Yeah, I just figured that would be a lot of screen real estate (especially on smaller devices)? I could also just not understand the solution you're presenting.
The other option could be colored numbers to represent each category, maybe something like below?
1 Undownloaded
2 Waiting to Download
3 Downloaded
4 Ready
5 Started
6 Finished
But remembering what each color stood for could be a pain... I have enough trouble remembering which status bar at the top is which! lol
EDIT: nevermind, that would look like crap without some way to frame them, and then you might as well do images again!!