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Windows Phone 7 on an Android-Powered G1? Could it be?

2010-09-28
hey guys it's joe and most of you know me as the android guy from pocket now well that's really cool but as i've mentioned before i used to be a windows mobile guy now i'm an android guy but you know windows phone seven it's looking kind of neat so you think we can put Windows Phone 7 on I don't know a g1 let's go take a look all right first and foremost this is an actual t-mobile g1 it is running cyanogenmod but that shouldn't be necessary to to run this now before you get too excited no this is not windows phone 7 running on the g one it is however a fairly convincing user interface that kind of looks like Windows Phone 7 and might be enough to fool some of your friends and after all if you can't fool your friends what kind of a geek are you so let's see how we do this first and foremost you're going to need an android-powered phone second you're going to need something like launcher pro which I've shown you in the past that's an alternate launcher program it's available free in the marketplace but there's a trick and I'm going to have to come back to that in just a minute the next thing you're going to need also from the marketplace is something called a desktop visualizer now that's what lets you put in these cool shaped custom icons and that's really all these tiles are is just a custom widget sitting on the screen and the last thing that you're going to need is this icon pack now that's available from XDA developers and i'll give you the link in the article that accompanies this video so you can go out and grab that putting everything on here's a little bit tricky so let me show you what you need to do now first this is just an empty screen and you'll notice you can't scroll up and these aren't live tiles like Windows Phone 7 but you know we've got to give some wiggle room there so how do we get this set up let's go ahead and tap and hold anywhere on the screen and we're going to add a widget and this is where desktop visualizer again free in the marketplace comes into play you scroll down and i usually do desktop visualizer large just because i can do anything want with that this screen likes to have the three by one and the one by two but if you don't know which one you're going to plop just go ahead and choose large and you'll be fine we'll come in here we're going to select an icon this is the desktop visualizer interface will select an icon from a file and this is going to fire up the gallery so we can pick that icon it's a g1 so the gallery is going to take just a little bit longer than normal and I've got my icons right there on my SD card I'll open that up and let's i don't know let's do let's do photo since we're in the gallery right now so we tap on the photos icon and we're going to select an action to launch the application and in this case it's going to be the gallery app itself wait for the application list to load scroll down here to gallery well select that here's the first trick hey see this label we don't want it so just select it and backspace it out the reason we don't want that is it's already included in the graphic itself and having them both there is just kind of redundant but what that should do here in just a moment is show there's our photos tile now it looks just right on the screen but it's not we chose that large format and that was not entirely right you can see here it's actually a what's that at three by three so it's a little too big now that's where the trick came in if you want to be able to resize these which you really want to be able to do you're going to have to unlock watch your port out or launcherpro you're going to need to pay him I mean I know it's ironic that you have to pay developers for their apps but when you do that it unlocks the capability for you not only to add more widgets but also to resize existing widgets which is really really cool okay so you can see here I've been resizing this widget a little bit i'm going to go ahead and resize it to its final size if I can grab this little grippy and that's going to be this three by one to select it you hit the back button and there you've got your finished tile when we tap that it opens up into photo gallery just like you'd expect and it's a g1 so we have to be a little bit patient with the loading time of the gallery now let's put that on the page where we want it to go we're just going to tap and hold and if I don't accidentally drop it we can scroll between screens that one's all full so we're going to drop it right there now you can see I've got another one over here that I need to populate but before we do that let's take a look if you notice I've got a 1 by 4 widget I've got two 1 by 3 widgets a blank one space and then another space up here and this is the standard Google search bar and all I did was the same thing that you saw me do with that in fact let me show you here I don't have enough room on this screen so I'm gonna have to go to another screen and drop it on but I've got a three by one space so let's add that widget on and i know this is diverging a little bit from windows phone 7 but you know we want to keep some of our android functionality in there too so i'm going to select google search and that's the four by one search widget will search all four way one it's not going to fit so again launcherpro we tap and hold if i do that right we tap and hold and then we get our little grippy and we can simply resize it to three by one and then grab it and move it over to where we want it to go so we'll just drop it right up there at the top now again we've got that other one space so let me show you the other way to do it then you might be able to do this without the launcher pro paid version so we know that's a three by one widget so let's go ahead and try a three by one so we'll choose a desktop visualizer three by one widget and the process is the same select icon from image file and we're going to go right back this time let's do i don't know let's do email and it's got kind of a picture of rustic mailboxes which is kind of cool so there's our rustic mailboxes we select that next we're going to come down select the action to watch our application it populates the list and we're simply going to want to come down here now I use gmail you might use email or some other app we're going to remove the label say okay and then it'll take just a moment to populate that onto the screen now this works a lot faster on faster phones as you might expect let's move that over I didn't wait long enough there we there we go and we'll just drop that right there now I've got a fully functional screen where I can tap to launch tasks tab to launch mail maps music photos I've even got my news ticker down at the bottom got my beautiful widgets home screen smaller or whatever the name of that app is and then mail calendar Tex browser photos and phone all right there so it's not quite windows phone 7 on an android-powered phone but it sure does look like it and it's a really unique interface it's a nice way to organize your home screens into something that's a little unusual or uncommon and it's definitely going to spark some interest when you have people looking at it a little bit more more polished and refined in my opinion than the zune interface that I showed you before you can click right here to see that video so tell me what do you think leave a comment down below let me know II think and of course if you like doing stuff like this fooling your friends or customizing your interface with unique and novel ways I'd like to know about that too give me a thumbs up so that I know you want to keep watching these kind of videos and learning this kind of stuff on your android phone even your now your relics your g1 here give me a thumbs up subscribe to our video channel and head on over to pocketnow.com to see all the latest articles that we've got on android and even on Windows Phone 7 so for pocket now showing off the really cool not quite windows phone 7 interface on the g one i'm joe levi
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