We love Sense, we really do. There are days though, that Sense just doesn't work for us. The random restarts when coming back from the browser, or from YouTube... The slowly loading widgets when the need to refresh... The lack of customizing the active buttons at the bottom of the screen... These are all things that just keep Sense from being perfect. So, to start off our week, we installed the free home screen replacement called "Go Launcher EX".
Go Launcher EX, from the GO Launcher Dev Team, is an amazing little application. The setup is very quick and simple. Stock out of the box, we found 15 interchangeable icons located at the bottom of the screen. 5 of these were preset with standard items: Phone, People, Application Menu, Messages and Internet. With a quick swap, we changed these out to our favorites. We then added media programs to the next 5 blanks and social networking programs to the other 5 blanks. Overall, tweaking took just a few minutes.
The home screens were just as easy to customize and setup. With just a few long presses we had an amazing home experience. Except, once again, the Facebook widget seemed to leave us a bit sad, mainly due to the fact it didn't filter 'applications' from our Newsfeed, even when turned off in Facebook itself. Chalk one up for Launcher Pro and it's Facebook widget again...
The app drawer has something for everyone. The drawer offers the standard vertical layout from Android or the side to side 'feed' from programs like TouchWiz. Two great options for fans of either.
The extra bonus to Go Launcher EX is the amount of widgets that are available for use. Go has designed a few great ones that are free to download in the market. Facebook, Messages, Task Killer, Calendar, Gmail notification and Message notification were all active on our screen at one point. For the most part, we liked them all, except for those 'Farmville' notifications on our Facebook widget.
Overall, we give this a major thumbs up and since it's free, you should give it a shot as well. The program is available in the Market as are the free widget items. To enable this, you simply press your home button and select Go Launcher EX from the list. To make it your default screen (only do this after you've decided you want to use it full time) simply check the box at the bottom of the list that says, "Use by default for this action." before you select Go Launcher EX from the list.
If you decide to go back to Sense, you just enter your Application menu (Menu>Settings>Applications>Manage Applications>All>Go Launcher EX - and select Clear Defaults. This will get you back to choosing which app to use for your home screen at each button press. To remove Go Launcher, simply uninstall the app and it will revert back to Sense only. WARNING - Do Not Delete alternate launchers until you have cleared the defaults!
Go Launcher EX is free and available in the Android Market - https://market.android.com/details?id=com.gau.go.launcherex&feature=search_result
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