App of the Week: My Favorite Live Wallpapers

Okay, this is going to be a group review: my favorite live wallpapers for Android! All of these are fairly dark (I like to check my phone in the middle of the night and I don't like to get blinded, plus I have heard that dark wallpapers use less battery), and they all run well, and they're all interesting--at least to me. Looking over this list I see that I have a distinct taste for scifi wallpapers, especially those that show spacescapes rushing by... Hmm. I like spacescapes, okay?

Shadow Galaxy: If you love the scenes in Star Trek that show an exterior shot of the ship plunging into a mass of swirling iridescent nebula, and you love those scenes not because of the ship but because of all that beautiful nebula, then you'll probably like this wallpaper. I had tried a couple of this developer's other "Galaxy" wallpapers and, while tolerable, they didn't knock my socks off or were too bright; I really like this one, though. Seems to run very stable.

Hyperspace 3D (free version): This one leans more to the "fiction" side of "science fiction" by superimposing a glowing "tunnel through space" on top of a vivid spacescape. (You can turn the tunnel off if you want to just have the spacescape, but what would be the fun in that?!) Some lagging issues on my Droid 2, but works well the majority of the time.

Solar Wind: By far my favorite live wallpaper, period. 5 patterns plus a "customize" mode mean that you can have pretty swirly dots swirl around your screen in several different ways. (The only pattern I really don't like is "Jiggly", because I find it vaguely nausea-inducing, but that might just be me.) Runs well.

3D Fireflies (free version): Same idea as Solar Wind but a bit different aesthetic; glowing trails behind little arrowheads rather than dots in lines. Lags a bit, although very rarely.

Starfield: "Set a course to take us around the nebula. Warp 2. Engage!" "Aye-aye, Captain!" And as the ship lurches into motion, a handy lieutenant videotapes the view out the front window to be included in this app. As a lover of the warp-speed visual effect, this was the second live wallpaper I downloaded after getting my phone (the first was Solar Wind). My only gripe is that the animation is centered on the home screen of my phone and doesn't move with scrolling; scrolling to the screens on the right or left causes the starfield to streak across the screen rather than from the center of it.