My experience customizing an Android phone

8Sep/110

My experience customizing an Android phone

forward: Hi, everyone! Nate here, swapping posts with Travis. Or, if he ends up thinking for a while and kind of forgetting, then that's fine too! I hope to mold this outline into more of an article over the weekend.

Look and feel: launchers

If you're unhappy with Android, I recommend downloading ADW Launcher from the market. ADW is what's know as a "launcher," a "home replacement app," a different homescreen, you name it. By default, the Motorola Droid X comes with the "Blur" interface. If you're getting tired of MotoBlur, or getting tired of HTC's "Sense" interface, I recommend checking out a home replacement app. My favorite is ADW because it has the most custom themes and has easy widget resizing. I was also happy with GO Launcher and LauncherPro. So, these custom home screens provide you with a bit more customizability.

Also, another big feature of these "home replacement apps" is that all 3 provide "hide from app drawer" options. So, you can hide the freaking Blockbuster app, the Amazon Kindle app, Madden, all those garbage apps that Motorola and Verizon load onto your phone. The pre-loaded apps pay for the phone through advertising, but I'm not interested in wading though garbage whenever I want to find an app. So, "hide apps from app drawer." It will change your life. For the better.

Battery life

Android's battery life can be a little bit limiting. So, I'll tell you what worked for me, and a bit of background about why it works.

screen to dim. The screen is huge. It is bright. It sucks power. Make the Power Widget on your home screen. That should let you adjust the brightness. Unless it's sunny, you probably won't notice the dimmer screen. If you dig down into Android's Settings, should be something like Settings, Battery, View Stats, you can view how much each program is using the battery. Wait a bit after start-up to get a more accurate reading. But yeah, for me, turning the screen down was the biggest battery saver.
Don't worry about Task Killers . . . everything on your phone is running there for a reason. If you don't know what it is, don't kill it. Idle processes aren't going to hinder performance. They're in a "sleep" or "ready" state where they aren't running on the CPU (source: Dr. Kapenga in CS 4540 Operating Systems. 5-state diagram, baby). Anyways, if you really don't want the process running, uninstall it. Ask me or search in the forums if you're not convinced about "task killers."
GPS: you can turn it off from the Power Control widget. It's a "radio" signal, and it's using battery.
If you have $20 and want to invest a week of consciousness, you could buy an "extended battery." I have the Motorola Droid X, which comes with a Motorola BH5X battery. This gave me about 1 day of battery life. That is to say, daily use called for nightly charging. I sprung for the extended battery, called the "BH6X." It's a little fatter, but don't worry about it. I got probably 1.5 days out of this bad boy. A decent performance increase.
The biggest thing to remember about battery life is that you're basically carrying around a laptop walkie-talkie in your pocket. It consumes a lot of power. If you're looking for stellar battery life, check out a non-smart phone ("feature" phone), or maybe a netbook. It's a freaking miracle that these devices work. They are 4000+ years of human ingenuity and science, and we're improving all the time. So, we make choices and trade-offs, and we find a useful solution.

(more to come?)

I won't really touch on rooting/gaining superuser access. For an awesome run down onrooting, check out an earlier post from Travis, called Why Root Your HTC Droid Incredible. http://www.dev-random.me/why-root-htc-droid-incredible