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Five Android Customization Apps I Can’t Live Without
I recently upgraded to a Samsung Droid Charge, which overall I’m quite pleased with. With the clean slate provided by the new phone, I immediately set to installing and configuring things to my liking. Below are five apps that replace, extend, or enhance functionality that ships with the phone; my system wouldn’t feel complete without them.
LauncherPro
A replacement for the Android home screen and app drawer, LauncherPro lets you tweak just about everything about that basic bit of the phone’s experience. A couple of my favorite features: the dock at the bottom of the home screen is totally customizable; and the app drawer allows you to hide applications, crucially letting me pretend that I’m not stuck with the ridiculous bloatware that Verizon saw fit to ship with my phone and prevent me from uninstalling.
Dialer One
A replacement for the standard Phone app, Dialer One’s killer feature is that the dialpad doubles as a T9 filter for your contacts. It’s a much, much faster way to look up who you want to call than anything else I’ve come across on a smartphone.
SwiftKey X
This is the only paid app on today’s list, but it’s well worth it. SwiftKey is a replacement soft keyboard. Unlike some of the more adventurous keyboard replacements out there, SwiftKey looks pretty much exactly like the built-in keyboard; the difference is in the predictions and autocorrection. SwiftKey uses semantic analysis to guess what you’re going to type next based on the last few words you entered. It also learns from your typing style, and you can even set it up to read your tweets, Facebook messages, SMS, etc. to learn more about the words and phrases you use most often.
Handcent SMS
Handcent is the SMS app of choice among Android power users; like other apps on this list, it boasts considerably more flexibility than the built-in alternative. Among other SMS enhancements, Handcent can display SMSs in a pop-up notification on the screen, and even allows you to reply to them without even opening the app.
Llama
Unlike the other apps on this list, Llama isn’t an in-kind replacement for an app that ships with Android; but it’s a general-purpose system tool, so I’ve included it here. Llama’s purpose is to automate features of your phone based on various conditions being met. In particular, it allows you to configure location profiles for various places you frequent; it uses cell tower polling, rather than GPS, to tell where you are, so it’s not a battery-killer. This may sound familiar to those who have come across the more popular Tasker, but I prefer Llama’s feature set and functionality even before considering that Llama is free and Tasker is not. Here’s what I use Llama for:
- Turn Wi-Fi on when I’m at home or in the office; turn it off otherwise.
- Turn off vibrate when the phone is plugged in (since that means it’s sitting on a desk and the vibrate will be loud and annoying).
- Turn down my screen brightness and disable sync when my battery drops below 40%.
That’s just a small taste of what Llama’s capable of, but even just using it for those few simple things makes my phone way better to use.
That is all.
