Customising Your Android

Personalise and shape your Android experience to best suit your needs

One of the best reasons to own an Android phone is its adaptability. Whereas iPhones are more prescriptive in what they have to offer, with Apple controlling what appears and what doesn’t, Google’s operating system is modular – to the extent that third-party apps can be used to change and improve various aspects of your phone. One of the most dramatic ways to do this is by installing LauncherPro which, ironically, makes your phone more iPhone-like by adding a dock and extra home screens plus some Apple-style effects such as being able to see all those home screens at once. But even if you don’t install LauncherPro, there’s so much you can do to enhance and customise your phone. Widgets are an amazing way to add dynamic content to your handset. You can use those which are built into the phone or scour the web for all sorts of useful content. Widgets, despite their resource-hungry nature, put content in front of you rather than hide it within apps. So you could have YouTube to hand on your home screen or something as basic as an analog clock. Whatever you decide, you can bet that it will give your phone a lift by presenting useful information as soon as you turn the handset on.

There are literally no limits to what you can have on your home screens. Can’t find an app for a specific purpose even though there are websites providing the service you want? Then just bookmark the webpage and turn it into an icon which is placed on your home screen so that, with one tap, you can access the information in an instant. And if you are feeling overwhelmed by the number of apps you have, then group them into folders to make them neater and easier to find, placing games, for instance, in one place and more serious applications in another. You are limited only by your imagination. And, of course, you can drastically change the way your phone looks with a host of wallpapers. You can choose from those that are already built into the phone, which include some great animated options as part of a Live Gallery, or you could even p lump for one of the many images that you will no doubt have on your phone. Take a photo with your camera and you can have it as a wallpaper within no time at all. Android is nothing if not feature-laden and over these four pages we will show you how you can best take advantage of the numerous customisation options. Play around with them and you will soon have a fresh-looking phone.

Quick tips : Handy ways of improving your phone

1: LauncherPro
Using LauncherPro, if you hold down on an app’s icon on your home screen, you can drag it to the trash can that appears. This deletes it. But if you hold it down a little longer, it will also let you uninstall it.

2: How to find widgets
Widgets come either built into the Android phone or via apps that you download from the Market. Take Audio Buddy, for instance; when you install this app, you can also make use of its widget.

3: Use a contacts folder
As well as creating folders to hold apps, you can create folders for your contacts. The Starred Contacts folder holds a select list of contacts; add a contact to your favourites and he or she will appear here.

Choose to root, Rooting is very much the equivalent of jailbreaking on an Apple iPhone. It lets you install new operating systems or make use of hidden settings. It gives you root permissions on your phone and can boost its performance.