Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for Pocket now in the past we've shown you some hacks and some tricks to make your Android powered phone kind of look like Windows Phone 7 well here is a launcher called launcher 7 that actually does a pretty good job of it let's go take a look so launcher 7 is a launcher app you get to it by of course pressing the home button and if I wanted to set this as my default launcher I could put a check in that box here's what I want to show you it's called launcher 7 if you saw that there was a really nice animation where the tiles flipped in just like Windows Phone 7 now all of these quote-unquote live tiles are they're kind of live and they're not quite as live as what you have on Windows Phone 7 but what you do have is counters so if I had Gmail waiting for me if I had missed phone calls I would have the the live tile counters in there just like you'd expect there are some nice very artistic very high resolution tiles like music ok so watch or 7:00 is a true launcher app so when you hit the home button it will bring up your complete action using intent and you can set any one of your installed launchers as default just by putting a check in that box right there of course I'm just showing this to you as a demo so I'm gonna go ahead and launch the launcher seven and the first thing you'd notice is it kind of animates the tiles it flips the tiles into place just like Windows Phone 7 does now these aren't live tiles like you've come to expect in Windows Phone 7 but on tiles such as your phone and your Gmail you do actually have your indicator so if you've got several missing several missed phone calls or unread emails you'll have those indicators right on there now you can see this is pretty much stock I've done that a little bit of customization I've added my barcode scanner app because I do a lot of that these days and of course you've got your high resolution 2 by 1 tiles but there's other stuff you can do as well so let's dig in a little bit first let's show you the app drawer which looks very similar to what Windows phone 7:00 pre mango looks like and we can let's say we want to come out here and grab the scrap the Congress app okay we tap on that the title is Congress the tile size we can set either to one by one two by one horizontal or one by two vertical and we're gonna leave it at one by one we can set some extra options and we're not going to to do much with that and now we're just going to add the tile so we've done that and now down at the bottom we have our Congress app tile okay that's pretty cool but we can also do a little bit more stuff so let's come in here and first of all let's look at the settings the launcher seven settings that other settings will take you to the phone settings so of course we can set all kinds of stuff like the background color we can change the wallpaper we can change the color of the tile right now it's this lime green kind of the Android theme coming through we can have it displayed in notifications we can even lock the tile layout we can follow the orientation I'll show you that it's actually pretty cool bouncy scrolling that's something that we're used to on Android wear if you scroll too far it will bounce a little bit at the end just to hint that you're at the end of a list we can have some animation options in here the fly animation is the one that I have chosen versus fade home key animation will animate the the tile layout like we've already done and of course it will animate the animations while scrolling this is not checked by default you need a little bit higher end phone the g2 does just fine but I've gone ahead and checked that status bar options this is kind of cool now status bar visibility you notice down here I've got my CyanogenMod seven status bar that I've moved to the bottom and we talked about that in a previous video so if you missed that make sure you go back and and look at our CyanogenMod seven final video but we can come in here and set the status bar visibility of the launcher itself which is a different one than this one so I've got that set to visible it defaults I believed hidden and then we can use the Windows Phone 7 style status bar if we want and I also believe that defaults to unchecked transparent status bar if we want to all kinds of other cool stuff so we can backup and restore our app drawer we can either have it as to the Android launcher or Windows Phone 7 style up to you so all kinds of fun stuff now this app is free but there are allegedly advertisements somewhere I haven't seen any yet there is a paid version it doesn't cost very much that doesn't have those ads built into it so kind of cool there now what's really cool is okay I've got this empty tile space right let's go ahead and go to menu let's add a widget and what I want to do here is let's add a beautiful weather widget and which one do I want to pick beautiful weather one by one pick that and this is my default configuration and settings for beautiful widgets so I'm just gonna hit save and apply and then I'm gonna create the tile you know just to show you what it's like let's go ahead and create a full tile widget and we'll create it now down here at the bottom you can see I now have a weather widget that's kind of like a live tile but it uses your Android widget so as long as you're a one by two two by one or one by one you're just fine anything more than that and I don't know exactly how it would work but now you can take these and you can tap and drag on them you can see the tile kind of lays back when you're over it when you want to drop it so we go ahead and drop it right there right there and we'll do the same thing it's a little bit tricky at first to grab on to it to be able to drop it but very simple just like that and now I've got a couple of my apps you can see when I tap on it it animates in and animates out so very cool now last thing I want to show you here of course is the rotate so let's spin the phone and rotate it and you saw those tiles just spin in place very cool very slick kind of got it halfway there but very nicely done up here is our Windows Phone 7 statusbar like I told you about it looks very Windows Phone 7 ish and I bet you could trick a couple of your friends into thinking that you had a Windows Phone 7 even though you may not kind of neat the things that you can do at Android if you liked it go ahead and take a look again this version of the app is free in the Android Market head over to pocketnow.com and I will have some links where you can go out and download those if you like it of course leave positive feedback for the app developer if you have any questions or comments or suggestions go ahead and leave those in the comments to the video or over at pocketnow.com for pocket now I'm Joe Levite