Gadgetory

hey guys Ashley would TechnoBuffalo here wanted to give you a little tour of my five favorite Android launchers so if you've ever been curious about rooting your phone but maybe our little bit reserved about it and are not sure if you want to actually do it you can try a custom launcher for your Android device that can customize the way that your phone looks and feels without having to go through the process of routing it won't give you as many options as rooting your phone and installing say CyanogenMod on it but it does give you a lot of customization options that are fantastic so let's take a look at my top 5 Android launchers I want to make a quick mention of the fact that any of these launchers may have the same features across them so for example this is action launcher Pro and we have a folder in our dock bar lots of feature that's pretty standard across launchers but if I mention it you can probably get something like this in different launchers that I mentioned what we're looking at here is action launcher Pro and their main features are they have three quick buttons here we have Google search this is a link to the Play Store which is kind of fantastic I always like having that right there for me and you can also go into some settings here now my favorite thing about the app drawer is it's actually not a drawer anymore it's just this quick swipe to the left and there are all of your apps you also have widgets available inside this same drawer making it really easy to customize your homescreen so right now I just have a really simple clock on the screen because I want to just show you the features of each launcher next up I'm going to go into something a little bit more robust this is ADW launcher so ADW launcher offers a few different customization options for you you can see our app drawer has been moved right into here and we have this beautiful sort of moving forward screen for all of our apps it's really lovely you can also set up and manage groups you can manage your app so if you want to uninstall something and we can also go into our atw settings one of the things that I really like about ADW launcher is if we were to go into our home screen here in long press we actually get a really quick ADW config so let's say we wanted to add more than one single home screen to our atw we can do that right here we can add it to left or to the right you can see we have many many screens happening if we want to get rid of the screen we can do that let's get rid of a couple of these and you can see you can also pin a screen to be your main home screen when you press the home button if we wanted to add widgets we just go over to add and we have launched or actions custom shortcuts new folders widgets and regular shortcuts so it's a really great way to customize your home screen next up we're going to take a look at Apex Launcher so here's Apex Launcher you can see it's a little bit different we have just a simple Google search bar we also have a bar here that is going to show us the status of our home screen so we have this lovely blue moving scroll here's our app drawer it's pretty standard reminds us a lot of stock Android you can go to downloaded so if there's anything that you've downloaded so if you only want to look at things you've downloaded and nothing that came pre-loaded on your device you can come right in here and we also have widgets available to us inside our app drawer now if we also wanted to go ahead and see what our app menu was we can do a lot of different things we can actually change the theme of this one so I've downloaded a couple of themes this neon pixels one we can actually choose icon skin and wallpapers so let's go ahead and apply that and now that we've done that you can see it's changed our wallpaper and we have these beautiful neon skinned app icons which is really cool and if they don't have their own icon it will just wrap it in a lovely little neon box there and then it will put the regular app icon inside it next up we're gonna look at Go launch or e.x a go launcher is one of the more popular app launchers in the Android store but one of the things that go launcher does is it makes your icons these beautiful sort of pillow box icons if we go into our app drawer we can actually see it's done it to all of our icons and we can also see what running right at the tip of our finger which is really fantastic I really enjoy that and we also have our settings down here so instead of having it up at the top of the screen we have it a little lower which can be a little bit cumbersome for some people if they're used to hitting the app drawer right at the bottom middle of their screen but there are plenty of options themes everything that you could possibly want you can see here's a bunch of different themes that they have available so lots of ways to customize with go launcher and lastly we have something that's a little bit different it's called smart launchers so here is smart launcher you can see it's very minimalistic there are no other home screens available to you and you have six icons that give you the ability to launch different applications so if we wanted to get rid of something like let's say we don't really use music a whole lot we can always trash it here but if we wanted to add something different we can always long press on the screen click on the ad and let's say well maybe okay we did want music we can choose which app we want it to launch by default so let's say we really love play music so now you can see it's added it to this lovely circle and there are also other options available to us if we wanted to utilize that something interesting that smart launcher does is it actually categorizes your apps so they have communications internet games media utility and settings and this is actually really quick so it's very responsive I really enjoy the way that they have set everything up but generally speaking very simple easy to use and certainly for the modern person who loves minimalist design on their phone so that is it for my favorite custom Android launcher as you can see I have quite a few of them installed on here I've got six including HTC Sense but I just want to remind you guys that a lot of these have free trials so you can go right into the Google Play Store try them out and if you like them you can buy the pro version or the paid version that will unlock additional features I know there are some like Nova Launcher that are very very popular out there and I'd love to hear your opinions on what you think is the best Android launcher thanks guys you