Must-Try Free Wallpaper Utilities for your Android Smart Phones Smartphones such as Mabilo and Wallpaper Rotator
Introduction
Wallpapers are one of the easiest ways to personalize your phone, and express your personality, without a major resource drain. There are plenty of free wallpaper utilities that help you manage your wallpapers, and to enhance them. These are standard wallpaper utilities, so you don't need Android 2.X to use them. On the other hand, it sure does not hurt to have them. All were tested on Motorola Droid running Android 2.1-update1, but should work on almost any Android device, including HTC Droid Eris, Droid Incredible, Hero, and Legend; Motorola Backflip, Devour, and so on.
If you rather learn about Live Wallpapers, please read the hub "Review of Live Wallpapers for Android Phones" instead.
Wallaby
Wallaby is a newcomer. It does something very important: it fixes up your wallpaper.
If you pick a picture from the gallery for wallpaper, you usually have to choose just a section in the middle. You can never seem to use the entire picture. Well, worry no more with Wallaby to the rescue.
With it installed, there is a new choice in wallpaper picker called Wallaby. Pick it, then you go into Wallaby to choose a bitmap. Once you picked it, hit "set as wallpaper", and voila, it is scaled properly! It really is that simple.
World Tour
Want a "fresh" wallpaper every hour (or less), from famous exotic locations all around the world? World Tour is your answer! By accessing high resolution webcam snapshots from around the world, from Aruba to Switzerland, from Paris to San Francisco, World Tour provides "live" looks at exotic locations around the world. You can follow specific webcams, or let the program pick for you. You can even make it skip the cameras at night. If you need better visibility for your icons and widgets, you can also 'dim/gray' the background. It's fun, and it doesn't eat up CPU and battery like LiveWallpaper. Though for optimum battery conservation, update once per hour, or less often, as it does need to access the Internet to get those pictures.
Wallpaper Rotator
Have a bunch of wallpaper, and you don't want to see the same one over and over? Use Wallpaper Rotator! Point the program to the directory where you keep all your wallpapers, and let it pick for you. Set the change interval, and that's it!
If you want more variety, you can let it log into your Flickr account and access the stuff from there instead. Though for optimum battery use, keep it internal, only access the local pictures. Combine with a wallpaper downloader manager, and you will always enjoy fresh wallpapers!
Mabilo Wallpaper
Part of Mabilo family of crowd-sourced content aggregator, this one provides access to wallpapers of all subjects.Stuff available varies from military to anime to sports. The default categories, in fact, are rather useless. Use search instead, enter a subject, and you'll probably find SOMETHING.
In fact, Mabilo works very well with Wallpaper Rotator. Just specify the Mabilo Wallpaper folder as your Wallpaper Rotator source directory.
If you prefer your own Wallpaper Aggregator, the same idea should work as well.
Wallpaper Label
Do you want to label each of the different "desktop areas" with your wallpaper? No problem! Wallpaper label will do that. First, pick a wallpaper from within wallpaper label, then for each of the "desktops" you can enter a label. The default are just numbers, like 1,2,3,4,5. You can enter anything you want though, just keep it short. Hit "set", and you got a desktops with their individual labels. Maybe "life", "internet", "utilities", "social", and "home"? (Note: obviously, do NOT combine with Wallpaper Rotator)
Conclusion
A static wallpaper is a good way to customize your phone without draining your phone's resources like a live wallpaper, and these utilities should increase your enjoyment of such wallpapers. Enjoy, and stay tuned for even MORE reviews of Android apps and utilities.
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