Gadgetory

hey guys it's Ryan a minimun from pocketnow.com and this is launcher wars part 1 in launcher wars we're going to help you determine the best launchers possible for Android so you can figure out which ones work the best for you let's get to it so in this video I'm going to talk about launcher Pro which is my personal favorite launcher for Android Joe is going to come on soon in another video it's going to talk about ADW launcher now the purpose of the series again is to help you discover the best launchers out there one of the best parts by far of Android is its ability to change the launcher which is of course the home screen interfaces all the widgets and the application tray now this is the Google Nexus S which comes with a very vanilla installation of Android 2.3 so you get the little duck on the bottom and there's seven home screens it's very simple it's not you know very visually intense like HTC senses which i think is a good thing I like things light and clean but I wanted to go even lighter and cleaner and faster with launcher Pro and I'm gonna show you how I have my home screen setup then I'm going to talk about the different settings that you can choose in modular Pro because I think it's the best launcher out there so let's start you're gonna see a crazy live wallpaper here I'll tell you what it's called in a second in case you wanted a little bit distracting I know but it's pretty cool and it doesn't really kill battery life too bad so it's called SolarWinds live wallpaper and it is free let's go back to the home screen and I'm gonna zoom in here so let me tell you about what I've done here to my home screens I like a home screen configuration that is very simple that gives me quick access to anything that I want so I've got a quick google search up here and as you can see it's skinnier than what you get when you make it and I'll show you why I've actually got the launcher pro upgrade for 3 bucks that allows you to resize widgets I've also got I believe this is called quick battery here which shows me the percentage battery life I have got a variety of shortcuts I've got my Google Voice widget also expanded beyond the stock size with the launcher pro feature I've got some icons here and here is my dock on the bottom with the Froyo style background and so when I swipe two different screens it stays put so that I always have those icons down here now launcher Pro will allow you to make multiple docks that you can swipe to the right and to the left but I think that kind of defeats the purpose of having a doc and doc should be the same no matter what home screen you're on now I've got hope three home screens set up here not seven like you get in stock Android or more because I like to just be able to go to the left go to the right and call it a day I don't want to be swiping millions of times to get to my other home screens now launcher Pro has the ability to zoom out to the home screen view you can pinch or you can press the home button and you can quickly dial to the home screen that you want I never ever use this feature because I'm only using three home screens anyway so I'm going to go to the left and show you the other things I've got going on here I've got this cool bookmark widget which gives me a little preview of all the websites that I have so Engadget Gizmodo google docs pocket now XDA down here on the bottom there is a Google Voice widget will allow me to make a message do other things going over to the right I've just got this favorite people thing it's kind of HTC styled which allows me to have six people now one of the coolest parts about launcher Pro if you pay the upgrade fee so if I tap in a hold on any widget I can actually resize it which is really cool and I'll show you a little preview what what it's going to look like so if I let go the widget will be extended it's a lot cooler when you're using a widget like I'm gonna put this on the other screen something that's stuck like the Google widget that you get out of the box so right now it's three items wide if I tap and hold on it and let go I can make it you know the normal size or if I want to keep it really small I can make it two columns wide so really cool ability to be able to resize the widgets there so I'm gonna bring that back over there and slide my battery back to where it was and again you can resize these other widgets like the Google Voice widget I can make that smaller really any widget that you can get you can resize if you pay that extra fee to upgrade launcher Pro now something else that I really really really wanted to change what's the application trade and standard Android you get this fancy animated thing that takes forever I wanted the application trade to open up in a snap and watch what I got here boom there we go and I've also increased the number of icons on the screen time because what I'm digging through the application tray I don't want to be going through the alphabet digging through a long long list I want to get right to the application I'm looking for so launcher pro lets me sort this by a row of five by I think we've got five here so lots of icons on the screen at one time and again look how fast that opens it's absolutely instant compared to the Android that you get stock Android or even HTC Sense or motoblur takes a second to open up so let's talk about some of the settings I've got here so I'm gonna go into the menu and preferences it's a lot of things you can change about this particular launcher so if we go to general settings this stuff I don't really mess around with that much but home screen settings you can specify the number of home screens you want you can go up to 7 but I go with 3 here you can choose the default home screen so when you press the home button it knows which to go back to we've got virtual looping which is just a little cool feature so that when I get to the end and if I swipe to the right it bounces me all the way back to the one on the left just a cool little feature to use there we've got enabled trackball scrolling a lot of the stuff I don't use transition effect I turn off all animations all transition effects I want everything to be instantaneous here home screen grid number of rows and columns so in case you wanted to kind of scrunch up the icons a little bit and fit more on the screen at one time you can do that with launcher Pro auto fit items so it will resize widgets I have that turned off here's the dock settings which is cool so we can change the number of docks you have like I mentioned you can swipe to the right swipe to the left and see up the three docks again I think that defeats the purpose of having a dock you can enable loop scrolling this is cool unread SMS count so you can have a little counter that shows you exactly how many missed SMS you have kind of like an iOS you can also do the same for Gmail and Misco I'm actually going to turn that on forgot to do that behavior settings autorotation so you get the sort of rotation on the home screen I like everything in portrait I don't want to have to wait for things to go into landscape okay going down appearance settings where some cool stuff comes in doc background so we can change this to glass let's go back and see what that looks like so I've got a kind of a new little doc background it kind of sits on a piece of glass which is nice let's go back into appearance settings here home button on app drawer so you can determine the behavior of the home button while you're on the home screen you can hide the notification bar if you want to get the maximum amount of screen space possible when you're on the home screen disable the disabled wallpapers scroll into the wallpaper stays what I mean it goes on and on and on there's just so much you can do and then if we go into advanced settings here we have a few other things we can turn on 5-row and home screen highly recommend that so you can see more on the screen at one time you can turn on high quality scrolling but again that will slow down your device we're going for sort of the the ability to get really fast operation here here's something that I really like opening speed of the app drawer I have it set to ten ten is instant zero if you went to that you get well let's see bah-wah who wants that I I can't imagine who would want to wait that long for the application tray to open so I'm gonna go back into advanced settings and go to opening speed and Jack this up to ten so I never have to wait again and then a lot of other things like screen previews you can change how fast that happens so a lot of settings a lot of things you can do here to customize what you've got going on and let me just show you some of these widgets I'm going to delete the people widget real quick I'm gonna tap and hold and go to launcher pro widgets so these are the premium widgets that you have to pay three dollars for and they're inspired by HTC's Sense widgets but i think they're better because they're resizable so we can go into messaging and we got a variety of choices here so we've got the kind of vertical list we've got the simple one item at a time let's go back and see the other ones real quick we've got Twitter Facebook friends people and so let's go to say friends and you've only got one style here and of course what not that one go back of course the one we were on was people and there's a lot of choices for that so you get this grid you get this well actually only two choices so this is the one that I was using here and I've got just starred items so that basically it's pulling from the people that I starred in the Android dialer and right now it's loading and it should come up on the screen perhaps I don't have that said exactly right I'll have to look into that so this is launcher Pro this is my favorite launcher for Android because it's fast it does what I want it has resizable widgets beautiful widgets and it just it works and there's a lot of options that you can use to tweak we're curious to hear about your favorite launcher for Android we're going to continue the series of launcher Wars to help you find the best launcher possible for your Android phone please thumbs up this video if you liked it and thanks for watching that's it for now