Solo Launcher

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Whether it’s about customizing your phones overall appearance or about making it more cleaner and user friendly. The fight for a good launcher isn’t going to be easy anymore. Churning out the top performance from your Android device largely depends on the launcher your phone uses. Most of the fancy launchers and stock launchers out there in market are battery hogs fighting for precious ram and processing power even when your phone stays in the idle State. So how did Solo launcher perform in this review against popular launchers like Nova, GO, Sense, and Apex.

Solo Launcher is a slim and highly stripped down launcher performing butter smooth despite adding a dozen of widget and besides that it gives you ample room for customization with themes, widgets and icon packs that come with the launcher and more can be downloaded from the play store. We personally liked the handpicked wallpapers available with each theme and the way they go hand in hand with their huge icon sets. Another great functionality is the ability to change icons for any app, be it matching your preferences, keeping some apps private or even prank your friends who drain all your battery juice gaming on for hours. Besides these cool tricks you also have option to hide apps from launcher. You no more need to download additional tweaks for having your unread count for Gmail, messages Samsung mail, K-9 mail and Kalten mails because the launcher has it built right in it, giving you bug free unread counts for all essential apps.

PERSONALIZED APPEARANCE WITH FULL SET OF CUSTOMIZATIONS:

Solo Launcher gives a full set of appearance customization with colors, shadows, text size etc for dock, notification bar and app icons on home screen and drawer. Choose the grid size, icon size and the transition effects with everything else you have known about them earlier. The app drawer can now have custom groups which have always been limited to apps and widgets. So you can have your office apps on one screen of drawer, games on other and so on in addition to folders that have customizable previews to match your taste. By selecting app views, you can access apps with different sorting attributes like , recently used apps, newly downloaded, frequently used or stick to customized grouping.  With Solo launcher you perfectly manage your google service, choose play store auto shortcut addition feature and to which page the shortcuts gets added automatically. So you don’t end up finding your recently installed apps and associated shortcuts.

FASTER SEARCH:

Planning to cut down on time spent searching apps and actions, the Solo’s search bar which can be used instead of Google search bar but without compromising on power of search with additional quick actions like searching contact and directly messaging them or calling them from search bar. You can also use custom swipe patterns to trigger apps and actions by simply swiping on the home screen.

SOLO WIDGETS:

The widgets look cleaner and can be resized to custom sizes that are not possible on may stock launchers and due to app limitations which need a premium upgrade before unlocking additional sized widgets . There are some sweet widgets like our personal favorite – the memory cleaner that cleans out unused background processes with single tap without having to run dedicated apps for it. The weather widget too has a clean look and goes hand in hand with almost every wallpaper you can think off.

IMPROVED PERFORMANCE AND LIGHT:

The memory hogging background processes and ever expanding list of apps leave you at the mercy of app launchers when playing a game with heavy 3D rendering. We tested out Tab3 8.0 which is not one of the best at gaming yet Solo launcher gave our gaming sessions enough room to run lag free. We tested GTA,  Gangster — and the results were quite impressive.

ROUND OFF:

Solo launcher gives your device a revamped the look. Not just did it give back the tablet feel on our galaxy tab which was lost on its Samsung’s stock launcher but also gave the Nexus 5 a fully featured yet light weight launcher for daily use. Moreover we tested it over budget phones (low end devices single core <1GB RAM) and the results were an outstanding performance , smoother scrolling and lag free app drawer animations without the compromise of battery.

We recommend SOLO launcher to users of both worlds, considering the simplistic yet elegant feel, packed full of features and customizations.

Solo Launcher

Tweet Tweet Whether it’s about customizing your phones overall appearance or about making it more cleaner and user friendly. The fight for a good launcher isn’t going to be easy anymore. Churning out the top performance from your Android device largely depends on the launcher your phone uses. Most of the fancy launchers and stock …

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This Android app review was performed on HTC One X running Android 4.0.3

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