Gadgetory

we all like customizing our phones and giving them a little personality that can be done by flashing custom rom or by installing a custom launcher app today we're going to talk about my home launcher I'm Joe Levi this is launcher wars episode 8 so this is my home launcher it just came up with an update there are two different varieties one for those of us running Android for bass drums and those of us are running android 2.3 this is version 4 or for Android 4 and it kind of shows you what it can do the first thing you're going to notice is we have animated widgets that's something that in the past has been reserved only to HTC sense now you can get it on other things now this if it looks at all familiar to you it's probably because you've seen me you'ii or my UI I don't know how you want to pronounce it or how it's supposed to be pronounced but mi UI it's an Android distribution a custom rom that is developed almost entirely in China for Android but it gives an entirely new look and feel kind of iOS ish in fact there's a lot of overtones of Apple's operating system that you'll find but with a very distinct android flavor it's very polished and looks really really good but of course you have to flash a custom rum a lot of us don't like doing that or don't want to forgo our warranty so this is a custom launcher you simply download and install it from the android market or the google play store i'll have a link for it over in the article at pocketnow.com and it essentially replaces your launcher and makes it look just like the me you Eeyore the miui custom rom complete with my locker so overall what you'd expect a very long paginate 'add home screen we can tap and hold on it and get even more where we can add and whatever we want to there's a we'll search can add another we just keep adding and adding and adding now there's no app drawer at least not one that I could find everything appears to be right here put together on the home screen so things that you don't want to use you just move off to the side so that they're right there they're accessible but you don't have to launch a separate launcher app for you to get into now you just saw a notification come through those of you who are familiar with the the custom rom will notice this is not the custom rom interface for that for the drop down for the notification bar for the notification shade this is stock Android or whatever came on your Android it's not changing that to do that you've got to have root access you've got to do through a custom rom this doesn't have that level access so some of the components are going to stay stuck to whatever stock is on your device but you can see very quickly and easily what you can do there we can come in and look at settings we can change the transition effect between the the pages I've got it set it cascading now let's set it to rotation will go back and show you that in just a minute you can change your wallpapers live wallpapers lock screen wallpapers and desktop wallpapers will get to lock screens here really quickly we can change the wallpaper scroll type which can be set by either the theme or you can manually set it to whatever you would like in there as well this is a setting i really like keep the launcher in the memory so it's going to do everything it can to keep this launcher app from being dumped out of memory when extra memory is needed elsewhere that means going back to the launcher is going to be a lot faster than it otherwise would if it would have to reload it back into memory so I like that setting icon shadow just some eye candy for how you want the icons to look on the home screen then do we want to use the my home locker so this is the lock screen and it's gorgeous and it's thema Bowl unfortunately it's an in addition to your current lock screen so if you've already got a lock screen now you have to you unless you turn one or the other off you can change the style this is what I have locally and it's just very nice or you can go online and pick out one of many many many lock screens including these nice little zippers no innuendo there right and just lots of other things that you can do simply download them a lot of them you don't know what they're called because they're written in Chinese this is a Chinese development house that does this so not quite as translated as I'd like it to be but it's impressive to see all of this coming from a one group of developers over in China and still have it look as polished and is usable in English I'm sure a lot of us us or other developers throughout the world aren't doing quite as much for our friends over in China and internationalizing for them we can enable haptic feedback enable sound effects and this is a translation i just have to point it out because i find it humorous and it made me smile we can activate the one key locker now what does this do I have no idea but what it says it does is enabling it can perform one key locker and make locking automatically perfect after lighting up the screen that sounds good enough for me now to do this you have to have administrative privileges it controls the lock screen I haven't done that before I really don't want to just yet so I'm going to cancel out of it some other things in here as break you and then some about information this is version 1.0 point one I just got it this morning I've been using the previous version up until this point so there we go back to home now you can see that new 3d flip like I was telling you really kind of cool nice fade transition little pinwheel there let's go ahead and turn it off wait just a few seconds for the lock screen to kick in we'll turn it back on and here you can see the my home lock screen simply drag down to unlock but you've got these four quadrants launched phone launched camera or launched messaging you can unlock now this is my stock unlocker i'll go ahead and unlock that i will then put in my secret code and i'm at my home screen obviously you wouldn't have three levels of protection on yours that's just you know what I've got set up for online overall really cool really impressive I love the animations and I love the fact that it carries through a lot of the things that you've come to know and love about the miui custom rom but it puts it into a package that you can get and download on virtually any Android powered device to replace your launcher so you can get some of that miui look and feel right there on your phone without rooting and without custom drumming I like it let me know what you think head over to pocketnow.com leave your comments on that article over there I'll have a link to the article down below this video if you're watching it over on youtube if you're watching it on pocket now just scroll down and leave your comments down there let me know what you like what you don't like what they didn't include from my UI that you wish they would have and if you've got a recommendation for an upcoming episode of launcher wars make sure you also leave that for us on the contact us link at pocketnow.com you