Due to the ever-ensuing patent battles, not all features of smartphone devices can be replicated onto those of rivals, and whether you’re an Apple fanboy, Droid junkie, or bear a partisan affinity to Microsoft’s Windows Phone, it cannot be denied that each has differing strengths and weaknesses.
Apple’s ‘Slide To Unlock’ feature was only last month granted its patent, many years after the initial array of touch-based devices. As such, Android devices use a different method to unlock by default, implementing a join-the-dots maze-like feature. Though not to everyone’s taste, it certainly makes accessing the main features a tad more interesting.
With Google’s mobile branch bringing forth Ice Cream Sandwich in the coming weeks, the lockscreen is one of the many features being given a cosmetic update. AndroidLock is a jailbreak tweak which has been bringing the Android lockscreen experience to iOS for a while now, and thanks to a free theme floating around on Cydia for said tweak, which goes by the name of AndroidLock XT, you can plaster on that Ice Cream Sandwich mask on your iOS device.
For $1.49 over at the BigBoss repo, we reckon it’s pretty reasonable, and will certainly confuse fellow techies. It’s not a carbon copy of the Android version, but it’s close enough – check out the following video demo courtesy of our friends over at iDownloadBlog:
Note: If you’ve never used an Android device before, remember that although the patterns add an extra dimension to the unlocking mechanism, it can be quite easy to forget your sequence. You don’t want to end up getting locked out of your device and needing a restore, so don’t get too carried away!
You will need to be on a jailbroken iOS device if you wish to install it. You can follow our step by step guide posted here to jailbreak your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch on iOS 4.3.5 using Redsn0w (or PwnageTool), or on iOS 4.3.3 using Redsn0w, PwnageTool, Sn0wbreeze & JailbreakMe (that last one being the easiest). For jailbreaking iOS 5 tethered using Redsn0w, you can follow our complete step by step guide posted here, or here if you want to use Sn0wbreeze on Windows. Since jailbreak on iOS 5 is currently limited to tethered boot only, you can install ‘SemiTether’ patch (instructions here) from Cydia to make your jailbreak semi-tethered on iOS 5. For those of you on iOS 5.0.1 can follow our instructions posted here on how to jailbreak using Redsn0w or here using Sn0wbreeze.
Be sure to check out our iPhone Apps Gallery and iPad Apps Gallery to explore more apps for your iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
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