Want to have your own Android avatar with it’s own personalized look? Guess what? There’s an app for that. The developers at HelloAndroid.com just released the Android Avatar Creator app that allows you to do just that! You can create your own droid and share it with your friends via Facebook, Twitter or email. With the release of their Lite version on the Android Marketplace, the app is promising but it’s not exactly what I dreamed of.
When you first run the app, an alert dialog with a small tutorial pops up. Click the “new droid†button to start the droid editor activity. Editing the droid is relatively easy. To do this, you simply click on a body part, then choose the new part at the bottom of the activity.
I was disappointed to find a limited selection of android body parts at my disposal. I counted no more than 17 parts total. The ability to change the shape of the droid was not an option either. Not a good set of features for a lite version either.
Another thing that bothered me were the annoying mechanical sound effects that accompanied each button press. I couldn’t turn off the sound – even after switching to silent mode.
Just when I didn’t expect the process to get worse, my phone froze right in the middle of my droid creation. This was probably due to all those sound effects. I was forced to reboot, but amazed to find that it restored my avatar upon clicking the ‘open droid’ button. This made it easy to jump right back into the building process. I didn’t even bother with changing backgrounds – I was not ready for another crash.
Saving my project seemed simple enough. Only one save slot was available for this version. I have to say, the graphical interface on this page is horrible. Saving my avatar displays a progress dialog message: “Building the masterpieceâ€. I needed that laugh cause the process took longer than I had the patience for. On a second attempt to save my droid, I got an even funnier message: “Configuring factory for mass produce…â€
After successfully building my avatar, I was presented with options to share my avatar with the world, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, or via email. I opted to send it to myself instead after “uploading the schematics to the droid storage server”.
I quickly exited the app just in time to avoid a factory meltdown. The app crashed again soon afterwards leaving me with a crash reporter, conveniently placed in the notification bar. Overall, good attempt for an app, but a bad idea for a lite version.
A full version is stated to be coming soon. Until then, I am decommissioning this factory from my phone.For more information on this project visit HelloAndroid.com
Interested in checking out the app ? Scan the QR Code below:
