Droid X: The Missing Manual

Home Screen

Welcome to your new home, the Droid X Home screen. Get to it by pressing the Home key no matter where you are on the Droid.

Note

When you first visit your Home screen, you see a green robot icon (he’s a droid—slang for an android). Touch him to get a few basic tips about getting started with the Droid X. After that, though, you don’t need him, so press and hold the icon until a trash can appears at the bottom of the screen. Then you can drag him to the Trash.

At first glance, it’s a relatively bare screen, populated by the following:

• Notification bar. As detailed on Status Bar Icons, this bar displays the status of many phone features and a variety of notifications, like when you’ve got email waiting for you.

• App icons. Typically, the Home screen has four icons—one for text messaging, one for running a browser, one for checking voicemail, and one, titled Market, to let you search for and download new apps—tens of thousands of them, many of them free. As you’ll see later in this section, you can add or delete icons from the Home screen.

• Permanent icons. Down at the bottom of the screen are three large icons. Unlike the rest of the icons on the Home screen, you can’t delete them, and you can’t add any icons here, either. The Phone icon launches the Phone app; the Contacts icon launches the Contacts app; and the Launcher icon, when tapped, reveals a whole new screen called the ...