Microsoft made a strong come back and nailed it in the face of other competitors in the Smartphones market when it came up with its Windows Phone 7 OS just about a year back. Since its launch, there has been all praises for its stunning interface and is rightly so.Windows Phone 7 is almost everything anyone could’ve dreamed of in a phone, let alone a Microsoft phone. It changes everything – The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. Instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before. It even makes the iPhone’s interface look ordinary.
Without going much deep into it as it has already been talked about much, lets get to the bottom line – How it experience such a stupendous UI on other mobile devices? Here, we are talking about Android mobile dives in particular. Soon after the launch of Windows Phone 7 Metro UI for iPhone, XDA-Developers forum member moky2008 decided to create one for Android phones as well and it is good. It basically gives you both the Metro style home screen with tiles as well as the alphabetically organized app list.
WP7 Android Launcher Overview :
One will find the scrolling experience to be real smooth and the included sketchy icons for system apps look pretty attractive. Few differences from the UI of Windows Phone 7 are as follows:-
- The tiles aren’t live and serve as mere static shortcuts to the apps.
- You can’t have large, rectangular tiles.
- Wiping sideways to bring up the app list doesn’t work and you have to tap on the arrow button on the top-right to show it.
- there is a landscape mode support including the compatibility with accelerometer auto-rotation which is an add-on.
WP7 Android Launcher Features :
- Tiles can be pinned to the home screen from the apps list by tapping and holding on any app in the list and selecting ‘Pin Tile’. You also get the handy option of uninstalling the app in that menu. Once pinned to the home screen, you can tap and hold on any tile and you will be able to unpin it or move it to another location. The procedure is quite different from that on WP7 as it  requires you to specifically select the menu option for each tile by tapping and holding on it, and once you have tapped ‘Move Tile’, you then have to tap and hold on another tile and select ‘Move here’. The process has to be repeated for all the tiles that you want to move.
- choose the color for the tiles : the ‘Change theme’ option allows you to simply choose the color for the tiles. While you have a color selection dial allowing you to choose from a vast range of colors, you can’t specify the exact color of your choice and most of the colors you can choose from are too bright. However, the choice available is far greater than that in Windows Phone 7, which only allows you to change to one of the few pre-defined colors. The ‘Reset theme’ option just allows you to switch back to the stock blue color for the tiles at any time.
- unlike Windows Phone 7 that only allows you to use either a plain white or a plain black background and gives you no option to choose a custom one, you can either choose an opaque, black background or set a wallpaper of your choice.
- the apps icons : this option enables you to decide whether to use the bundled sketchy icons for some Android system apps or stick with the default icons – whichever suits your taste.
Its true that it cant satisfy our bellies to the core and there’s always a room for improvement –
- A full-color palette for tile color selection,
- the option to select custom icons of your choice for the tiles,
- Support for large rectangular tiles
- Live tiles would be awesome,
- the option to choose the font color preferably for both the home screen and the apps list(but at least for the apps list would fix the visibility problem with custom wallpapers.)
We know that, its easier said than done as implementing all of the above is a herculean task but as they say “nothing is impossible”. So, just in case you envy the Metro layout of Windows Phone 7 devices and want your Android phone to have the same look when it comes to the launcher, Download WP7 Android Launcher here.
Note : To request features, seek help or leave your feedback, you can contact the developer of the launcher at the XDA-Developers forum thread.
You must log in to post a comment.