Fascinate First Five

[LaFinDuMonde]

Good day,
I have been waiting for Verizon to offer the Fascinate at the decent price for several months. Today - they offered it as their 12 Days of Christmas deal and I took the bait.

I've been reading and watching for quite some time but I want to know everyone's opinion on a few things before I brick my new phone.

It will be arriving tomorrow and I'd like to know:

What are the best customization?
What's the best way to remove Bing without having to hack the phone?
What are your favorite apps?
What's the best way to deal with battery life?
What are the absolute MUST things to do?



Basically... if you were restart with the phone TODAY, what would you do?


Thanks in advance and I look forward to reading your replies.


Jim

 

[Johnly]

You are going to love it, very cool phone.

 

[ocgreenmachine]

Good day,
I have been waiting for Verizon to offer the Fascinate at the decent price for several months. Today - they offered it as their 12 Days of Christmas deal and I took the bait.

I've been reading and watching for quite some time but I want to know everyone's opinion on a few things before I brick my new phone.

It will be arriving tomorrow and I'd like to know:

What are the best customization?
What's the best way to remove Bing without having to hack the phone?
What are your favorite apps?
What's the best way to deal with battery life?
What are the absolute MUST things to do?



Basically... if you were restart with the phone TODAY, what would you do?


Thanks in advance and I look forward to reading your replies.


Jim

Hopefully this will help:

1. I personally like Launcher Pro Plus for the look and feel of the menus... Launcher Pro has a free app that has some features locked, but the paid version is well worth the few dollars it was.
2. To remove bing, you have to either: root the phone (hack) or wait for froyo (android 2.2) to be released for the fascinate.
3. There are a few apps I would recommend: Launcher Pro Plus, Pandora, SmsPopup, FolderOrganizer, AngryBirds, Custom car home.
4. To save battery, I suggest turning the screen brightness down to 10-20% and turning off automatic brightness adjustment.
5. If you are tech saavy, i'd say root your phone. It can help improve performance by removing bloatware from your device.

Hope this helps.

 

[ocgreenmachine]

Oops double post

 

[mrodsunshine]

Good day,
I have been waiting for Verizon to offer the Fascinate at the decent price for several months. Today - they offered it as their 12 Days of Christmas deal and I took the bait.

I've been reading and watching for quite some time but I want to know everyone's opinion on a few things before I brick my new phone.

It will be arriving tomorrow and I'd like to know:

What are the best customization?
What's the best way to remove Bing without having to hack the phone?
What are your favorite apps?
What's the best way to deal with battery life?
What are the absolute MUST things to do?



Basically... if you were restart with the phone TODAY, what would you do?


Thanks in advance and I look forward to reading your replies.


Jim

1. there is no "best" customization, but as ocgreenmachine said, changing the launcher is probably your best bet.

2. you could download a 3rd party browser such as dolphin (which is what i use). it doesn't remove bing per se, but if you set it as your default browser, it does default the search button to google, which is nice. downside is that the 3rd party browsers aren't as quick and optimized as the stock one.

3. angry birds, music downloader pro/tunee, world newspapers, launcher pro Plus, NBA gametime.

4. work the brightness settings like ocgreenmachine said. also, turn off wifi, bluetooth, and GPS when not in use. if you dont need to communicate at all, put your phone on airplane mode.

5. also agree with ocgreenmachine about rooting. not for everyone, but the benefits are fantastic in relation to the drawbacks. you do have a chance to brick your phone, but there's enough community support and information available that you can for the most part, bring your phone back to life should you brick it. benefits include but not limited to: theming (if you dont like the stock colors/font), new ROMs (to speed up or clean up the phone), and new kernels, (i.e. undervolted processor for increased battery life),

 

[Sta11i0n]

I just got a new one for myself today, so I can give my old one to my girlfriend. It was easier to do it that way since I was using an upgrade from my plan and she has a separate one. I made a backup of my old one before activating the new. Fired up the new one, rooted right away, flashed CWM, DJ05 Stock ROM from xda with the DJ05 modem and StupidFast v1.54 kernel. Then restored my backup (kept my original SD card) and it's like nothing had ever happened.

 

[LaFinDuMonde]

Awesome answers guys. Thanks!

I've also read that you can install Launcher Pro to fix the BING issue and then uninstall it?

I am not worried about rooting and what-not on my phone. At some point my wife will also be upgrading and if I were to put those things on her phone, it would be a mess I'm sure.

Keep the answers coming!
Thanks
Jim

 

[ocgreenmachine]

I'm not aware of any way for launcher pro to de-bing the phone.

 

[Kevin Gossett]

Perhaps the OP was thinking of using LP+ to hide the apps in the app drawer... but that doesn't remove them

 

[emptycube]

also, turn off wifi, bluetooth, and GPS when not in use.

You don't need to turn off GPS, it's only active when you open an app that needs it (like Maps or Nav). I leave mine enabled all the time, it's only active when you see that GPS symbol in the notifications bar.

 

[LaFinDuMonde]

I guess I should admit that I'm going to be using the 150 mb data plan. I should probably disable those items anyway just in case. Most of the places I'm at (work, home, inlaws house, parents home and siblings homes have wifi).

Thanks again. Also I noticed an AWESOME theme on the thread above. Any suggestions on how to implement those?

 

[JeremytheIndian]

The best de-binging that you can do without rooting is to use LauncherPro to get the Google Search Widget and to install the enhancedgooglesearch.apk that can be found in the "Bing is Dead" post found in the sticky section of ROMs/Hacks. After that the only thing that will route to bing should be a long press on the search key (this will launch bing voice search) and searching from the stock browser search bar; This can't even be fixed with root.

Other then that I would suggest Beautiful Widgets, LauncherPro Plus, Google Maps (can't remember if it was pre-installed), Pandora, Winamp and Jorte Calendar. The first 2 will cost a few bucks but you already spend plenty on the phone and service, what's another few bucks? Also, Angry Birds and Slice It are some good games to start off with.

Rooting is easy with z4 root (found in the market) but I can understand not wanting to. It took me a while but I got fed up with force closing VZ Nav and and others on every boot. If you do root you should definitely spend another few bucks and get RootExplorer and follow the instructional in "Apps that are safe to remove", also found in the stickies under ROMs/Hacks, and move some of the bloat off to the sd card.

Have Fun!

 

[Burchamj]

You don't need to turn off GPS, it's only active when you open an app that needs it (like Maps or Nav). I leave mine enabled all the time, it's only active when you see that GPS symbol in the notifications bar.

Did not know that. Thanks for the info

 

[LaFinDuMonde]

awesome info guys! I'm currently using LauncherPro and ADW - haven't decided which I'm going to go with yet.

I have most of the recommended apps from previous. How about FREE photo apps? I've got Retro Cam and tried a few others. Recommendations?

Thanks!
Jim

 

[LaFinDuMonde]

I think I'm going to stick with Launcher Pro and most like purchase plus soon. I have a few different clocks and an awesome power widget. I've been trying apps that supposedly shut off my Data connection when I'm not using it (or a switch so I can manually turn it on and off) but neither seem to work. In the 36 hours I've had the phone its already vaccumed down 9 megs and I haven't used the device off of Wifi yet... not happy. I found a cool moving water live wallpaper. I can't wait to plug into the memory card and start building some graphics on my own.

Thoughts on the data issue? More widgets?

Thanks
Jim

 

[wtherrell]

Add Locale and Locale Dock Condition and Locale Shortcut add-ons. This will let you change the app that loads when in car dock or desk dock to that of your own choosing. I use Custom Car Home for the car dock and Bedside for the desk dock.

 

[Sta11i0n]

I've been trying apps that supposedly shut off my Data connection when I'm not using it (or a switch so I can manually turn it on and off) but neither seem to work. In the 36 hours I've had the phone its already vaccumed down 9 megs and I haven't used the device off of Wifi yet... not happy.

You're always going to use some data, even on wifi, because sync services are done through VZ's 3g network versus a general interwebz connection. You can turn it off entirely when you're not using the phone by enabling airplane mode, but that will not allow wifi simultaneously.