TSF Shell Pro now available

TSF Shell Pro is a launcher that has been teased for a few months, and it’s finally available – at least for some devices. It showed up in the Android Market for my Galaxy S II, but not my Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, which may mean that tablets aren’t supported. Then again, apparently not all versions of the Nexus are compatible (on paper) either, so who knows. Nothing new there; it’s just Google’s amazingly broken compatibility system kicking the legs from underneath users once again. 

Anyway, assuming you have a supported device, TSF Shell Pro will bring a whole bunch of nice looking features to it. What sets this apart is the animations and effects that are used for everything from widgets to folder organizing. The 9 minute video above shows a lot of these features, so you get an idea of what this does. The basis for this launcher reminds me a lot of SPB Shell, which also focuses heavily on looking nice, but this appears to have a lot more features. The downside? A $17 price tag. 

I downloaded it and tried it myself, but hit the refund button within minutes. It didn’t take a minute from when I installed it until I had encountered two bugs: the Market link to a launcher-specific widget didn’t work, and once installed, the icon to add said widget was put on top of another icon, leaving an open space where the icon was supposed to be and no way to press the icon underneath. I also found the launcher rather annoying to use – fancy, but annoying. Like using a Rube Goldberg machine to press a button, almost. And in my humble opinion, if you charge $17 for the first release of an app, you can’t expect people to be as forgiving when it comes to bugs. 

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