By Matt Rodricks
Photo: phandroid.com
Right out of the box, the newer versions of Android have fancy ways to jazz up the background of your home desktop, with the launch of live wallpapers for example, which allow screen interactions and a much more visual way of improving the appearance of your home screen - at a slight cost of battery life.
The Play Store is your main source for downloading third-party software, which can be used to customize the phone. However, there are normally plenty of ways, you can improve the look of your phone without even needing these apps.
Adding items on your home screen is the first step and can be easily done by selecting an icon and pushing down on it. Now you can either reposition the later or dump it in the trash bin (it does not remove the program, just the home screen icon). Finally, pushing and holding down on an empty screen lets you add shortcuts, folders or widgets. The last of these can improve the functionality of your phone immensely, such as displaying weather widgets, status updates or calendar entries.
Heading into the Settings menu provides a few more options you can change. For example, you can adjust your ringtones, vibration feedback (if present), how long your phone's backlight stays on before dimming and locking the screen. Or you can enable alternative keyboards, so if you don't get on with the default Android version, you can download a couple of freebies from the Play store (eg. iPhone keyboard) and enable these instead. Some custom keyboards can even have different skins.
In terms of a performance boost, we recommend Spare Parts (search for it on Play store). Despite reportedly being a root-only app, it seems to work fine on non-hacked phones and it's really handy for adding additional features, such as auto-rotation transition effects, haptic feedback or viewing detailed battery status reports.
Don't Like it? Change it.
Another way to customize your phone is to replace your default software. For example, you could get hold of Documents To Go for editing Microsoft Office documents or download Dolphin Browser, which is a great replacement to the default browser. For a start, the browser feels faster in operation and has gesture control as well, so you can draw on the screen to perform certain actions, such as adding bookmarks.
Of course, you may be sick of your default home theme or the way the icons/widgets look. Here you can head to the Google Play store and download a variety of third-party apps to customize your Android further.
Photo: phandroid.com
Right out of the box, the newer versions of Android have fancy ways to jazz up the background of your home desktop, with the launch of live wallpapers for example, which allow screen interactions and a much more visual way of improving the appearance of your home screen - at a slight cost of battery life.
The Play Store is your main source for downloading third-party software, which can be used to customize the phone. However, there are normally plenty of ways, you can improve the look of your phone without even needing these apps.
Adding items on your home screen is the first step and can be easily done by selecting an icon and pushing down on it. Now you can either reposition the later or dump it in the trash bin (it does not remove the program, just the home screen icon). Finally, pushing and holding down on an empty screen lets you add shortcuts, folders or widgets. The last of these can improve the functionality of your phone immensely, such as displaying weather widgets, status updates or calendar entries.
Heading into the Settings menu provides a few more options you can change. For example, you can adjust your ringtones, vibration feedback (if present), how long your phone's backlight stays on before dimming and locking the screen. Or you can enable alternative keyboards, so if you don't get on with the default Android version, you can download a couple of freebies from the Play store (eg. iPhone keyboard) and enable these instead. Some custom keyboards can even have different skins.
In terms of a performance boost, we recommend Spare Parts (search for it on Play store). Despite reportedly being a root-only app, it seems to work fine on non-hacked phones and it's really handy for adding additional features, such as auto-rotation transition effects, haptic feedback or viewing detailed battery status reports.
Don't Like it? Change it.
Another way to customize your phone is to replace your default software. For example, you could get hold of Documents To Go for editing Microsoft Office documents or download Dolphin Browser, which is a great replacement to the default browser. For a start, the browser feels faster in operation and has gesture control as well, so you can draw on the screen to perform certain actions, such as adding bookmarks.
Of course, you may be sick of your default home theme or the way the icons/widgets look. Here you can head to the Google Play store and download a variety of third-party apps to customize your Android further.
Read more useful android tips on Everything Android which focuses on apps, tutorials and useful stuff for your Android device.
Checkout Everything Android today at etandroid.com.
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Customize User Interface of Android Device
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Rating : 4.5
