Application Icon Control

For starters, an ever-increasing number of applications, as games or tools, are becoming available for an ever-increasing number of mobile devices. Whether downloaded to a PC, iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry, Android or whatever becomes the flavor of the week, there will always be more applications available than any one person could possibly use. But is your current mobile device capable of holding enough applications that you might access on a regular basis?

As an example, the current iPhone 3G can show 9 pages of icons with 16 on each page. That is 144 applications, plus the 4 in the static bar or dock on the bottom of the iPhone. I say “show” because it is possible to load more, but the iPhone will not show the new applications until one of the previous 144 has been deleted. Of course you must have enough memory left to load these applications in the first place, which shouldn’t be difficult with 8 or 16 GB of memory.

How often do we load an application, use it a few times and then forget about it? Even a light user who loads 2 to 3 applications a week on their iPhone would run out of icon space in the first year. The hottest application to hit the download market will likely be somewhere near page 9 as it is the most recent application that we would have downloaded. For these reasons, it is prudent to keep our application icons tidy. Think of it like email. Your mobile device needs a good cleansing once in a while. Remove the unused applications and shuffle the icons around into a system that works for you!

How do we move and remove the iPhone icons you might ask? Since iPhone software 1.1.3, simply tap an icon and hold it until the icons start shaking. While they are shaking you can swap them with other icons and even move them to a different page. Click the small x at the top of the icon to remove the application. A couple of minutes playing with it and you will be an expert.

It might just be time for an application that manages all my applications!