Cyanmod

Do you ever get a little bit frustrated at the way your phone manufacturer thinks you want to use your phone?

Some carriers charge a premium for tethering (using your phone as a modem for a PC) or have annoying built in programs that you have to use, or counter-intuitive menus.

And why is there no option to reboot?

Cyanogenmod is basically an alternative to the stock operating system that you received with your phone. It is based on the Android OS, but has been improved with the things that users have demanded.

Some of the coolest things:

Tethering - use your massive data plan to run your home internet.

Phone goggles - program self restraint into your phone! No messages can be sent to your ex after beer o'clock.

Gesture lock screen - instead of neatly drawing a shape onto the nine dots on the lock screen, you can unlock your phone with any shape you like, drawn onto a blank slate.

Status bar - completely customise how your status bar looks.

Reboot - You can choose to reboot your phone instead of having to turn it off, wait, turn it back on.

Your phone company and the manufacturers don't want you to use this.

If you do, you will have no warranty and get no support from your carrier with any software glitches. Please do your research before deciding whether this would be right for you.

http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

Moving Contacts from or to an Android Phone

On your Android phone, go to 'Contacts' or 'People' and choose settings.

Click 'Import/Export' and choose 'Export to SD Card' or 'Import from SD Card'.

Exporting will save a *.vcf file on your SD card - this is as close to a standard contact type as we will ever get.

Importing a *.vcf file will add all those contacts to your phone.

If you get double ups, a lot of programs (for example Go Contacts) can consolidate and look for near or complete matches.

Once you've got your *.vcf file you can connect your Android to a computer and copy the file onto another type of phone.

App2SD

Running out of space in your phone's memory?

All those applications I recommended for you have now clogged up your phone - and it's running slow.

Check out App2SD.

It helps you to quickly move your applications onto your SD (removable) memory card.

You can move your applications without the help of this app, but finding out which ones are moveable, which ones are already there is a frustrating process - all this app does is display a list of the applications you haven't yet moved, and provides a link to the system page where you can shift it over to the SD card.