Hello All! This is our first installment of our How To series on making your Android device yours! That’s right! Everyone who has a Droid Razr, HTC Desire, or Milestone X2 have the same device, internally, externally, and even sometimes the style or launcher setup. The launcher is the “desktop” of your phone, where you place your widgets, icons, and your wallpaper. Of course, most people aren’t aware that you can actually modify this without voiding any warranty or harming their device! That’s what this series is about, making your device unique and personal.

First and foremost, you need to have a Google account on your device. Most of you already have this done, it’s usually put on the device at the initial setup. The reason this is needed is to download things from the Market. Second, we need to gather a couple of things. There are quite a lot of awesome launchers to choose from starting with ADW.Launcher (Free|Paid), Launcher Pro (Free|Paid), GO! Launcher (Free), Launcher 7 (Free|Donate) and SBB Shell 3D (Paid). Some are free, some are paid. ADW.Launcher is the one you’ll be seeing in the screen shots but I will say that I’ve used Launcher Pro for quite sometime and it is an awesome launcher as well. GO! is free and very popular, SPB is unfortunately the most expensive app in the list, running at $15 USD. 

Let’s go ahead and start - 

After downloading ADW.Launcher from the Market, hit the home button, some of you will be treated with the sight of your new launcher but some of you may see a pop up box like this:

Select ADW.Launcher. Once you have that selected, you’ll see this beautiful sight:

Now, we’re going to go in and theme this beast! Click on the hardware menu button on your device. This could look like 4 squares, 3 lines, or something completely different but most devices have them, usually located at the bottom. You should see a pop up menu with a “More” option, tap that, then you’ll see “ADWSettings”. Click that and you’ll see this:

Now, in the free version you can set your app drawer to either slide side to side or up and down. I prefer the vertical scroll instead of the horizontal pagination. So that’s how that’s what I’ve selected here:

On the paid version, you can have an awesome 3D style vertical scroll where it makes the icons appear to be pulling in and out of the device, really nifty stuff!

Now that you have that selected, let’s theme it!

I download Ice Cream Sandwich Theme by KovDev (Free) which gives you the feeling of running Google’s newest OS installment without harming your device! We need to be in the ADW.Launcher settings again, and select Theme Preferences. You’ll be met with a screen like this:

After setting the theme, hit the home button and you’ll get to see your beautifully themed device for the first time:

Move those icons down to those blank stars and you’ll get something like this:

And if you add some widgets and take some time on it, which I know you will, the end results could be amazing! 

Next time, we’ll create an amazing lock screen and add some widgets to make your Android even more mouth watering and juicy!