THE BASICS - WALLPAPER FOR DROID 2 (PART 1)

So what do you think of when someone mentions the word "wallpaper" to you? I immediately return to my childhood, and the memories of watching my Dad trying to wallpaper several rooms in our house. It was quite entertaining really. I would find a spot in a corner or behind a chair where I would be out of sight and watch his face turn multiple shades of red while he tried not to blow a gasket as he battled the wallpaper. He fought valiantly and seemed to win most of the times - at least until my Mom would come by and point out the places where the wallpaper pattern didn't match up. Needless to say, I've never had wallpaper in any of my homes as an adult.

THE TECHNICAL STUFF

Obviously, it's a lot different for your Droid 2 phone. Luckily, it's easier too. Wallpaper for your phone is very similar to the wallpaper on your computer. It's an image that serves as the background for your phone's display and gives you a chance to add a bit of your personality to your phone. 

Wallpaper for the Droid 2 comes in two flavors - images and live wallpaper. Images are pictures, graphics, etc, that must be in the jpg or png format. Live wallpaper is wallpaper that moves or is animated, a fish swimming around your screen for example. **BEWARE - Using live wallpaper drains your battery quicker.**

Wallpaper comes in different sizes, usually given in increments of pixels. The wallpaper size for the Droid 2 is 960 x 854 pixels. ALERT - Here comes the only tricky part....So if the wallpaper is 960 x 854 pixels, then the phone's display should be 960 x 854 pixels too, right? WRONG! 

Each screen on your phone is 480 x 854 pixels. Therefore, if you had your phone set up for only two screens, the first screen would show the left half of the image and the second screen would show the right half of the image. Let's do the math.....

1st screen at 480 pixels wide + 2nd screen at 480 pixels wide = wallpaper width of 960 pixels

But who has just two screens on their phone?! The Android operating system handles more than two screens by shifting the background slightly (less than 480 pixels) to the left or right depending on how many screens you have. This is why when you move between screens, part of the image that was on the previous screen still shows up in the new screen.

So what does this mean for you? Well, when you are trying to find images to use as wallpaper for your phone, if the image size is 960 x 854 pixels, you won't have to trim or shrink the image which will result in a better background.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW IN A NUTSHELL

• The two types of wallpaper are images and live wallpaper.
• An image must be a jpg or png file.
• Droid 2 wallpaper size is 960 x 854 pixels.

NEXT TIME:  How To Change Your Wallpaper On The Droid 2