The Galaxy Nexus is a beautiful device. It’s thin, light and sexy, with a 720p screen that begs to be taken advantage of. Get your mind out of the gutter, I meant the screen real estate!
If you have gone to the trouble of rooting your Galaxy Nexus (and even if you haven’t) you owe it to yourself to download Nova Launcher. It is a launcher replacement that looks and feels remarkably similar to the stock Android 4.0 home screen, but adds more functionality than you’ll know what to do with. Nova will work, in fact, with any device running Ice Cream Sandwich, so Gingerbread users are unfortunately out of luck (but can come pretty close with the new version of ADW EX.)
For starters it adds a dynamic dock to the bottom of the screen: instead of having one row of four icons, you now have a horizontal carousel of icons in which you can store your favourite apps or folders. You can change the grid size to fit more icons on the screen, re-size any widget to your perfect width and height and, perhaps best of all, alter the ridiculous way widgets are picked.
Nova Launcher will work with or without root, but flashing it through the recovery menu opens up several new features (like the aforementioned widget picker in the app drawer).
While Nova is in beta it is a free download from XDA-Developers but that will change, like Launcher Pro and ADW EX before it, when it hits a stable version. Until then, get downloading: it will be the best launcher decision you’ve ever made.
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