SwitchPro Widget

Sep 9, 2010

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One of the things that always keeps me jazzed is the liberal app aproval policy in the Android market. It lets developers improve on just about any feature in Android, without Google getting all hot and bothered. SwitchPro Widget is just such an example. It takes the simple “power control” widget available on any Andoid phone and really tricks it out. Its nearly unlimited combinations will keep anyone who wants customizable toggles happy.

SwitchPro Widget looks a lot like the power control widget that comes with Android—except you get complete control. Want a single widget that turns on your camera flash? Done. Want a widget with seven different buttons? You got it. You can also change the color of the indicator and make the widget
translucent.

For the record you can toggle: Wi-Fi, data connection, bluetooth, GPS, auto-sync, airplane mode, brightness, battery indicator, vibration/silent mode, auto-rotate, screen always on, reload SD card, reboot, flashlight, 3G-2G, speaker mode, and auto-screen lock.

SwitchPro Widget also gives some nice advanced options. I particularly like the ability to have the wifi settings panel open up when on toggle. This way I can directly choose the network without an extra step. I wish I could have two different toggles for wifi, one that just turned it on and one that took me to the settings.

Something that really irked me, however was the inability to edit widgets after they’re created. So if I wanted to just edit the function on one of my seven toggles I would have to create an entire new widget and change each button from the default values back to what I want. Also, the customization is a bit limited, you can only change the background of the widget from solid to translucent, or you can change the widget color. It would be nice to have some more complete skinning and develop some themes.

All in all, SwitchPro Widget is definitely worth the $0.99. With a few updates it could really be amazing. Especially, since the control widgets included are limited, this app really gives some much needed added functionality.