XPRT tweaks

Coming from the HTC EVO to Motorola's XPRT has been eye opening on the differences in Android experience. It is completely different depending on vendor. HTC's Sense is pretty nice. My biggest complaint was the browser hides the notification bar. I really like to see the time while browsing so I know when to stop browsing :-) Everything else about Sense was great. If HTC makes a phone with a physical portrait keyboard I will go back. What I really want is the BlackBerry Torch form, but until HTC provides either of those I am sticking with the XPRT.

So, XPRT has a couple of "features" that aren't all that great. Here are the alternatives that I came up with to solve the "problems" that Blur has.

The calendar doesn't scroll and only shows three appointments. It resizes, sure, but there is so much padding around each event that you can only see five events at a time in a full screen widget. I needed a better calendar so I installed Pure Calendar widget (~$2) which doesn't scroll either but I get between two or three days worth of calendar events.

The next issue was actually more difficult to find a solution for. Sense allows you to create a shortcut to call a person with one tap. So on my home screen I had the faces of my family members and I could just tap the face and boom, phone call made. Blur only allowed you to add a link to the person's contact page, but from there you can tap on their phone number and it will connect you. I feel weird saying this, but that seems like to many taps. I want one tap calling! I won't give you the whole story about finding a solution to this problem, but there were at least three apps installed to solve this problem. I finally settled on One Touch Call/SMS (Free!) which works like a champ.

During my search for calendars and one tap calls I happened to install Launcher Pro Plus (Launcher Pro is free, to get some of the extra features you have to upgrade to Launcher Pro Plus which is ~$3). While playing with LPP I just found the calendar form that I have been searching for (scrolling agenda!) so Pure Calendar is about to get deleted. Anyway, Launcher Pro Plus has a couple of other fun features like a quick launch bar at the bottom that you can load with links to applications or contacts. It has snazzy transitions between home screens and a plethora of other features (including a calendar with an agenda!). One cool feature Blur and LPP shares is the ability to resize widgets. I highly recommend LPP.

Anyway, my XPRT is more to my liking now.