Home Screen Replacements [Impressions]

Have tried out all the home screen replacements on the market so far. At this point in time nothing had seemed useful/robust enough for me to replace the standard home screen. Main problems being the fact that they are still in the early stages of development and changing often with updates. No point in arranging all my icons and folders nicely just to find out that a new update breaks it/makes it redundant!

So far the apps released are:

• aHome
• dxTop
• Sweeter Home
• Open Home

I would say that aHome is probably the most polished so far, not to say that it has the most potential though. The main reason I got excited about these apps was the addition of new widgets to the home screen. The question has to be asked though: why do we need a home replacement to have new widgets? Google should open up the API for widgets to be developed for the standard home screen.

Sweeter Home adds the most new functionality and shows the promise for the future. Features include deeper customisation than the rest and the ability to add things such as last messages received and contacts to the home screen (amongst other things). Too cluttered for me at the moment though.

aHome seems to have the most widgets available at the moment, a weather widget is extremely useful (seems to be broken at the moment though), a call log widget is also on the market and there is a battery status one available too. Like I say, this is probably the most polished but does not add a huge amount more than the original home, also it lost all my desktop layout when I upgraded!

Open Home has some nice themes available which change the clock and dock also, although the free version has some unsightly text overlaid alerting that it is 'Open Home - Lite'.

If you must change your home screen right now, aHome would be my recommendation. However I personally will be waiting until they become more developed or until we have native widgets on the original home screen.

La Tour Eiffel [Review]

La Tour Eiffel is a free app on the Android Market which automatically updates your wallpaper every 30 minutes from a live webcam at the Eiffel Tower. I have happily been using it for the last few weeks without a single problem and they have just released a nice update so I thought I would write a review of it. The update now adds an additional 10 webcams to choose from, which all update every thirty minutes.

The extras cams are:

• Penguins in Antarctica
• Basilica di S.Pietro
• Downtown Montreal
• St Louis
• Space Needle
• View from Sears Tower
• Lake Arrowhead
• Statue of Liberty
• The Earth (Europe)
• The Earth (America)

If like me you are always changing your wallpaper to keep it fresh then this comes highly recommended. The Eiffel Tower itself really is a great wallpaper as it looks outstanding at many different times of the day and they often add additional lights on special occasions! Since the latest update I have now settled with The Earth from space for a while, the lighting of the planet from the sun changes as the day progresses.

Doom for Android

Last night a port of Id Software's extremely popular Doom first person shooter was released onto the Android Market. It seems like the devs are serious about updates as a new version 1.01 was released today.

First impressions are excellent aside from it being pretty difficult to set up the controls. Looks like the devs weren't aware that the G1 doesn't have arrow keys! The framerate is superb and everything was fully playable for me once I configured the keys. Well worth the download.

First major addition needed is proper vertical sync as there is a fair amount of screen tearing when moving quickly. There is also no sound as yet. After that anything else will be a bonus. Wifi deathmatch anyone?

It is widely expected that hot on the heels of this port a version of Quake will be released on the Market very soon, following Android and Me's second bounty competition offering donated cash to the first dev to port it. The first bounty they offered saw the development of Torrent Droid which I have yet to try.