This is a launcher for Android by Samsung.  There’s a freebie version, and a paid version.

It works a little differently to the typical Android launcher, which usually has an app drawer plus some number of home screens on which one places app icons, shortcuts, and widgets.

Instead, Pure Breeze gives you its main app view, which is a set of categories.  An app can be in multiple categories (e.g., you might put ChompSMS in “Comms” and “Favorites”).  The categories are displayed at the bottom of the screen as a scrollable set of colour-coded folder icons.

When you press the home key on your device, up pops the “kite”.

The kite is roughly analogous to the typical home screen, but it can hold only widgets and app icons.  And it scrolls vertically, rather than the more usual horizontally.  It’s a single screen which can scroll as far as it needs to, on which you place icons and widgets.

If you’re already on the kite when you press home, you go back to whatever you last had up.  This makes it pretty easy to flip between an application and the kite, so you can interact with or look at a widget without interrupting your workflow.

It’s pretty neat, so long as you’re happy with this arrangement.

My main complaint is that it seems a bit buggy.  I’m running it on a HTC Desire with Oxygen ROM, and the kite routinely complains “Insufficient resources to add tile” when I try to add an additional widget.  As all I have on there right now is a 4x1 Beautiful Widgets clock/weather and a 4x2 Pure Calendar widget plus some app icons, this seems a little unreasonable.

Adding an app icon to the kite (by dragging it from the app drawer to the top-right corner of the screen) seems to clear up whatever’s going wrong, as I can then add another widget to the kite.  So it’s most likely a bug rather than a genuine resource limitation.

That aside, I’m liking it so far.  It’s a little different to the standard Android approach — which pretty much every other third-party launcher follows and extends — so it’s nice to see someone trying something new.

You can get the lite version here.  The main limit is that you can only have a few categories and a limited number of items on the kite, but it’s enough to get a taste.

My one hard requirement for a phone is that it must run on Telstra’s 850MHz NextG network.  Beyond that, I’m pretty open about platform, form factor, and so on.

The devices presently of interest to me are:

• HTC EVO 3D, which is near-identical to the next on this list, except that it has better battery life, slightly more RAM, and a pair of crappy 5mp cameras for the 3D gimmick rather than one crappy 8mp camera, announced for Telstra but not yet available
• HTC Sensation, slightly less RAM than the EVO 3D, 8mp camera, available right now
• HTC Titan, monsteringly huge 4.7” display.  Single-core 1.5GHz CPU, but Windows Phone 7 doesn’t seem to need as much grunt to be useful.  RAM is a little on the low side, hard to say how that’ll work out with Mango.  Definitely a “watch for retail reviews” device.  Not yet announced for Telstra, but they’ve got the previous-gen HTC WP7 devices (Mozart, HD7) so I’d say it’s a fair bet they’ll get this too
• Nokia N9, this thing looks like the most awesome thing ever, total nerdgasm territory.  Announced for Telstra, release date as yet unknown.  Another “wait for the retail units to be reviewed” jobbie, but the first look seems promising

Also curious to see the first run of Nokia WP7 devices, though by all accounts they’re likely to be very similar to the first round of WP7 units from other manufacturers.  But even so, if they have Nokia’s typical good optics and decent industrial design then they may well be worth a look anyway.

Following on from my earlier review of LeeDroid on the HTC Desire…

Having used this for about a week, it became intolerably slow.  It has now been replaced by Oxygen (whose primary website seems to be kaput, but it’s in ROM Manager if you want it).  I’ve used Oxygen before, it’s a pretty stripped-back AOSP-based ROM.  Small, light, fast.

Now that I’ve made the effort to get the sd-ext stuff set up for LeeDroid, Oxygen was happy to make use of the partition so it’s doing that now too.  Which is helpful — I can’t say just how lacking the Desire is in terms of internal storage enough times.  That’s the one thing which puts me off the otherwise rather neat-looking Sony-Ericsson XPERIA Neo.

The Duck has a HTC Desire and kind of likes Sense, at least in the 2.x incarnations.  Admitting this is an instant nerd-cred killer, but even many of the folk who’ll rant and rave about the wonders of the Google Experience(TM) then move on to tell you all about the awesome third-party launcher, dialer, and other bits they’re using, so clearly the Manly-Man Google Experience isn’t quite what they’re loving.

The biggest problem with Sense isn’t Sense so much as it is HTC’s idea of how much storage is appropriate.  They really skimped on the Desire — which, let us not forget, was supposed to be The Bomb eighteen months ago — to the point where it was okay-ish with Android 2.1, pushing it with Android 2.2, and they gave up on trying to squeeze 2.3 plus Sense on to the thing.

The workaround is a trick known by a bunch of names, but A2SD+ will do.  It’s a complete hack of a thing, but it suffices if you’re technologically adept and willing to screw around a bit.  It boils down to repartitioning the micro-SD card so there’s a small ext3fs slice sitting at the back.  A ROM which knows about this trick will, on first boot, look for such a partition, mount it, and move a bunch of stuff there, symlinking various directories over.

LeeDroid is one such third-party ROM.  It takes Gingerbread, the A2SD+ hack, and sticks Sense 2.1 on top.  There are some other bits they bundle, but the point of the thing is to get Sense on a current version of Android, with enough storage to, oh, install more than two apps.

(One small caveat:  if you try to install this from ROM Manager, it’ll offer you a newer-looking LeeDroid HD.  ROM Manager shouldn’t be showing this to you on a Desire, it’s only for the Desire HD.)

I’ve been using it for a couple of days and so far so good.  It seems like the battery is getting a bit more of a workout than it was with MIUI, Oxygen, or CyanogenMod 7, but not so much as to be a real problem.  This may be Sense, or it may be LeeDroid, or it may even be just random wacky based on a slightly different app load-out.

The one big catch with doing this sort of trickery is that the micro-SD card is no longer removable.  The Duck finds it hilarious that the same type of nerd who’ll beat his chest about his l33t sk1llz using this sort of hack will most likely also have a good belly-laugh about how lame it is that Windows Phone 7 does basically the same thing, but nobody ever said that we nerds are necessarily consistent.

So, the Duck’s first favourite Android app: Titanium Media Sync.

The main use for this is as a dodgy poor-man’s iCloud photo sync.  On iOS 5, when you take a photo it gets pushed up to Apple’s servers, then sucked back down to any other devices you have registered and inserted into iPhoto libraries and so on.

Using this tool one’s Android phone can automatically push photos (or other media, but photos are the obvious use-case) to Dropbox or an FTP server.  I’m using it to push to Dropbox, which is then syncing to my laptop.

The result is not as swish as iCloud looks to be, but it suffices.