Growing Panel – More to it… (Updated)

It turns out that the Growing panel has more to it than what was initially believed of it. It is not just a cool animated panel, but has a lot more to offer.

First of all let me start off by complementing the animating panel. Having run it for a couple of hours now, the first thing i noticed was that it kept changing with time. The sun went down and the moon came up, and slowly made across the sky… and now the moon is almost out of sight and the sky a bit brightened, the sun should be showing up soon. (unfortunately i won’t be able to catch the sun rising as i’ll be asleep by then…)

Next are the small insects on the panel. Bees flying by, worms crawling on the plants, fireflies in the air, and snails on the ground. Hit the bee or the ladybird and the phone buzzes, hit a snail and it hides itself inside its shell and stays there – hit it again to get it moving again, hit the firefly and it flickers… This is definitely a panel worth having!

Now… the functionality on the panel. As expected the clock at the top-left corner of the panel brings the time & date settings screen. It is the flowers and plants that actually represent different stuff. For instance the middle flower in the screenshot below represents e-mail. When a bud, you have no mail… but when blossomed, you have mail. Not only that, the flowers differ depending on time as well as when the panel is switched. For instance, in the first two screenshots we have a dark-blue flower, but in the next screenshots you should see a light-blue flower.

The flower to the right (red bud in the screenshots) represents phone calls. I didn’t have a second phone near me otherwise would have given myself a missed call to see it in action. The flower on the left (yellow one) is SMS. The plant with the purple flowers (right side of the screen) is for phone profiles and the single stem with leaves on the left is for battery. Note in the screenshot below that when i attached the phone to my laptop and started charging the device, the bottom of the battery plant lit up… white sparks rise from the light and travel upwards fading half-way across the plant.

Is there more to this Growing Panel? Maybe there is… could it also show weather? Maybe the day-time screen (which differs a lot from the night-time screen – just look at the screenshots i uploaded in the previous post) has more stuff on it. I can’t wait to find out in the morning… :)

I was impressed by the panel when i thought it was simply an animating panel. I am now literally loving this panel and hope that when the final version of R3 ROM hits the update utility, we’ll see more panels like this one.

Update: At the bottom of the screen are really small plants – sort of like grass – with white tips. These are hooked with Wi-Fi. When Wi-Fi is turned on and connected to, flowers grow there. The stronger the strength of the signal, the more flowers there will be. Additionally, when you have a meeting in the calendar a butterfly appears on the panel – reported to fly higher when meeting is closer. The mushroom on the screen represents bluetooth – when activated the mushroom evolves and turns blue.

The phone profile plant wilts its flowers based on volume of the device and chosen profile (for me it only updates/changes the top two flowers). the Battery plant turns from brown to green starting from the top – the more the plant turns green, battery percentage is as less.