There’s a bunch of live wallpaper apps out there for Android, which typically come with a variety of different features and formats. Some are little more than animated slide-shows, others deliver pitifully low resolution video or stutter badly in operation. But to date there’s been no real ‘practical’ video wallpaper product which didn’t suck up all your phone’s processing power or battery life.

Jack Hunter’s Alive Video Wallpaper is a brand new freeware app which delivers gloriously high definition video wallpapers for your Android phone, and which runs smoothly, has no impact on processing or battery life and is very cool. The secret is the fact that the app uses Air Lite, which can switch off the video when the phone is in standby and when other apps are being accessed. This means you only see the running video when you’re accessing the home screens.

There’s a great choice of default videos to choose from, culled from natural scenes, and no doubt others will arrive later on. What I particularly like about this app is the fact that it’s not just limited to high end smartphones. I actually managed to run it on an ancient (!) HTC Magic handset running CyanogenMod 6, and it worked. Gadzooks! Well when I say worked, it runs a few of the simpler videos, but even so that’s miraculous. Anyhoo, if you’re looking for a way to impress your non-smartphone owning friends, this is as good a way as any.