I am very excited to buy this Chameleon Launcher and get it installed to customize my Android tablet. Since long was looking for this to get an custom widgetised home screen experience. Here is my personal experience of this Android Tablet Chameleon Launcher which is gonna come to your Android Phones soon.
I always wanted to customize either my Android Tablet or smartphone and always look for various applications/launchers which are in light weight and which is totally user-friendly. Was keeping an eye on Chameleon Launcher since when its get launched and was observing how it got improved version by version and when I recently opened their website, I found $3.99 as an Holiday offer price which was actually available at $10 so couldn’t stop myself to immediately grab this cool launcher.
Let me give a basic info and available features about this Launcher: Chameleon Launcher is to customize your Android tablet home screen designed to fit your lifestyle, which lets you create multiple home screens with your own widgetized layout and apps. You can have a look at some of the widgets or create/build your own widgets with their custom API, you can get more info at next generation of widgets.
Chameleon Widgets will give you a great experience in terms of readability and their customized presentation of the content and yes without any clutter. I am sure most of the Android Tablet users might not be happy with the default widgets available by app providers as they try to have their own look and feel for their widgets, so if you places widgets from different app providers then you may site different color schemes and various fixed sizes of widgets where customization is very less. In this case of Chameleon custom widgets works like a charm, you can have consistency all across various widgets and are built with HTML5.
Chameleon Launcher comes with the following popular and most used widgets as default to customize your home screen – Calendar, Facebook, Gmail, Google+, Instagram, RSS News Reader, Switches, Time, Twitter, Weather, YouTube and you can even add Native Widgets, last but not least you can also create your own widgets with Make a Widget facility. And all the widgets are transparent and can fit in any of the backgrounds, this launchers provides some cool and eye catchy wallpapers to get a great user experience. From The Nexus 7 to Motorola Xoom, Chameleon Launcher was specifically designed to work beautifully on tablets. And yes home launcher is responsive and the transition is very smooth when we shift from portrait to landscape or landscape to portrait mode.
My overall experience with this Chameleon Launcher was great and was expecting the following customization options:
- Typography – option to choose at least 5 good custom fonts for headings or content etc. and able to add more fonts would be a great option or provide Google Web Fonts library to choose :)
- Once the tablet is switched of and switched on back – I see blank widgets, instead of that you would have cached the earlier content and display it as dafault content. Because after I switch on the tablet someone felt that something is broken in tablet or was not working properly etc.
- Some minor bug with Twitter widget – after I click on refresh, nothing happens – once done with refresh and I click on edit icon the updates are displayed.
- Would have been great if there is a widget which could display all the social activity in one widget? Like combining, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ etc. all in one widget – a kind of social stream?
- Right now the display is a mix of text and thumbnails etc. Can the widgets be like Flipboard? Text with background or related images covering the widget width?
And here is an hands-on review of Chameleon Launcher v1.0
Will keep updating this list as and when I came across some ideas to improve this further – hope that helps the team :)
