This week was very interesting in the mobile world. Both David and Goliath were too busy dealing with their own bad press to worry about smacking each other in the face.

On Friday, Internet erupted with pretty serious accusations against Motorola and how they allegedly booby-trapped their Droid X, their flagship Android-powered superstar, so that no ROM hacking could be done whatsoever.. otherwise the device would pretty much self-destruct.

On the same day, Mark Milian from the LA Times wrote a piece on the inclusion of useless applications by carriers and the reasons behind it.

Absolutely Android put up an article titled “Why Motorola should be asked to  leave the Open Handset Alliance“, which maybe was a bit of an overreaction that we all shared at that point, but ended up somewhat appeased when Motorola “clarified” the situation. Yes, it’s arguable.

Around the same time, Apple was in damage control mode with the iPhone 4 antenna fiasco leading up to the press conference on Friday, where Steve Jobs openly admitted he actually is considering refunds and is giving shit away to avoid a mutiny among his unholy horde. Apple. Giving back money and free shit. Because they fucked up.

It was definitely a very interesting week in the mobile world.

Bill Shackett, a few minutes ago, wrote a comment in reply to one of my Xperia review and reminded me about all of this, and mostly about the junkware stories. I vented about that very thing quite passionately in two articles I wrote last month, and I thought it would be a good idea to write a post, instead of a reply to his comment, to answer his question: how the hell do you solve that problem? It’s annoying, and if you’re reading this chances are you agree with me. I don’t mind bundled applications, I understand the motives behind their inclusion and have no problem with a little promotion where you can… when it’s well done. Carriers and manufacturers should not make bundled applications uninstallable or worse, like Sony Ericsson for the X10a, completely hinder the operating system. The Xperia X10 is stuck on the 1.6 version of the Android OS when the current stable version is 2.2, because their attempted symbiotic integration into their obsolete version didn’t pan out as they planned. They did promise an update to 2.2 in Q4 of this year… but by then, the OS will be even more advanced. Yes, they did good with the patch they released last week, but it really feels like an Apple-flavored cookie to basically say “hey, we’re doing something. It’s not what you want, but it’s something, right?”

So I thought I’d explain to Bill and everyone of you how to get rid, as best as you can, of bundled applications on an Android platform. It’s not foolproof, but it’s working great for me.

Step 1: Get Startup Auditor

Startup Auditor is a program by VesperaNovus that allows you to control what applications are launched automatically when your phone starts up. Bill had an issue where Maps would always be running, and I agree, it’s really annoying. Foursquare, Facebook, Weather Applications, most Twitter clients, and pretty much everything that could involve notifications and data update is running in the background on the Android. I like to control these things, I don’t need the ones that I install myself, so I sure as hell don’t need the bundled applications which I never run and are hidden from every menu to suck up battery juice while they sit and do nothing. Some applications conveniently have that option in their settings, but most don’t, sadly. You can get it on the Android Market for 0.99$ – trust me, it’s worth it just for one feature: aside from doing what it advertises, it also allows you specify if the application you prevent from running at startup should also be automatically killed when launched. So carriers can’t play a timed auto-run trick on you. How’s that for sticking it to the man?

Step 2: Get dxTop

I know it’ll sound a bit restrictive for you maybe, but this is what I found to be the best solution. dxTop is an alternative Home application that has a lot of cool improvements over whatever standard (or carrier-bundled) versions of your default Home screen. One of them is a native task killer that you can access just by sliding a drawer, showing you which applications are running, recently used and which services are initiated. From there, you can long press any running apps’ icon to kill it selectively, kill all apps, kill all services or just nuke everything. Now, I know the opinions on having task killers on Android are  mitigated. Some people need to have control and go against the intended  design and some claim having a task killer sucks as much resources as  you’d save by killing unwanted applications. My take? I agree with both.  I like to have control, and I can charge up whenever I need so battery  isn’t that much of a concern to me. That’s why I went with a task killer  – but not just any. I figured if I was going to spend resources on  something purely obsessive, I might as well make it worth it, so I went with a full home replacement with a native task killer. The one and only inconvenience with that is simply that you cannot have an ignore list of applications you might want to keep running, like your Twitter client and Google Talk for example. I’ll have a more thorough article on dxTop once I finish evaluating a few applications for a top 10 list I am planning to write soon, dxTop is definitely on it though, of that I can assure you.

Step 3: Get Memory Monitor

Another advantage of running dxTop is this pretty cool widget called Memory Monitor. It’ll sit one of your Home screens and show you a pretty (customizable) graph of your memory usage. Tapping it allows you to kill all apps or services to regain control of your resources.

Using these three things will allow you to tune your control over what runs at startup, what’s allowed to be automatically open, and what you want to be running when you care enough to look at your resources usage. Plus with dxTop, you do it with mad style. I realize however that dxTop might not be your thing, there are lots of different tastes, habits and Home applications out there, but seeing as this one is my favorite, I hope I still managed to provide a viable solution, or at the very least inspiration, to Bill’s problem. Lastly, I’d like to point you to Bill’s website , or at least the one he wrote in the ‘website’ field of the comment form, an active little community of Xperia X10 owners/enthusiasts, which can sometimes come in as handy as the xda-developers forums themselves. I’m always amazed when a home link from a comment is not spam, I was almost knocked unconscious when it turned out to be a great find, so thanks for brightening my day!

Note: All the applications mentioned in this article are available on the Android Market. Sorry for the lack of QR codes. I realize some of the applications are not free and offer only a toned-down version to test out and they are available through other canals that enable you to obtain them for free. While I encourage the method for longer testing periods and more through evaluation of the features that are not available or modified in the free version, I also encourage the developers of this market. If you like the applications, please consider buying them or making a donation to their developer. Thanks!