Nokia Z launcher: What makes it cool?

Nokia has been working on a cool launcher for Android. Does it deliver?

It is difficult to keep Nokia out of the smartphone world it seems. Once the most dominating manufacturer on the planet by a comfortable margin, the company was acquired by Microsoft recently in a multi billion dollar deal. While this means that there will no more handsets coming from Nokia, the Finnish company has retained some of the departments that will be a part of the company going forward. One of those departments has churned out a surprisingly good launched for Android called the Z launcher.

There have been far too many attempts to make a decent launcher for Android with only a few succeeding. Nokia’s replacement for your Android home screen is one of the most promising in recent memory.

While a lot of launchers go for cluttering your screen with information overload, Z launcher is all about minimalism. The top of the screen shows the time, date and upcoming calendar event while the rest of the screen shows some apps, selected contacts and web links.

The interesting part of Z launcher is that the home screen is completely dynamic. It learns your usage patterns to tailor the most useful home screen for you through the day. So this means you will have work contacts and related apps on the home screen during morning while at night it will change to give way to leisure apps and related contacts. The bottom of the screen is static and customisable with 4 apps that you can decide to always have on your screen.

But does this considerably affect the time taken to open other apps not on the home screen? This is where the brilliance of Z launcher kicks in. A feature called ‘Scribble’ allows you directly access the other apps by scribbling the app name on your screen. You can scribble anywhere on the launch screen to get the app you are looking for. The first ‘f’ you type will pull down apps starting with f with subsequent letters narrowing the list. It also learns your search pattern to put your most frequently accessed apps on the  top of the search drop down. Simple and highly functional.

The Z launcher is still in pre beta which means that it comes with a good amount of bugs and is visibly slow in operation. You can download the launcher right now if you promise to give the developers feedback with your usage.

Nokia has the potential to change the  game with the Z launcher. Are you going to download it?