Hybrid Notebook/Tablet, Android-Style From Lenovo

Customizing the tablet

As with all Android tablets, you're free to modify the look, feel and functionality of the S2110 in many ways without having to resort to "rooting" it, a process akin to jailbreaking iOS devices.

After powering up the tablet and going through the initial setup process, the first things I did were to change the tablet's home screen wallpaper and add several system tweaking and management apps. In the screenshots below, I:

• Set the home screen wallpaper to my favorite nebula image.

• Installed about 200 apps, mostly side-loaded from my growing stash of Android app APKs.

• Installed the Android Folder Organizer app and used it to create 15 folders on the primary home screen. That makes it easy for me to launch any app or browser-bookmark with one or two screen taps.

• Installed my favorite alternative keyboard, the Hacker's Keyboard. Note: another alternative keyboard, the GO Keyboard, comes preinstalled on the S2110 and is also shown below, as is Android's excellent Google Voice Typing function.

These screenshots below show the tablet's customized lock screen. Note the modified wallpaper and the use of Android's pattern-unlock option.

Customized lock screen with pattern-unlock. (Click image to enlarge.)

The following screenshots show the tablet's customized home screen (top), plus Android 4.0's popup status panes (bottom):

Customized home screen and pop-up status pane   (Click images to enlarge.)

Now let's look at one of my favorite third-party apps, Folder Organizer, which provides more extensive features and flexibility than the standard Android 4.x folder function. Using it, you can create customized folders, app launchers, and bookmarks, and assign a custom icon image to each.

My customized S2110 has a single home screen (shown above), which contains a combination 15 folders, 47 app launchers and three widgets. The following set of screenshots reveals what's inside my 15 home-screen folders:

Contents of the home screen's 15 folders (Click images to enlarge.)