Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hello everyone. So this is Go Launcher Next, it's currently on a 40% off deal
brings it down to around £6,normally it retails for about £10. Quite an expensive launcher
but they say this is the next generation. Now as you will know if you tune in
regularly, I'm a
big fan of the TSF Shell launcher
I think it does a fantastic job at giving you a new style of desktop, so,
really interested to see what Go have come up with here. So, this is the theme I've chosen to use.
There's lots and lots of themes available for this which is really nice.
Quite a lot of them are free and they're
quite easy to get hold of from the Play Store as well.
Now feature wise, the features that I've found
to be really really clever, for starters it has this
ability to move the launcher pad at the bottom, this desk dock
and just flick it to move between various states and you
can see there that's the carousel view for all of your home screens. You can just tap to go in or
flip around again and you get the various add buttons which allows you to add your widgets
wallpapers
and so on. And if you go into personality you can then customise the theme.
So there's a load of themes that they feature or you hit things to get some more, or
if you have themes installed, you simply tap the theme you want,
apply it,
and the theme shifts. You can see there, there's the new theme.
There's a lot here that feels like it's borrowing from a lot of other launchers that have done
one or two kind of advanced features
3D Shell Pro I think it was called
does this kind of effect very very well.
There's elements of TSF Shell coming through on some bits as well
in the way the icons are handled, but
overall it's a very very fluid
launcher.
Quite expensive though, that's my only kind of qualm I think with it, that
while it is a next generation launcher the features tend to be borrowing from lots of different
launchers to kind of create this new
environment.
But that said, it's not bad at all.
The addition of things like free widgets
and a lot of free themes I think makes it quite good value for money.
If they were trying a lot of the themes were being charged for,
for around £1.50 a go, I think I would
probably feel a little bit
hard done by having just bought the launcher
as well at nearly £6 or at £10 if you bought it full price.
But there is a lot to love here in the way it operates.
It is
incredibly fluid, it has to be said.
Settings wise, they've kind of incorporated
a lot of kind of
whizziness that you've come to expect, so if we
pop for instance pop into the settings menu
if I can remember where it's gone,
that one, there we go. So we get
this settings panel here
and then you've got preferences, and in here is all of your visual effects
how the actual engine is going to work, how the icons will be in the app drawer,
your dpi I think can also be scaled in one of these,
that might just be a rom dependent thing.
I think that's just rom dependent, my bad!
Yes, it's rom. But effectively, those are all of your options in there
and you can also go in and set personality, your wallpaper, your widgets,
add things to the home screen, edit,
everything basically, edit these
layouts so if you long press
you can pick one up and drop it wherever you want to like that.
This effect can actually be changed, there's a few different ones. this is kind of a carousel
effect I've
gone for the one position
this object is the actual flow so it kind of flows off round the screen.
They're just really different ways of making your phone look whizzy.
But it's done really really well.
The widgets that Go have launched for this are OK but they don't seem to
take on
the kind of theme
which is a bit of a shame.
Haven't worked out if there's a toggle for that anywhere.
And a lot of the themes tend to reskin all of the default icons as well which some people
like, some people don't. I'm
in the don't like camp because it just becomes more confusing every time I change my theme.
What does my Play Store icon look like with this theme?
But there's a lot to love here, it is quite an expensive launcher
but it's well made and
it's very very fluid on the Galaxy Note 2 one of the most fluid launchers I
think I've used. Slightly more responsive than the TSF Shell not quite as responsive as
something like Nova.launcher.
But no, it doesn't have anywhere near as much stuff going on here
from a
kind of screen drawing point of view. One thing I did find helped the launcher
performance quite a bit was going in and turning on the 2D hardware rendering
just seemed to make things kind of a little bit more fluid.
when my finger actually registers on the screen anyway. But yes, that is
the Go Launcher Next, or the Next Launcher by Go, whichever you want to look at it.
Up on Google Play now. It will cost you £6 during this 40% off deal
for the next couple of days and then it will be going up to full price which is £10.
Decide yourself whether you think that's good value for money.
I think it's just about good value for money at £6
£10, maybe wait for the next deal.