How Tos

How to rearrange your Android Home screens

Keep your Android ‘appy and organised

How to rearrange your Android Home screens
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So the paid games and apps on the Android Market are almost here (well, they are here if you’re reading in the US), and as any iPhone, Palm or WinMo owner will know, once you get that inevitable software bug you’re handset’s going to fill up with all manner of randomly chucked-about icons.

So we thought we’d show you how to keep your Android screens organised and clutter free, by arranging your icons neatly.

Here you can see our Android Home page on our G1 handset. You’ll probably note the awesome cool Pitfall wallpaper, which we’ll show you how to do in a later ‘How To’ (that rhymes, and you know it does). Anyway, we’re not fans of cluttering up this particular screen, so slide it off to the right, and we’ll begin work on the left hand screen.
As you can see, we’ve got one or two games on there already. But we just got a new game, and it’s so good we don’t want to have to hunt through the file explorer to find it.
Open the file explorer by pulling the tab at the bottom up the screen. Here you can see your long list of programs in no order whatsoever (thank you, Google).
Touch and hold the icon for the application you want to move to the Home screen. You’ll feel a slight vibration as it unlocks, and the file explorer will disappear, but don’t let go of the icon just yet.
You’ll notice you can slide the icon around anywhere you want (including the adjacent screens, if that’s your desire).
When it’s roughly in position, let go of the icon and it’ll auto-align to a grid, so everything’s nicely lined up. You can now start your app directly from the Home screen.
Should you get fed up of your app and want to remove the icon from the Home screen, touch and hold it once again until it unlocks. At this point, the incon increases in size and the symbol on the file explorer tab changes to a dustbin.
Dragging your icon onto the dustbin and letting go of it removes the icon from the home page. It’s worth knowing that all this does is delete the icon - the application is still safely installed and available from within the file explorer, so don’t worry about deleting stuff from the Android Home screens.


Spanner Spencer
Spanner Spencer
Yes. Spanner's his real name, and he's already heard that joke you just thought of. Although Spanner's not very good, he's quite fast, and that seems to be enough to keep him in a regular supply of free games and away from the depressing world of real work.