Customizing Android Phones

Easy steps for phone customization

Phones, as i believe, is something very very personal. Then why my phone should be exactly like anyone else's phone around? Why should it even look or behave like someone else's?

OpenSource was crafted with this intention, they gave all possible opportunity to people to create their own environment. A place where they can have everything just the way they want.

When i talk about OpenSource in Phone environment i guess we all know what we are talking about here... Yepp Android Operating system.

Well here are some easy ways by which you can customize your phone and make it behave exactly the way you want.

STEP 1 (Non rooted / rooted phones ):
Widgets : This has been on Android since the beginning of time  :) Many of you must have been using it already on your phones and many haven't.
Widgets are by definition small portion of application which can work on your home screen and provide you a quck and easy way to access your application contents without even opening the application. For example the above screenshot contains three widgets
1. Google search widget
2. Clock
3. Music Player
 Put them together and your screen becomes gorgeous :)

STEP 2 (Non rooted / rooted phones ) :
Wallpapers : Again you have couple of choices. You can use a static image as a wallpaper or can go for live wallpaper. WHATS LIVE WALL PAPER ? Its a wallpaper which can perform actions. For example it can show you a ocean view and you will see the waves around. there are hundereds of free live wallpapers available on android market, just check em out :)

STEP 3 ( Rooted / Custom roms) : 
Ok.. so you stayed long enough to reach this section... this is for pro users who love to play in deep :)
There are plenty of options for you, namely Cyanogen, AOKP, MIUI and many others out there... all of them have some pros and cons. Cyanogen undoubtedly has the biggest community support followed by AOKP and MIUI. I personally use Cyanogen on my Galaxy Nexus device.

These roms give you plenty of options to modify the system not only on appearance but also you can overclock your processor and get an awesome experience which you could have never got from your phone.

Here are some of the things that you can do!

So you can see the customization at notification area and the Lock screen.

There are millions of other coool stuffs that you can start doing.. ( One of my Fav..  Run Ubuntu on your Android ) 

STEP 4 (Rooted / Custom Rom) : 

THEMES : YOu can install themes on your device... and trust me it ant gonna slow your system down.. :) 

Here are some changes which happened on settings and other places due to themes:

Change your phone every day with themes...

Hope you enjoyed and will try to make your phone a little more personal :)

Andy Rubin: No 'one-size-fits-all solution'

Andy Rubin -- the father of Android --has taken to the Android Developer blog to shed a little light on what's happening regarding Honeycomb,any changes in Google's open-source policy, and fragmentation. The post is titled "I think I'm having a Gene Amdahl moment," referring to the former IBM exec who coined the phrase "fear, uncertainty and doubt" -- aka FUD. You'll definitely want to read the entire post, but we'll break it down here:

"We don’t believe in a 'one size fits all' solution. ... Quality and consistency continue to be top priorities."

"As always, device makers are free to modify Android to customize any range of features for Android devices."

"Our approach remains unchanged: there are no lock-downs or restrictions against customizing UIs. There are not, and never have been, any efforts to standardize the platform on any single chipset architecture."

"We continue to be an open source platform and will continue releasing source code when it is ready."

Again, those are just bullet points cherry picked by us. Read the entire post. And then take a deep breath and read it again. And while you might not like the answers -- or maybe you don't think really Rubin answered anything at all -- Rubin, and by extension Android and Google, did one thing we called for in last week's Android Central Podcast: cast a little transparency on what's been a bit of a murky period for Android's "open" nature.