Kinoma Play – Launcher app with shortcuts to Media & Social Content
by Paul Wilks
Mar 28, 2012 8:37 AM –
Install
Kinoma Play is a form of virtual launcher for various Android functions. You can access your media (pictures, videos and music), your social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, Cloud Storage spaces such as Box, your installed apps and Kinoma Play-specific apps for Flickr, Youtube and Wikipedia. It arguably simplifies your mobile interactions and places everything in one place. Kinoma Play certainly looks relatively good and it performs lots of functions but… doesn’t my device do all this anyway?
Price: Free
Tested on: HTC Desire HD
Content Rating: Low maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Original idea!
- Robust user interface!
- Slick interactive animations!
- Lots of functionality and features!
Cons
- Underneath it, just groups similar functions together. You can generate the same by putting a series of widgets onto one home screen which would work and look better.
- Takes a while to hunt for apps, pictures or files.
Features:
Kinoma Play is a new and innovative kind of launcher. It presents you with a scrollable list of places and functions in one location. So there’s a shortcut to your pictures, music, albums and movies. There is a social dashboard which includes the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. It incorporates extra downloadable apps such as calculator, calendar and weather. You can customise the background, add new shortcuts, access your apps and easily access location-based features like Foursquare. Additionally, there are plenty of additional apps and tools to download to work inside the app itself. These include things like calculators as well as clients for services like Yelp.
Two things struck me initially about this app. Firstly, to its credit the app looks pretty good and feels good to use. It’s open and customisable and includes neat animations plus slick transitions between screens and most apps. It’s an app that clearly a lot of development has gone into it, but… and this was my next thought… doesn’t my phone do this anyway? I can group all my media shortcuts onto one page and open each natively. Each app features far more functionality than the ones built into Kinoma Play anyway. I can access my apps from my app draw which is actually smoother and more configurable than what I experience with this app. I can open my camera because the link is there, I don’t have to go looking for it. I can’t add widgets to Kinoma Play and it takes forever for the social networks to drag information to it. The resolution is incredibly average and it feels like a kind of 5 year old ‘My First Windows Smartphone‘ experience. Why do I even need this? It’s like an app that’s solving a non-existent problem.
I left the app alone for a while. It kept bugging me because I must have been missing something. Why would so much development go into an app that essentially replicates what your Android does better anyway? It’s a polished app but it’s still a significantly inferior experience to using a normal launcher such as ADW Launcher EX or GO Launcher EX. In all honesty, it looks like a very very early iPhone concept. Mostly it works really well and there are nice screen transitions, but I found myself continuing to ask ‘why?’. Maybe I have really missed something significant, but no matter how much I use the app, it completely eludes me.
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Kinoma Play – Main page
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Kinoma Play – Landscape
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Kinoma Play – Basic music player
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Kinoma Play – Play dashboard, social networking
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Kinoma Play – Picture gallery
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Kinoma Play – My media list
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Kinoma Play – Facebook interface
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Kinoma Play – Set up dashboards
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Kinoma Play – Settings
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Kinoma Play – About
Usefulness:
The functionality contained within the app is very useful. But the fact however is, your phone launcher- even if you still rock a G1- is still superior. There is I guess the potential that using an app like this could save a little space on your device if you really are limited. This aside, I cannot see what sense it makes.
The app does aggregate content from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube into one page so if somehow that’s a really big deal for you it might be worth a look.
Ease of Use:
Kinoma is very easy to use and, as mentioned, relatively quick.
Frequently Used:
If you genuinely adopted this as your primary means to launch apps and access media etc., it would be something you used on a regular basis. However, I just can’t see why anyone would use this unless their device is so stricken for space they have no choice but to use an inferior interface like this.
Interface:
The UI is OK and there are nice animations and fluidity in some places. However, it is still a big step down from your native or other third party launcher.