I got my Droid about a year ago and I have a lot of stuff installed on it, but for some reason, I feel like I’m wasting its true potential. It has quite a powerful little operating system which is much more customizable than Verizon would lead you to believe.
So how can I make the most of my Droid? I believe rooting it would be necessary to achieve maximum functionality. Is there a website where I can get some ideas? I’m pretty sure I’d like to customize the GUI more, too.
If it helps, I know Java and XML, so I could program some of my own stuff if necessary.
The go-to site for Android customisations seems to be the XDA developers forums. Assuming it’s a Motorola Droid you have, this is the appropriate sub-forum:
To add, rooting is the first step, for full flexibility you can flash custom ROMs. The “Motorola Droid Android Development” sub-sub-forum has detailed instructions. Since the Droid is so well established, it looks like it’s a very straightforward procedure.
I was uinder the impression that Motorola has a locked boot-loader, and therefore you can’t use custom firmware/ROMS with them? I know you can root it to gain “superuser” acces, but I had thought I read custom ROMs were a no-no.
Or maybe that’s only certain Motorala Android models…
At any rate, one of the best things to do after rooting is enabling/download a tethering app, if your model can do it. All models should be capable of USB tethering, but the cooler ones can create an ad-hoc wireless network and allow multiple computers, and device like tablets and other smartphones, connect to it and share it’s connection.
I’d also recommend lookinginto the app called Tasker. It’s a few dollars, but can make your phone do super-awesome things all on it’s own. If you have a fairly set work schedule, you can set it to, for instance, automatically connect to your owrk’s wifi when you walk in the office at 8 AM, go silent at 11 PM so you won’t get woken up at night, keep screen brightness at full when plugged in, go to mid-dim when not plugged in, and go to lowest setting if the battery is low.
There’s tons more stuff to do with it, but that’s just to give you some ideas. I don’t have it myself, but I’m looking into it, since I forget to do things like that (the number of times I’ve been woken up by a text or the ‘battery fully chaged’ beep because I forgot to put it in silent mode…)
I’d also recommend getting the audio manager app/widget (there is a free version.) It lets you easily change all six volume settings (Alarm, media, alerts, ringer, system, and voice.) It’s nice to know that no call or text will wake you up, but your alarm still will if you need it to.