know a few little quirky things I haven't noticed any problem with battery life or any untoward would be the good word slow down because of all of the advanced features now this is a relatively high end phone it's a Galaxy Nexus gsm so it's a dual-core 1.2 got plenty of RAM in it so it's near the high end of the spectrum but overall I've really liked it once you get familiar with it and how it works it's just a joy to use did we miss something that you wanted to see covered let us know in the comments over at pocketnow.com if you like what we're seeing here with this cool 3d give the video a big thumbs up and of course head on over to pocket now so you can stay up to date on the new upcoming launcher wars because there's plenty more to cover showing off Regina launcher in launcher Wars 74 pocket now I'm Joe Levi