Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a look at the home screens on the Google Nexus One we're going to talk about the live wallpapers the widgets and the various home screens that you can have on this device so let's start off by turning it on and of course this unlock pattern is optional you don't have to see that every time you turn on your device and as with other Android devices you have multiple panels that you can sort of customize with widgets there are five of them so there are two to the left and back to the center there are two to the right now a way that you know where you are is by looking at these dots down here so I see there are two dots on the left that means there are two panels or two screens to the left and now there are four to the right so it's a nice way to sort of visualize where you are although there's still no way to sort of jump to the one all the way on the right or all the way on the left you still have to manually scroll which is kind of annoying so let's talk about these live wallpapers I don't know if you can tell but the background is actually shifting around a little bit tapping does nothing but on some live wallpapers tapping actually allows you to interact with the wallpaper which is quite fascinating so we can tap and hold and we can go to wallpapers and then click on live wallpapers and we'll go through most of these galaxies pretty cool it actually looks like a universe of stars that swirls in into a circle so I just click set and as you pan around from screen to screen the aspect of the background kind of changes a little bit so that's pretty neat let's go to another one grass is really cool because it actually customizes itself based on the time of day so as you can see here at night you'll get a starry background in the morning you'll get a sunrise look during the day like you see here you'll see a blue sky and during the night you'll see a sunset or during the evening time so it's really cool and the grass moves just slightly as if it's blowing in the breeze and as you slide to the right and to the left the sort of blades of grass slide with the screen movement so very interesting and and nice and subtle what live wallpaper magic smoke is what you saw a moment ago and you can actually change the look of the magic smoke by tapping here so we can get kind of a monochrome we can get this wicked red sort of the psychedelic blue and green and so on and so forth they're about five you that you can choose from and of course if we click okay and set wallpaper you get the idea you get the wacky moving background let's go to the check out the other ones okay there's one called many says all music visualizations together slowly revolving a 3d just a way to sort of have the background interact with music that you're playing on your device so obviously it doesn't do too much right now because I'm not playing music but it would if you did play music so let's go back and there are several that interact with music let's go to Nexus this is sort of the the background that we saw on the leaks of the Nexus One which is actually one of my favorites it's it's not too distracting although it seems like it is right but as you can see you can still see all the icons on the screen what's really neat is you can interact with it so you can tap on it and if you go really quickly you get many different colors it's kind of just fun when you're bored just tap along on the screen anyway let's go to the next one we have something called polar clock which doesn't always work let's see if it'll work this time and see this happens it says the application Android live wallpapers has stopped working so that's kind of annoying so let's go back to the other ones we've spectrum and vu meter which also work with the music also waveform works with music this one is really cool it's called well I don't know what it's called what was it called it was called water so we can set the wallpaper this is another one you can interact with so you get this kind of water with the leaf so they're the colored Leafs and you can tap on the screen to have the water move sort of like koi pond on the iPod Touch or the iPhone so very cool as you swipe across you get to see it more leaves and a bigger view very fun background now these live wallpapers do indeed use a battery life in fact there's a screen you can go to and we'll talk about that in a future video that lets you see the breakdown of how the device is using battery life and you'll see that about 5% of the usage comes from these live wallpapers so if you're really concerned about battery life you definitely want to use a standard wallpaper and down here we can click wallpapers and see sort of the default wallpapers or the ones that come on the device that aren't animated there are some very nice ones some blades of grass it looks cave many different choices here let's go with just a plain one we'll go with the grass just cuz it works very well and there you go blades of grass so let's talk about some of the widgets that you can add I'd say that the widgets that you can add aren't as a robust as you'd find on the HTC Hero for example there's a lot of Android devices and each of them pretty much have different widgets that you can use in the selection on the Nexus One isn't terribly impressive you'll see what I mean in a second so we can tap and hold we can either add shortcuts widgets or folders let's start with shortcuts because this is quite useful we can add a variety of shortcuts we can add an application which is quite simply a link to a program we can add a bookmark which is very nice because you can see right into the web browser someone at pocketnow.com as a bookmark and here it is I can move it around of course by tapping and holding or that same token I can drag it to the trashcan let's go back into shortcuts you can also add a contact so you can quickly dial somebody that you call on a regular basis you can have a screen filled up with pictures of people that you call sort of like SBB mobile shell in Windows Mobile I'll give you an example I'll click contact and add one ok so I'll add Adam Lane here and there's a little picture of Adam Lane there's also an indicator on there that will show me if I've got some kind of communication with him so I'll drop that in the trashcan let's go back to shortcuts we can also do a direct dial so one touch dial to someone I whereas before with Adam Lane if I tapped on his name I'd be taken to his contact information also a direct message this is kind of cool you can have a direct link to direction so if you travel to say Philadelphia on a regular basis and you want a way to quickly launch directions to get to Philadelphia and of course Android 2.0 2.1 has built-in navigation you can do that and shortcut name let's call it Philly ok she's a little icon let's see here if that one looks good a little soccer ball and you click Save and once you press on Philly it will start the Google Maps Navigation I've got the GPS disabled right now so that won't work so let me drop that into the trashcan let's go back into shortcuts and see what else we almost got to the end of the list we also have a link to email Gmail labels and music playlist you can toggle Google Voice which is quite nice and also add a shortcut to settings so let's go back and talk about the widgets that you can add to the Nexus One we can add an analogue clock but you really can't change what it looks like this is what it looks like and that's all the choices that you get you can't do anything to change the design so let's throw that away go back you can also add a calendar but again you can't customize the look of the calendar you can only see next appointment not you know two appointments or three appointments obviously tapping on the calendar will take you right into the calendar application so it's convenient to have that perhaps on one of these extra screens we can also do a link into Facebook which is quite nice and you can sort of tap to the right and tap to the left to see what people are saying or you can tap on the Facebook icon to get directly into the Facebook app on the device and it's a very good Facebook app works quite well and again I'm going to throw this away so we have more room on the screen we can also add music so we can play music from the SD card something here news and weather which is great we can choose to have either weather news or news and weather and let's just do news and weather so we have everything in one and by default the device actually comes with this enabled and it's quite nice it shows you the latest news on the right and on the Left you get a little temperature gauge and it knows where you are using the GPS and you can tap on any of these icons down here or on the temperature itself and you're taken into kind of an extended view of the day and you can drag your finger along and say okay at you know 6 o'clock a.m. what will the temperature be what will be the chance of precipitation and what will the winds be so a pretty nice feature to be able to really see what the weather conditions are going to be like on a certain time of day we can swipe to the right while we're in this application to go to top stories and we can read a particular story by tapping on it and we're taken sort of into the web browser but it's it's not the web browser it's really just a viewer that works in landscape pretty well so we can tap around and see the news story there and then click the back button to go back into the application and they're organized by top stories us sports entertainment and I think that's it so really neat pretty much so really neat news and weather application built into the nexus one that I think a lot of people will appreciate so I'm gonna throw that away and let's continue down the list of widgets we also picture frame which is kind of cool so we can it says pick an item from your collection and I haven't yet fully discovered this kind of navigation here it's kind of strange sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't it's taking pictures of furniture the other day so here I have a picture of a couch you can move this around or you can sort of reposition it and pretend this is a picture of a friend or a family member or something and you want to put a picture on your main screen and there you have a little picture frame a nice little touch to have on one of your auxiliary screens certainly this isn't a new feature to Android but it's always nice to have going down the list we also power control which is what you see right here so really OneTouch access to enable your GPS Bluetooth Wi-Fi syncing and screen brightness and what's pretty cool about this is if you tap Bluetooth you get a little dim notification and then it will turn dark once it turns all the way on and there it goes now so this are really handy application to our widget to have on your home screen let's go down we have search which we're going to talk about in a second it has a really good voice search built in the device we also have tweet droid and twee droid large I don't know if I'm saying that right this is pretty much the best application I've found for Android and it says we need to have more space on the home screen to add that and I'll show you that but you're gonna see it's not gonna be functional because you need the pro version but really cool you can have a whole panel devoted to Twitter so you don't have to actually drill into the application so we'll throw that away and let's finish down the list and down here we have YouTube which is pretty cool so you can actually quickly upload a video you can press the record button film the video and the Nexus One will remember your user name and password so you can instantly upload the videos or you can search the library of YouTube tapping on the whole button we bring open the the Android YouTube application which is quite nice let's talk about this this search so to the right of the search there's a little microphone so if I talk to it it will search for what I say so let me try this oops HTC hd2 review perfect has really fantastic voice recognition that works almost all the time so that's a really nice feature to have in case you don't want to type or you're walking down the street you quickly want to find you know the Starbucks in Philadelphia that you're trying to trying to give them a call or something like that so let's slide that down and see what else we have we've gone through all of the widgets finally you can add folders to your main screen you can add contacts what's really cool down here is Facebook phonebook so you can actually have this drill into your entire Facebook album and query the phone numbers of people so that you can quickly call anyone that's in your facebook list that may not have a contact in your phone really handy little mini application here that you can add to your home screen and of course with Android you can always add another application to your home screen say after you download one by going into the program tray and just tapping and holding and dragging it right to your home screen this kind of operates like Windows actually you can go into the Start menu click and drag and put something on your desktop this is pretty much unique to Android and I think it's a really nice way to quickly add various things to your home screen so overall it's nice to see that the Google Nexus One has some useful widgets for the home screen displays it's nice to see that there are five home screens that you can use to customize again I'd like to see an easier way to jump between these home screens and also be nice to see even more widgets with greater functionality it would be nice to have a stock Twitter widget for example that allows you to update your status instantly and things like that but pretty nice and the live wallpapers are also quite impressive that's it for now