I just got one of these phones, and have just rooted it after a while of frustration, but a whole world of difference it makes when you finally have superuser access and are able to get rid of those pesky att apps like stocks, and myatt. I have some advice for rooting, first, I hear you can brick your phone by doing this, second, you can also brick your phone by having access to all those extra features, I chanced it by perm removing some att starter apps for instance. I use superoneclick and android adb console. Two things that were stopping me were the usb drivers and not formatting the sd card before rooting. Make sure when you connect your phone to computer for rooting that windows installs it as android ADB device, not android USB device. This was frustrating because windows keeps trying to install the wrong driver, and you have to update the driver manually. Theres not too much you can do to this phone to improve performance, I am working on getting an overclocking kernel to try to pump up the mhz a little bit. This is a good phone, but slows down really easy when you have too many things running. Rooting the phone and changing the governer and memory settings have really sped this phone up so far, I can notice a big difference in responsiveness. Also rooting your phone will void the warranty, but it is NOT illegal to root your phone, just dangerous. Happy Apping!
To answer the original question, keep in mind the desktop has five pages, and you can fill them with buttons for your apps if you want. 
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