[Galaxy Tab 10.1 Themes and Apps] len_smith:
Hi,

I decided to take advantage of the discounted price for the Chameleon Launcher and see how it works on my GT-7510. After downloading it and playing with it for about 10 minutes, I returned it. The approach the developers have taken has a great deal of promise. In fairness, their approach is different from other launchers and the paradigm shift could create a negative initial bias in the user simply because it's different. Still though, I felt that other launchers offered more flexibility, which is ultimately why I chose to return the product.

Nevertheless, I feel that their approach has potential, especially for niche markets such as healthcare or public safety , where the launcher's "tile" approach to widgets could allow for the development and deployment of solution-specific widgets. The "tile" based approach of the launcher is somewhat like what is seen on Microsoft's Windows 8 "Metro UI." I would encourage the developers to continue to work on the product and be open to the comments of the user community.

The Pros

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1. The ability to set home screens that are active based on certain criteria, such as location and/or time of day. In and of itself, this is huge and it's something that developers of other launchers should seriously consider.

2. The application dock is tied to a particular home screen. This is nice when you want your selection of application on the dock to suited for work or for gaming. Again, other launchers should take note of this feature.

The Cons

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1. The discounted cost of $3.99 is probably a more appropriate price point versus the original retail price. The launcher simply isn't delivering value that would justify anything beyond $5.00, especially considering the competition.

2. Performance lags when compared to other browsers. I only used the launcher for about 10 minutes and it may need some time to "settle in," but I felt like it was a bit slower than other launchers, even after a reboot of the device. This was really evident when configuring a new widget, such as the email widget.

3. The full benefit of the launcher comes when you use widgets supplied with the launcher. That is a pro and a con. For V1.1.4, there is a handful of basic widgets tuned for the launcher. (Email, FB, Twitter, Calendar, News, Clock, Weather, Instagram, YouTube, Switches, etc.). The con here is that the selection of widgets is limited and I can't see why other third-party widget developers would be motivated to do the work to support this new format. This would leave a user dependent on the folks from Chameleon to develop new widgets for the launcher.

4. You can add other stock and aftermarket widgets, but not all work well with the launcher and you are stuck with the default widget size as there is no option to resize.

5. The Email widget only displays unread mail. There is no option to select other filters.

6. Visual overload. If you like a little "white space" on the home screen, you may find that Chameleon visually overloaded. There is simply way too much going on visually, with information competing for your attention. Yes, you can limit the number of widgets on a screen, but when you do that you lose some of the benefit that the launcher intends to offer. All widgets share the same background, making it hard to differentiate between widgets. It would be nice if a given widget could be configured with a custom background and/or the ability to configure a more pronounced border between widgets.

7. You cannot configure the number of available "tiles" by increasing the available rows and columns as you can in other launchers. Allowing this would give the user increased flexibility on the placement and size of the widgets.