17
Oct
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[Hunt For The Best Dialer, Part 6] Angel Dialer Offers An Alternative To The Stock Dialer For Those Who Like Simplistic, Pre-Defined Interfaces

Posted by in App Reviews, Applications, Hunt For The Best Dialer

Joining the vast crowd of dialer replacements in the Android Market, our hunt has brought us to Angel Dialer, an uncomplicated app that effectively replaces the stock Android dialer, but which may have compromised necessary functionality for a no-frills implementation.

At A Glance

While Angel Dialer takes a concerted stance against superfluous features, its simplicity is not always a plus. While its features work, and it provides the same basic functionality we've seen before, it is lacking a few things that would take it up a level, and make it a decent dialer replacement. As it stands, I wouldn't say it's in the running for my day-to-day dialer app, but it does have some positive points.

15
Oct
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[New App] Want Your Android Launcher To Look Like iOS? There's Now An App For That - Espier Launcher

Posted by in Applications, News

I'm not sure I would personally ever do that (wait, I'm sure - I'm shrugging just thinking about it), but let's say that you really love the look and feel of the the iOS desktop UI found on Apple's iPhone, with the launchpad, rounded corners, folders, trembling icons with little X's, etc. However, you also love the flexibility that Android offers. Can both be combined? The answer, as it turns out, is yes - Espier Launcher, which just landed in the Android Market (probably immediately infringing on a few dozen Apple patents).

The app is openly advertising its similarity to the iPhone desktop layout, icons, and functionality - if it ever picks up, I give it a few days on the Market before Apple wheels in the big guns lawyers.

05
Oct
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[Hunt For The Best Dialer, Part 5] DW Contacts & Phone & Dialer: A Little Cluttered, But A Powerful Option Nonetheless

Posted by in App Reviews, Applications, Hunt For The Best Dialer

From developer DWP, DW Contacts & Phone & Dialer (hereafter referred to as DW Contacts) makes our fifth entry in the hunt for the best dialer, combining a slew of features into one versatile (if a little clumsy) interface.

At A Glance

The first thing I notice about most apps is their visual design. DW Contacts was no different in this regard, but that isn't necessarily a good thing. DW doesn't offer anything really new in the design department, except for the ability to change the colors, transparency, and font size of pretty much any element of the app. This is nice, but nowhere near as flexible as the theming we've seen with certain other dialers.

19
Sep
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[Hunt For The Best Dialer, Part 3] Dialer One Packs Your Favorite Phone Features Into One Beautiful, Versatile Screen

Posted by in App Reviews, Applications, Hunt For The Best Dialer
Last Updated: September 23rd, 2011

Next in our series of dialer reviews is a very popular replacement dialer called simply Dialer One, developed by Yermek Zhumagulov and available from the Android Market for free. It has a slick design with multiple theming options, and combines just about all the features you need into one screen, which seriously cuts down on time spent navigating around to find what you want.

At A Glance

I have a habit of talking a lot about the design of an app, but in this case there isn't much to say. The design of Dialer One is great. It's simple, clean, and interchangeable, including a black, white, gray, and 'wallpaper' theme (which makes the interface transparent, showing your own wallpaper behind it).

14
Sep
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[Hunt For The Best Dialer, Part 2] Touchpal Dialer Brings Together Useful Features And Subtle Design

Posted by in App Reviews, Applications, Hunt For The Best Dialer

Next in our hunt for the best replacement dialer app is Touchpal from the developers at CooTek, the same team behind Touchpal Keyboard and Search.

CooTek's dialer is extremely well-designed, unassuming, and easy to use. It combines most of the features I want in a dialer but doesn't attempt to overdo things with too many superfluous or redundant functions. Best of all, the dialer is totally free.

At A Glance

Immediately after installing Touchpal, I was impressed. The design is clean, simple, and unassuming. It combines the familiar tabbed browsing of Android's stock dialer with a dialpad/call log screen reminiscent of HTC's Sense dialer, in a way taking the best aspects of both and combining them into a simple, lightweight app.

12
Sep
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[Hunt For The Best Dialer, Part 1] RocketDial Makes Improvements Over Stock, But Still Overshadowed By Bugs

Posted by in App Reviews, Hunt For The Best Dialer

With all the things that Android phones are capable of, it's easy to neglect the feature of the device that actually makes it worth carrying around instead of a tablet or laptop: the dialer.

Android's native dialer is super fast, but pretty basic. It works alright, but just doesn't add that extra something that brings making a phone call up to par with the rest of the things your phone can do. That's why we've decided to set out on the hunt for the best dialer. That is, the best dialer to replace the one that comes preinstalled on your phone.

07
Dec
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Launcher Pro v0.8.2 Brings Virtual Homescreen Looping, Recent Apps Dock Popup

Posted by in Applications, News

Launcher Pro, one of the greatest Android homescreen replacements (Sense who?), received an update today with 2 excellent new features: virtual homescreen looping and a Recent Apps dock popup.

The virtual looping feature enables scrolling past the leftmost or rightmost homescreens with a quick bounce-to-the-opposite-end effect. While Fede implemented it this way instead of an endless scroll for technical reasons, I think it's visually a lot better and clearer, as you will still know when you've reached the end and won't feel lost in your own homescreen forest.

Joining SMS, missed calls, and bookmarks, the 2nd feature is a new swipe gesture dock popup called Recent Apps.

27
Oct
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Fancy Widget For Android Finally Returns After Cease & Desist From HTC And Months Of Disappearance

Posted by in Applications, HTC, News

If there is one unique thing the HTC Sense UI brings to the table, it's definitely the clock/date/calendar widget. You know the one I'm talking about:

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HTC most certainly brought the sexy, and those of us running alternate launchers (Launcher Pro, ADW, etc) or using phones without Sense, were getting kind of jealous. The solution came in the form of an app called Fancy Widget which mimicked the Sense widget almost to a tee, while adding a host of handy options:

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Unsuprisingly, Fancy Widget got very popular, and HTC ended up sending Android Does, the widget's developer, a cease and desist order.

26
Oct
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Slick UI Wants To Be The Next Game Changer In Android UIs, Looks Plenty Original

Posted by in Applications, News, Videos

One of the reasons I love Android is because you can customize the heck out of your experience. Replacing the stock launcher with Launcher Pro is pretty much the first thing I do now when I get a new phone because of the innovations a hard-working, smart, and dedicated engineer (Fede) can bring to the table.

However, Launcher Pro is not too much different from the stock UI, outside of tweaks and other little but important things - same goes for ADW and other home replacements. Because of that, I get especially excited when I see some outside the box thinking (remember Mozilla's Seabird and the TAT's Horizon concepts, for example?)

The visionaries behind Slick UI are some of those outside the box thinkers that I am so fond of - they're thinking of a UI nobody's ever done before, and I'm very much interested in seeing this concept go to something real we can all install on our phones.

23
Sep
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SwiftKey Keyboard, One Of Android's Best Keyboards, Sheds Beta Status, Goes Premium; On Sale For $0.99 Until September 30th, $3.99 After

Posted by in Applications, News

SwiftKey Keyboard has been in beta ever since its introduction to the Android Market a few months ago. Having tried Swype, I also jumped on SwiftKey to give it a fair shot and ended up sticking with it. Yes, it was that good.

SwiftKey is different from other keyboards because it uses predictive recognition based on both tons of statistical information and your own typing habits. In fact, you can make whole sentences without typing a single key and just picking default suggestions.

SwiftKey-reads-mind 

Every company needs to make money at some point, and so today, having shed the beta status, SwiftKey is turning into a paid app.

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