Editor’s Note: Seye Kuyinu is a Senior Developer at Nysteria Solutions, a web development firm whose target clients are the big financial institutions. He has a keen interest in User Experience design(UX) and RIA(Rich Internet Applications). This post first appeared on Seye Kuyinu’s blog. You can follow him on twitter at @seye.
I recently downloaded Cover Screen. This was after the many months of anticipation, registering for beta testing. According to CNET, Cover brings a number of features to Android phones: it picks commonly used apps on your lock screen, changing them according to your location and time of day based on your usage patterns for work, home, or in between.
It lets you slide the app icons partway over for a quick peek at them or flick them all the way over to launch them. And it offers a new multitasking option: a long press on the right of Android’s status bar will produce a drop-down list of your most commonly used items. After downloading it, I was quite pleased at how it worked …as advertized.
But then with an HTC One, I think its totally useless. You see, with the settings of my HTC One, I only have to set my most used applications on the home screen folder, swiping up even at lock screen. Also, while listening to music on Spotify or with the native music app, without Cover, you can change tracks, pause etc.
With Cover, you lose all that. It’s been about 48hours now it hasn’t identified my work and my house yet to change the cover screen. Also on the advert, swiping down from the top right to multi-task didn’t really work for me. Doing that on an HTC One will bring down HTC Sense5’s settings.
To be honest, with the HTC One’s folder system at the bottom border, you can easily categorize your most used apps and get to them when you need to. Cover is really cool though. The most important facility I see useful is how you can control your ring tone when you are home or at work etc.
