Is there a way, without rooting the phone to basically freeze some apps from running? For example, I don't want the Amazon MP3 program launching. Linux / Android OS is doing me no favors by launching stuff I'm not using.
Every couple of days, I power down the unit by long-pressing the Call Cancel button.
I would take the plunge and just root. It's nowhere near as difficult as it sounds (READ then follow all directions carefully) and you can remove what you like with little difficulties.
I did it on my friend's phone and removed ThinkFree Office (that thing took up10-15mb) Where and Amazon Mp3 to give her space on her phone, plus I used Titanium Backup/apps2Sd (the root version, I don't have the phone with me now) to move practically all non essential apps (System apps and widgets stay internal) to her SD card so now she has 27mb of space free and that's including everything on the phone, like Angry Birds, handcent, Go Launcher Ex adfree, Titanium Manager, and many more things.
Finally, last night I stayed up and installed a kernel on her phone (Ultimate V3 or something like that) and her linpack went up to 8.6.
Now keep in mind, that I did all this for a woman who gets upset if I change the wallpaper on her phone, for me to be able to do all that on her phone and her not to really notice any negative impact is pretty good.
If you're interested I can look up and provide the links that I used, but I'm pretty sure I did it the long way around and it should be even easier.
***UPDATE**** Sorry went off in a tangent, what I meant to say was that you should take the plunge and root. If you're worried about making changes to your system, once you're rooted, you can freeze Amazon mp3 (which doesn't change anything, it just stops it from loading up but doesn't uninstall it) and the like with Titanium Backup and you're done with minimal changes or risks. You could probably unroot right after if you like, but ask someone with more experience than me.
If you want to improve your phone with minimum changes, I would root(one-click), freeze the bloatware, and install the custom Kernel(No visible changes, just makes the phone smarter about certain things) and then leave it alone. Your phone would appear completely stock, you would just have less stuff loading up at start, better battery life, faster performance and etc... without changing the way you use your phone.
This should give you an idea of what you can do with Titianium Backup and how to do it. (freezing apps, uninstalling apps, moving apps to SD and etc...)
