Gadgetory

hey guys it's Joe for pocketnow.com and gingerbread is the big news the question really is who's going to make it to market first independent developers or hardware manufacturers well when you've got a device all to yourself and can cook your own rom like Samsung did with the Nexus S the Nexus S wins but for everybody else it looks like it's going to be the community developers and thanks to one of our pocket mail readers we can show you an early look of cyanogenmod seven for the g2 running Gingerbread let's go take a look all right so here we go guys it's Android version 2.3 point 1 which is cyanogenmod 7.0 point 0 RC 0 now what's RC RC is a release candidate and 0 means it's not even really officially been released I'm once you get to RC one that's the first hey I think this is ready for prime time so I'm going to go ahead and release this candidate that's that's kind of the development process this isn't quite there and why isn't it there well let's go ahead and take a look back here this is the phone settings you'll notice that there are no cyanogenmod settings which would be right up here they're not they're not cooked yet they're not done now ready for this bill they're not included in it and those usually come after all of the other stuff is complete now what do I mean by other stuff well take a look up here first of all you see my new gingerbread style notification bar I've got Bluetooth turned on I've got Wi-Fi on Wi-Fi has good signal my battery is all nice and charged up and I've got my clock up there and it's that nice dark black bar that we're coming to become familiar with with Gingerbread but other stuff doesn't work other Hardware Wi-Fi doesn't work exactly right now over here I've got the latest version of google maps gps seems to be working it's a little bit laggy and kind of interesting at times but one of the things that the location services on the android does is it uses cell towers it uses Wi-Fi access points and gps all together to help pinpoint your location and to help narrow that down quicker so you don't really notice that you know it took 60 seconds 90 seconds to get a GPS fix because well it got a cell tower fix almost immediately it got a wife I fix within the next 5 10 seconds and then you know you're well on your way to knowing exactly where you are when the GPS catches up because the satellites take a while to come to view and whatnot this isn't a video about GPS and how it works though but the GPS wonkiness is when I'm not under an active umbrella-like am right now it'll just turn off that sounds kind of like it might be a feature because you don't really need Wi-Fi when you're not under Wi-Fi umbrella just choose a battery but when you do that you also lose out on your ability to get a quick location with your GPS sensitive apps like Google Maps so let's go ahead and move along one other thing that's not working and I don't know if this is going to throw an error like it has been or not is the camera app now this goes for both the still camera and the video camera of course the the g2 doesn't have a front facing camera just the rear one but normally it would throw an error message here saying it can't even connect to the camera and then you're just left with a button to say okay in this case we'll just have to hit home and go back home again so camera isn't quite done you also notice how long it took to do a nori entation change that is also because things aren't quite optimized for the hardware yet that's still coming along and it's to be expected something else now this is more gingerbread than it is cyanogenmod but i thought i'd show you i've gone ahead and added a contact to my desktop it's this guy named brandon minimun he runs a website is kind of really cool i like it a lot it's called Paquime com if you haven't been there I'd recommend doing that in fact I'd also recommend you I subscribe to their video channel if you haven't done so already but anyway looking down at this you've got this little ellipses dots down at the bottom of his contact icon now before that used to be a colored bar I used to be a green bar that went or a gray bar and some some roms that went all the way across at the bottom just kind of look like a drawer handle that you could grab onto and pull well now it lifts these points it's just a little bit of a change in the metaphor so when you tap on that it brings up what I call a quick action bubble because I don't know the real name of it if you know the name of this please let us know the comments down below but you'll notice i believe it's new to gingerbread it's got this nice dark drop shadow around it now that's because ginger bread has some higher resolution so you don't see banding and whatnot in here you're saying deeper color depths and what not really taking advantage of the GPUs that are coming in most of today's modern Android phones but you can see in here various different ways that I can contact Brandon either by phone or look up his contact text gmail Twitter or even review his website it also aggregates in his latest comment on a social network in this case 14 hours ago by Twitter that's probably you guys I haven't synced up with Twitter he's probably said quite a bit because he talks an awful lot about tech so again plug in there for four following pocketnow tweets on Twitter and pocket mal video on on youtube so lots of cool stuff if you're curious about this live wallpaper this is the snow globe the coca-cola live wallpaper that we showed you over at pocketnow.com a few days ago one thing that I would like to note this is not the launcher that comes with Gingerbread this is ADW launcher which is a phenomenal launcher you can get that in the marketplace we've talked about it in the past it's faster and more feature-filled than the stock launcher and it generally comes with cyanogenmod so once it's going to be ready for your device well to put it simply it'll be ready when it's ready and not before cyanogen does not release builds that don't have all of the hardware functioning so make sure you stay tuned we'll let you know when cyanogenmod comes out for your device over at pocketnow.com for pocket now i'm joe levi