My experiences with the Motorola Xoom + More
Posts tagged home screen
Home Screen Capture for July
09 months ago
by Charles
in Customizing
I’ve changed a few things since my last home screen capture.
Along the top you’ll see the Weather Channel widget, Beautiful Widget (clock), a Widgetsoid switcher (turn on/off the Wifi, bluetooth, airplane mode, camera light for flashlight, and show battery level)
Next up are shortcuts to Facebook, Google+, and my Xmarks which synchonizes my Firefox bookmarks across all of my devices and computers. The music player widget is on the end of that row.
The third row has widgets for my personal email, work email, work/google calendar, and the Launcher Pro Friends widget for Twitter and Facebook feeds.
The next row is a series of Circlelauncher app (previous post link) groups to organize apps so much better. The icons are completely customizable. I purchased some icon packs for a couple US$ over the weekend and love them.
And the final row include the Verizon data widget, followed by Evernote. Evernote synchs across devices and desktop computers. I’ve got it installed on my laptop, iPhone 3gs, and the Xoom. Some cloud is great, but I’m not completely sold on going beyond some notes and Firefox bookmarks….yet. I’m not about to go music yet, because of ISP bandwidth caps.
Wallpaper Changer
09 months ago
I recently tired of the same old background image, then it occurred to me: surely someone has written a background image rotating app.
I found Wallpaper Changer and love it. It works pretty good. I uploaded a number images to my Xoom, configured the app and the background image rotates by itself every 30 minutes.
A Proper Screen Capture
01 year ago
(Update 3/14: To the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to take a screen capture on the Xoom without rooting the device and I have no intentions of doing that at this time. The only other option is to install the SDK, to perform the screen capture. A screen capture function built into Honeycomb or the UI would be an awesome add-on and could be seen as a free advertisement medium for the Xoom.)
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I spent a little time installing the Android SDK packages today and the end result was really worth it. I plan to dabble in development at some point, anyway.
This is the Home screen. There are two other screens available on the left and right sides, accessible by swiping in that direction.
Background image: I took this photo down the street at the lake during the snow/ice storm earlier this year.
You can easily pick out the Gmail widget now and it’s pointed to my Google Apps domain.
…in the column of widgets along the right hand side of the screen: The OS supplied Music widget, followed by Beautiful Widgets (weather via Accuweather,) and Widgetsoid (easy access to wifi, Bluetooth, brightness, GPS, & battery life)
Various other app shortcuts are scattered about.
The bar along the bottom include the Back button, Home Button, and an icon that displays able list of the last 5 apps that were used. This is important to make note of, because historically most buttons of this nature on mobile devices are real buttons. The only real buttons on the Xoom are the up/down volume buttons on the left side and the lock/power button on the back.
This is followed by Notifications (new email, Facebook, app downloads/installs, that type of thing.) appear next to the clock. Click the clock to display wifi/3G connectivity strength, battery percentage, an alternate way to switch Bluetooth, wifi, etc. on and off.
The Home Screen
01 year ago
by Charles
in Customizing
Screen captures are currently awkward, to put it lightly. After a brief amount of research, I believe that true screen captures can only be made after rooting the device. I have no intentions of rooting right now, so this will have to do for now. And yes, that’s my iPhone taking the snapshot 
I have a series of icons along the left hand side of the home screen:
Camera
Web Browser: Chrome-like
Settings: Preference settings for the device and OS
Amazon’s Shopping App
I can tell already that I’m going to love widgets. I have placed a gmail widget at the center of the screen. It is a completely scroll-able and click-able mini email app. Click a specific email and it opens the full email app. Click the little envelope icon in the right hand corner to compose an email.
To the right of the email widget is the calendar widget, which displays the current day. Google timed the, for lack of a better word, gmailification of Google Apps domains perfectly. Why? My Xoom is tied completely to my Google Apps domain account.
Below the email and calendar app is the Music player app. From here, there’s easy control of playing music. I currently have Symphony of Science playing!
I have a few more icons along the bottom row of the screen: Facebook, Android Market, Music, and GTalk. Speaking of GTalk, I’ll toss out there that we tried out Google Video Chat last night between my laptop’s built-in webcam and the Xoom. It was pretty darned cool!