Xperia S basics

[HawkMan]

So I just got myself a Xperia S while waiting for WP8 phones. And it's been a while since I was REALLY into the Android scene and could need some good tips from those that use this or similar phones.

1. The market is pure hell to navigate, so does anyone have any good Widget apps that are nice and elegant for the home screen, like text based clocks and nice clean single color useful widgets. Fancy widgets isn't as fancy as they used to be anymore, and the inability to change fonts without making a theme is annoying to say the least, as their theme designers are horrible and the default font choice is REALLY bad.

2. any reason I should root the phone. I can't really see any. and the Sony root procedure is quite long and complicated, and what happens if I root it, form the instructions it almost seems as if you lose the Sony stuff and get dumped to clean android.

3. Any decent gallery apps. the built in ones are pretty bad and don't allow me to show pics from the cloud (skydrive(or GDrive in this case I guess) and facebook) and save these to the device for use in backgrounds and user pics. I guess I'm spoiled form WP where I can just use the cloud pics for backgrounds and contacts photos.

4. I like the Sony launcher is clean and simple, any reason to switch to a third party one any more.

I like the phone despite some annoyances, like the automatically activated and registered G+, orry I already have facebook I don't need this. and the fact it automatically adds gmail into the gmail app. again, it has a mail app that gets all my mail from different providers like my work, my personal and my gmail. I don't want my gmail popping up in a separate app. It makes no sense. Just add peoples Gmail to the phones mail app automatically instead.

Any other need to have apps from the other Xperia S owners ?

[ichi]

1.- I'm not really into widgets as I don't find the need to show stuff like weather on the screen, but Sony has a custom text clock widget for their Xperia launcher that looks nice.

The only widget I'm using is Evernote's. It has an option to use a monochrome theme that's not really pretty but doesn't look that bad either.

If you want a calendar, Simple Calendar Widget looks quite clean. Again I have no use for that, but if I did I would install that one.

2.- I also haven't found any reason to root my phone.

3.- I don't know of any gallery that shows your cloud pictures unless you are syncing them with some local phone folder. You'd have to open the app for your cloud service, select the images you want and share them with whatever gallery app you are using.

That said, QuickPic is a quite nice gallery app, although I have no problems with the default gallery on ICS.

Scalado's Album is nice and fast too, and allows you to browse pictures by date (it shows a folder for each month) using the EXIF data.

4.- While I prefer the vanilla Android launcher, I was using the Sony Xperia launcher for a while on my Nexus S and it looked quite nice. As you said it's clean and simple.

Third party launchers usually add more customization options, but in my opinion they make the home screen overcomplicated. I don't need any of those extra features myself, but YMMV.

Regarding the Gmail app IIRC you can disable sync for you account in the app and then use only the generic Mail app, if you want.

You should give Airdroid a try if you haven't already. It makes your life a lot more simple when moving files between your phone and your computer.

[Xahid]

Welcome to the Community :)

1. there are lot of home widgets, you just need to pick the one you need.

for Clock, check out Sense 4 Clock

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1554077

2. root is necessary to remove the bloatware from your device or just disable them. its not really hard, you just need to downgrade the kernel root the device & then re-upgrade the kernel.

3. the built-in Gallery Application is pretty neat, it works fine for me. dunno about Gdrive or skydrive, but it show the facebook pix, you need to enable Facebook inside xperia.

4. I use the Sony launcher too :)

[HawkMan]

couldn't reslly fond the sense 4 clock when i searched the market plate now. but since it's a sense clock i suspect it has the flip clock look. i want a smple clock with just text. preferably identical to the sony clock thats on the phone, but 4x2 imstead of 2x1. I also used to have some neat text onlocks that showed the time in words.

i was able to disable all the bloatware ( gmail and G+) without rooting, there are some basic apps i can't disable but they hardly bother me as they dont't run by themselves anyway.

Yeah the album app does allow you to view FB photos, unfortuntely not to save them, though it allows to set them as background or contact pic.

personally i would prefer the main homescreen to be as clean as possible, with mostly just the background visible and whatever information i have on it as nice clean typography.

[HawkMan]

I decided to test the HD Widgets app and it does pretty much everything I want, nice clean almost fully customizeable toggles, even a fully customizeable togglebar with 5 toggles instead of the 4 I can get with single toggles. (one of the only reasons I used a custom launcher on my old Xperia X10 back in the days was 4 collumns instead of 3, but this one is sensible enough to have 4 (but now I almost wish for 5 :p)

Now if I just need a way to make shortcuts with custom icons, as the e-mail icon in my home screen is clashing with all the nice white mono color icons :)