Posts Tagged
customization
Calling all Android customization addicts, this month we’re dedicating half of our posts to making your phone look and behave in harmony with you. Whether you’ve only changed a wallpaper before but would like to learn more, or you’re a customization veteran, we have something tailored for you.
From custom ROMs to widgets, themes, launchers, icons, wallpapers and more, March on Android.Appstorm.net will be an epic month of gorgeous content to help you add back that sparkle to your old phone, or make your new one even more original.
So fasten your seat-belts, get your batteries charged, and prepare your thumbs and indexes. It’s going to be a fun ride!
One of any Android users’ purest joys is the ability to customise their experience with homescreen widgets. It’s also fair to say such modding has become somewhat of an art form, with websites like mycolorscreen.com becoming spaces where design-savvy Android users can showcase their artistic flair.
For any users keen on beautifying their Android interface, the first port of call has to be the Google Play Store, where a multitude of apps and widgets can help you do just that. So enjoy this huge round-up of great minimalist and highly customisable homescreen applications that will let you inject your own style into your Android homescreen!
THe launch of the Nexus 7 created a storm in the mobile market – it quickly because THE 7″ tablet to get, bar none, finally staging something of a challenge to the iPad’s dominance in the tablet market. For a super-low $199, the Nexus comes with all the top-of-the-line hardware you can imagine: a quad-core processor, a gig of RAM and a brilliant HD LCD display.
Now although the Nexus 7 comes with a bunch of wallpapers already on the device, including the now famous Jelly Bean background, that’s never really enough, is it? If you are anything like me, you’re going to quickly go find some awesome images to customize your home screens with some brilliant imagery. Well, let your search begin here. Here are 50 of the best wallpaper images I could find to help you deck up your Nexus 7 and show it off at the next chance you get.
That widgets are one of Android’s most loved features is no secret. They are clearly one of the platform’s biggest assets and a staple on pretty much every home screen. Although most versions of Android come with a decent set of widgets built in, the real power of the widget comes to the fore with custom widgets available in the thousands on the Play Store.
Unfortunately, I’ve found myself wanting for a decent clock widget that did everything I needed it to do. A search that has seen me experiment with tons of options on the Play Store, including the excellent Minimalistic Text widget that I wrote about a while back and have been using since. As things go in the Android world, the app found its biggest new rival in my books last week with the Ultimate Custom Clock Widget – or UCCW as it is commonly called in the XDA Developer circles.
If you’re like me, you spend way too much time customizing your smartphone with launchers, widgets, wallpapers and icons. And why not? With custom interface elements, our phones look cooler than when we took them out of the box. But how about getting them to sound better too?
Enter Ringtonium Pro. It’s a well designed workspace to create ringtones with, whether it’s for calls, messages or Facebook notifications. The app isn’t just all about looks though, and comes with some clever controls for precise editing. But is it worth the money? Let’s find out.
As you know, changing the launcher and lock screen of your phone can give you a completely revamped experience and make your phone feel brand new. Go Locker (developed and offered by the same great dev team behind Go Launcher and Go SMS, and which we reviewed here) is the most popular lock screen replacement app in the Play Store.
Although it currently doesn’t offer the customizability present in WidgetLocker Lockscreen, Go Locker can be modded with a variety of free and paid themes available for download in the Play Store as well. In this roundup, I’ll show you a few of my favourite such mods.
One of the reasons I chose to get an Android phone instead of one from any other platform was because of the ability to customize practically every aspect of the user interface. Whether you have a problem with the keyboard, need more functionality from the dialer or dislike the default SMS program, there’s an app to help you change and tweak these to your liking.
Similarly, if you’re looking to change the way your icons, widgets and shortcuts are presented, all at once, you can try an alternative launcher. Hi Launcher is one of the new kids on this block, with a functional screen layout, a boatload of options for customization and some clever new features to keep things interesting. Let’s take it for a spin and see if it can become the default launcher on your device.
When we did our first roundup of wallpapers for Android just over a year ago, the response was pretty overwhelming. It wasn’t very surprising given how much emphasis most of us put on choosing the right wallpaper for our screens – mobile, desktop or anything in between. Since it is the most visible part of your Android home screen and is most probably what you see first every time you look at the phone or tablet, to expect to see something beautiful there is quite natural.
Here we are then, a year later and with a fresh batch of 60 more wallpaper images for your phone (or tablet or even your desktop for that matter). A lot of the images we have linked below are available in a variety of resolutions and will therefore suit your needs just fine. Given the crazy variety of screen sizes and resolutions on Android today, you will most probably need to crop the image to fit your screen. Shouldn’t be a problem though, since the OS should take care of letting you do that at the right time.
If you’ve read other articles here at Android.AppStorm, you’ll notice that we absolutely love the way we can customize our phones’ user interface. The overall look, however, can be attributed to a certain theme for a specified launcher, depending on which one you have installed.
The themes I personally prefer are those that have fewer graphics and more texture; I find that these make it easier for you to view your app icons, and make your home screens look cleaner and clutter-free.
Here are 40 highly recommended themes for launchers like GoLauncher EX, Launcher Pro and ADW Launcher. All these themes are free on the Market.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to replicate my custom Android home screen layout, “One Goal”, using just ADW Launcher EX, Minimalistic Text, and a custom background.
One Goal - The final result
