Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and acer is just getting into the android business which is kind of cool but they've done something that well honestly a lot of manufacturers are doing and that's customizing the device with their own UI with Android that's really really easy because all you have to do is replace the launcher app so let's go take a look and see what Acer's done with their launcher app alright first off this isn't an Acer device this is a Nexus One running Android 2.2 but it's got the Acer launcher on it now some of our good friends over at xda-developers have gone through and ripped the launcher out of one of the Acer devices and have made that available for download so please go over to pocketnow.com and check the article that this video is going to be posted on and I'll give you that link or at least the only that was working when I tried it so let's get into the good stuff first of all you're gonna notice that this is a very very clean UI up at the top here you've got your time and date with kind of a neat bar subdivision I've got my time set to 24 hour time so it says that it's 0 7:44 hours if you've got just a regular 12 hour clock it's just going to say 744 so that's kind of neat one thing that you'll notice up in the top there is no traditional notification bar I don't know how many bars I have I don't know how much battery life I have I don't have any of that information I don't know if bluetooths on I don't know if Wi-Fi is on which really I think is kind of a little bit it'll take some getting used to but for a nice clean screen it does a really good job next thing I want to show you is down here you've got come back to that in a minute down here you've got a little tray if you will vikon's and these icons are what you think are the most frequently used apps and they're customizable to get to your app drawer it's really simple you just drag this up nice and fluid with some semi-transparency up at the top as soon as you get up to the top now you have little text icons or little text underneath your icons rather to show you what they are so again down here they're kind of compact with a little reflection the nice touch there and then over here no more reflection instead they've got the word underneath it describing what it is if you want to toggle this out really quick let's say that I don't use mark it all the time and I want to use feeder I tap and hold drag up drop it's just that simple now when I look at it feeders right there position prominently now obviously this isn't all the apps that I have installed on my device so let's go ahead and take a look at how you do this you'll notice down here on the bottom there's a little paginate ER this is I'm on page 2 of 5 so I can go over here that's my first page of apps second page third page fourth page now you get the idea so kind of cool and then of course back to the home screen one thing you'll notice is there are really no there's no room for widgets on here you can tap and hold and get into this control panel that lets you change your wallpaper and some other stuff but every time I've done that it's forced closed that's probably because I don't have another apk installed something that I need to have but it's one of those things that when you're installing stuff that's been ripped out of other roms you kind of have to get used to ok so back to the home screen a couple things you'll notice is I've got these little grippies over here on the side and they really don't look like the traditional Android grips over on the the sides of the screen can you see those let me see if we can zoom in a little bit just this little gray bar area here and then another one right here so let me show you what those do because it's really kind of cool first of all let's go over to the side and this has three different options pictures music and videos and you've got kind of a little carousel scroller here to show you all of the folders that you have pictures inside that's kind of neat let's go over to music and it's just just add it to your music and then last as your videos so there's my daughter playing the piano and they're all in this nice carousel tap this little arrow which I believe is pointing the wrong way but that's just me and it will take you back to the home screen use the grippy on the other side which after I force closed it got rid of all my history I had all this setups for you so you're gonna have to bear with me as I go in and do some stuff so let's go into the browser app and you'll notice it had kind of a neat fly-in effect I really really like that it's not your typical just kind of zoom pop whatever you want to call it that that expands your app to fill fullscreen it's kind of an elect elastic effect so let's launch something else and I'll show you it also does that same minimizing and it minimizes over here which we'll get to so let's now go into feeder again that animation will go back home and let's go into the phone dialer so here's my dialer so back home same animation and let's do one more for good measure let's see I wanted to do that up and down scrolling to the side to side so it's going to take a little bit used to so there's the market and we'll go back now you'll notice all of these have kind of been minimizing off to the side over here and now I've got that grippy so let's open it up and look and sure enough I now have a history carousel of the apps that I've just recently run the browser feeder the phone dialer and the market if I tap it again it takes me right back into it really kind of a cool UI it looks really neat I wish we could do more stuff with with customizing it but maybe one of you guys out there reading or watching this video can get in there and figure out why it's doing that force close and help the others of us to fix it I certainly hope we can but hey you know it's really cool what acer's done here the only things that I could recommend for them in the future would be to put that notification bar back or give us some way to put it back and maybe you can through the settings that we can't get to because it was forced closing I just don't know but overall very cool very impressive it's Android but it's a sir it looks very sleek and but don't take my word for it what do you think leave comments down underneath the video of course if you like seeing this kind of stuff give it a thumbs up if you haven't already subscribed to the pocket now video Channel now is the time to do that and as always for pocket now I'm Joe Levi