Now that Cupcake is released its not as big of a deal, but there have got to be some of you out there that want to have custom themes, different widgets, and/or a completely different home screen then what Android natively provides without rooting. Most people know about the programs in the market that make this possible but this is for those of you that don’t. The main ones are aHome, dxTop, and Open Home. And as the picture above demonstrates it’s easy to change between them and decide which one you like the most before setting it as default. Today we are going to look at all 3 light versions.

 


Each has plenty of themes and they all have very good variety, but say that you wanted an iPhone theme; one might have a better one then another. So if your primary reason to use an alternate home is themes then test them all out to find which home version skins the best in your opinion. I personally love how themes change the desktop but I don’t like how it changes the dock…like in Open Home’s default theme the above, it changes some of the icons and not others. To me, the cons outweigh the pros as themes go and I usually end up disabling themes.

 


Widgets aren’t quite as big of a deal now as the majority of G1 users have Cupcake but support for 3rd party widgets used to be one of the major selling points for alternate home screens. All 3 have support and all 3 have a good variety. aHome comes with a few custom widgets in its standard installation, shown above, weather, digital clock, and Google search.

 

 

aHome


aHome supports up to ten individual home screens. You press the magnifying glass to bring up the dock with all of your installed programs; you click on the speedometer on the right side of the screen to pull up the list of all your currently running programs. The thing that I found the most interesting with aHome was the way that it handled rotation as shown above. Unlike how the main home screen moves all the icons to accommodate the changed orientation aHome keeps them where they are and just rotates them. I haven’t’ found any bugs running on Cupcake.

 

 

dxTop


Doing this review I’ve discovered that I really just don’t like dxTop. It has 4 individual home screens in a diamond configuration, it’s really hard to get used to and I’m discovering that it’s even harder to describe. The dock on the right is actively running programs and the dock on the left is your regular full list. It has support for themes and widgets but doesn’t come installed with any. It has a nice ability to change the dock icon colors, and system fonts. I haven’t found any bugs running on Cupcake.

 

 

Open Home


Open Home opens with a glassy custom theme, it’s nice but like I said above it only changes some. There is a magnifying glass on the left, if you click that and have the Google search widget it goes to that and opens up an included on screen keyboard, which doesn’t require Cupcake, now if you don’t have the Google search widget it automatically searches through your contacts also with the included VK. On the right is a star when you pull it to the left it includes a dock that you can place icons on, there’s visually room for 3 but you can place more and then drag left and right to get to them.

 

Conclusion

 

It’s a wash between aHome and Open Home, and if you can get past the diamond formation of dxTop then that too. They’re all good, they all include themes, widgets and different ways to get around. But for me, I like to stick with the original. It’s a whole new world to enjoy, have fun.

 

Full Version prices as of 6/2/09

aHome: $4.99

dxTop: $2.99

Open Home: $3.99

 

Joshua Graham




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