Widgets, homescreens and live wallpaper explained
If your journey with smartphones started with an iPhone or one of RIM’s BlackBerry devices, you’ve probably never been introduced to the multiple homescreen or a live widget.
Currently specific to Android, a homescreen is a screen that you can place whatever you want on, while widgets are tiny programs that show small bursts of data on a homescreen.
Most Android handsets can take up to seven homescreens, but having between two and five makes it easier to look through your information.
A homescreen can support lots of things, including shortcuts for applications, or tiny widgets designed to let you control your music, check the weather, see how many downloads you have left for the month, or quickly look at any new emails that may have come in.
Apple’s iPhone doesn’t support this style of tiny program, instead showing you just a simple menu with shortcuts to every app. In Android, you can find these shortcuts to every app by hitting the “applications” icon.
One other Android specific thing is “live wallpaper” which can literally be interpreted as animated backgrounds.
It’s technically what happens when a widget meets a wallpaper, providing interactive and flashy backgrounds that can do things such as show you a clock without a widget or change to show the weather in an animated way.
While live wallpapers are pretty cool, they also have the downside of reducing battery life, so that’s something to be aware of.
Keeping the iPhone look
Every manufacturer of Android phones has a different look to it, and while you may want a bigger screen, it’s entirely possible that you may not want to change the way you use your phone.
No worries. There’s a solution for that.
Android supports a form of skinning called “homescreen replacement” which not only changes the way the widgetised homescreens look, but can also make the phone take on the look of a different device altogether.
Like the Apple iPhone.
Espier is one such application to make this transformation a reality, changing the homescreen into the layout of the iPhone, complete with a search screen all the way to the left, support for folders, and softened square (they called it a “squircle”) app icons in an easy to read menu.
Espier even supports one widgetised screen right before the search screen, so if you want to use a couple of cool widgets – like a small music player, email reader, and calendar – you can do this and still retain the look of the iPhone.
I assume because of DRM, any videos bought from iTunes also won’t work on an Android phone? Does Android support the AAC codec for DRM free music files?Â
widgets are what makes androids better, similarly live tiles on a windows phone – giving you info without the need to start an app – why would you get rid of it to have the cluttered look of an iphone.
For that matter a similar article for windows phone would be good – the ability to pin a page from a onenote notebook on skydrive right to the main screen of your phone is VERY useful
I have both. It’s irrelevant which one is used for the most part. There is a big difference in Hardware QUALITY and after sales support.
If I want to watch videos, it’s on a larger screen device, not a phone.
simply jailbreak your apple device for nothing and you can download all the apps free-gee you need a brain to figure this out!