Decluttering a Motorola pro plus

Bloat removal. Even though I said I wouldn't do it I've started disabling the some of the packaged applications just because they were always popping up in context menus and annoying the bejesus out of me. Rather than just provide a list I'll try here to provide some information about each application so you can decide if you want it or not. Also, I'm removing these one at a time and running the phone for a week or so in order to weedle out any unintended consequences. So, this list may get longer in time, please check back if the tension is not too much for you.

There's a variety of ways you can disable these applications.

• You need a rooted phone.
• I'm using "ES File Explorer" from the market to rename the apks to something else (in fact I'm appending ".old" to the end of the filename so I can reverse it and restart the application easily if I need to. Note this file explorer takes a bit of fiddling with in "Settings" to do this job.

APK	What's it do
7Digital.apk	Alternative Music player that tries to sign you up to online services, keeps appearing when you don't want it and eats up your RAM and memory card.
gotomeeting.apk	Some hideous collaboration software that would give my IT security guys a heart attack even if I could persuade anyone else to use it
RichLocation.apk	Amalgamated location Social Sign in to tell all your fabulous friends exactly where you are. I don't need them to know.
RichLocation.apk	Amalgamated Social Sign in to tell all your fabulous friends what you are doing (i.e. status updates). I don't need them to know any of that that either.
TTSService.apk	TTS. If you don't know what it is you don't need it.
GlobalUnplug.apk	This puts up a popup which tells you to switch off your charger from the wall to save energy when you unplug your charger from the phone. It can quite frankly stop that immediately.

Motorola Pro Plus - a review

Completely subjective review from a few weeks use. The phone is upgraded to the latest and probably last 2.3.6 release:

• Battery is a bit rubbish - it will barely make a day of fairly average usage. 
• Motoblur is for me just all noise - I've ended up removing all my accounts from the Motoblur umbrella and using the standard, individual Android apps to access email, texts etc. I've decided I don't want them blurred. Annoyingly I need to keep the Motoblur account itself to get phone updates.
• It was really difficult for me to get my corporate email working as I wanted so I ended up using an older (froyo) version of the email application, getting that to work was in itself a trial however it's synching fine now.
• It's crashed once, which is once more than my old android phone did in a year!
• Having a physical keyboard is 1000x better than a touch keyboard.
• The screen is great - I don't play games etc. but it's certainly big enough for everything I want on it. Slightly annoyingly because it is oddly proportioned, certain apps (e.g. BBC iPlayer) don't show up on Google Play. If you can get hold of the APKs (e.g. by pulling them from the store with another phone) they generally load and work just fine.
• It's just slightly bigger than I expected - my car mount and my well worn phone cover won't work any more :(
• The performance of the gallery is super slow. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of that one.
• The advertised 4GB onboard storage is useless. It's actually 1.3GB of accessible memory (the rest is used by the system). As I generally use about 2GB of memory, I need to use an SD card. Once you stick a SD card in the phone, it starts humping everything onto that and ignores the internal memory!
• Some of the apps  (I'm talking about you Samba sharing) live in that nether world of not quite working right.
• Managed to Root the phone which unleashed some goodness (e.g. it no longer says "TESCO" (my network provider) in the status bar all the time.