Goondu DIY: simple tweaks for the Samsung Galaxy S4

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is one great phone when it comes to hardware like its 5-inch Super AMOLED screen. Yet, by packing in a whole of features – including some crapware – the Korean phone maker may make you pull your hair out in frustration at times.

How do you get get a “clean” Android interface, without all the clunky bells and whistles? Here are some suggestions.

1. Get rid of Touchwiz (sort of)
Though it has improved over the years, Samsung’s Touchwiz interface remains one that many seasoned Android users just love to hate. With its poorly spaced-out gaudy icons, it’s not my cup of tea either.

Taking my Galaxy S4 out of the box today, the first thing I did was to remove all those widgets that Samsung had placed on the main screens. This not only saves screen real estate but can possibly improve battery life and performance.

To avoid Samsung’s Touchwiz interface as much as possible, I installed the Nova Launcher app. This is often the preferred launcher for many Android geeks looking for a lightweight replacement for phone makers’ add-on interfaces.

What I did was to change the number of columns to five for the App Drawer, so this shows me a lot more apps when I want to browse through them. More importantly, Nova Launcher does away with the ugly Samsung interface and brings along one that resembles a clean Android display.

It doesn’t correct everything, of course. You still have the big fat icons on the Samsung notification bar and when you go to your system settings, those poorly-spaced items still irk you. But at least the main screen you stare at so often is much nicer.

2. Replace the SMS app
Samsung’s rather uncool interface extends to the built-in SMS app as well. If you still fancy the good old, iPhone-style balloon conversations, then fine. But there are other apps that show more information without taking up half the screen.

One of them is Chomp SMS, a neat and simple SMS app that you can download to take over your SMS functions. Replacing the Samsung interface, it is a treat for sore eyes.

3. Get your Google services back
Being the biggest Android phone maker, Samsung obviously touts its own apps and services at every opportunity. Some are useful, like the ability to remotely control the phone should you lose it, while others are rather unnecessary. In many instances, the Android versions from Google are much better.

If you use Gmail, go download the Gmail app from Google instead of using Samsung’s e-mail app. The Gmail app is a lot more flexible and powerful. For calendaring, you can use the default Samsung planner, or download Google Calendar. I prefer Google’s for its simplicity.

There’s also a Google app called Keep, which is an alternative to Samsung’s S Memo. Keep has a much cooler interface, which lets you save all your notes and retrieve them even if you are using another device, say, a tablet. All you have to do is log in to your Google account, of course.

4. Take out that irritating lock screen
When you wake your phone from sleep, you have to endure a rather irritating lock screen that comes with the words Life Companion in some sort of Comic Sans-like font (“cool jazz”, Samsung calls it). Did someone tell Samsung’s designers that Comic Sans is uncool?

Well, thankfully, you can get rid of that without much effort. Just go to your system settings, select the My Device tab and then Lock Screen. Here, select Lock screen widgets. You’ll be able to just place a clock on the lock screen or change the message to something else, hopefully in a less hideous font.

More tweaks
The tweaks above are but the easy ones that anyone can check out.

For the more adventurous, there is also the option to “root” the phone and get complete control over its software (see how-to here). The danger to that is you can screw things up if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Share with us your own tweaks for the Galaxy S4.