Tuesday, August 3, 2010

5 Things I Love About LauncherPro for Android

It has been a personal bone of contention that a lot of the reviews I have read have had less than complimentary things to say about Touchwiz 3.0. TW3 in my opinion is a perfectly good launcher for the normal smartphone user. I call the normal user 'the type of person who makes little to no adjustment to the aesthetics of the interface of their smartphone'. They receive their phone, fire it up, and go. No tweaks, minor and certainly not major, and they are perfectly content with that. That is not me! Whether I like the launcher or not, I am going to play around with and tweak the UI to something that I like.

Enter LauncherPro.

Currently I am using the free version of the application on my Samsung Vibrant. The paid version, which cost $2.99 via PayPal, adds some very nice looking widgets. I would be  more than happy to help the developer of the application Federico Carnales by purchasing, but I haven't used PayPal since my days of football card collecting. I wish the option to pay via Google Pay was available.

Now on to the list:


  1. LauncherPro zips through everything. Swiping through home screens, loading preferences, or navigating the scrollable shortcut dock (I'll explain it further later.)
  2. LauncherPro 'cooperates' well with Android 2.1 and specifically Samsung's tweaked UI. It leaves all other other options that you would usually have, and just adds its functionality.
  3. The scrollable shortcut dock is an absolute stroke of genius and the gem of the application. It is a mini shortcut icon height, side scrollable bar that can house icons and save your home screens for larger, real estate hogging widgets.
  4. It is highly customizable. Everything is tweak able (yes!!!). From the ability to back up your setup, auto-rotation on the home screen,  a couple high quality wallpapers, (a small feature but favorite of mine) the ability to hide the notification bar, and many more options.
  5. Finally and quite simply, the obvious care and attention to detail that was put into the application. 
If I could ask for anything extra it would oddly be to make it easier to purchase the application. I'm sure re-establishing my PayPal would be painless, but with a robust payment system in place it seems weird when asked to pay by a different method.

LauncherPro is a first rate launcher application with all of the bells and whistles. Do yourself a favor install it and tweak to your hearts content.

-James-


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