Our most hack friendly phone now gets another amazing application. Besides having hard keys, you can now have the same functionality as the ones enjoyed by your friends with phones having capacitive buttons. As you may already know, capacitive buttons don’t work until they are lit up – which more or less translates to something similar on how softkeys/ gestures should work on an HD2. Putting it straight, the screen of HD2 needs to be unlocked so that you are able to use touch buttons/ soft keys simulating the same functionality.
As a requirement, you’d need to have the following:
- An HTC HD2 phone
- Version of Android 2.2 or 2.3 running on it – could be via sd-card or through NAND
- A dollar and twenty cents if your want the pro version with all functionality
The app in question is zMooth, which is available in the Android Market in Lite (free) and Pro versions, and you can assume that the pro version definitely jumbo packs a lot more.
It might take you a couple of days to get use to the gestures, but believe me, it’s really cool when you start using them all to navigation within your HD2.
One bad thing is that the gesture signs are hard coded so you cannot customize gestures of your own The good thing is that this is how you learn to be more flexible and compromising.
zMooth and set your hardware keys free.
zMooth lets you use gestures to mimic your device's hardware keys (back, home and menu), you will be able to use very intuitive gestures to navigate your device.
zMooth is unobtrusive and uses minimum amount of screen space but very easy and intuitive to use. If you use for couple of days you won't even think about using the buttons.
After you install the app you will see a blue area at the bottom of the screen, swipe left on this area to go back, swipe right for menu and gesture a up-arrow(^) for home.
zMooth will also save your hardware keys from being prematurely degrading as you will be using them a lot less. It might also slightly increase your battery life as you won't be turning on button lights and triggering hardware button circuits.
The pro version will add more features, including being able to turn off screen, change width, colors of the gesture area.
Hardcoding gestures would also avoid conflicting actions/ events being triggered in case you have more or less same signs to signify two totally obtuse actions.
This app you can download it directly from the Android market place by following this link.
Note: zMooth requires a rooted android device.