13 ways to optimize your Android smartphone
13 ways to optimize your
Android smartphone
Make your Android phone
more powerful, useful, and efficient with these 13 quick tips
By JR Raphael, InfoWorld,
July 21, 2014
13 ways to optimize your
Android smartphone
Listen up, Android users:
It's time for a smartphone tuneup.
Don't get me wrong, most
Android devices work fine out of the box. But with a few minutes of
manipulation and a few helpful apps, you can optimize your phone to make it
more powerful, useful, and efficient. Isn't that what technology's all about?
Let's get to it, then.
Here are 13 quick tweaks that'll improve your Android experience.
1. Blast away bloatware
Manufacturers and carriers
love to clutter up phones with preinstalled apps, better known as bloatware.
But just because it's there by default doesn't mean you have to live with it
forever.
To send your bloatware
packing, head into your system settings and look for the Apps option. Swipe
over to the right until you're in the column labeled "All," then
scroll through the list until you find the app you want to zap.
Tap the app and look for
the Uninstall or Disable button. Next, pound that button while belting out your
most intimidating battle cry* -- then repeat as needed.
*Battle cry optional (but
strongly recommended)
2. Make Chrome more
efficient
Using less bandwidth can make
mobile browsing faster and help you burn through your monthly data allotment
less quickly. Best of all, it takes just a flip of a switch to move yourself
into a more efficient gear.
Open up your Chrome app, tap
the Menu icon at the top-right of the screen (or press your phone's Menu
button, if you're using an older device), and select Settings. Tap the option
labeled "Bandwidth management," then select "Reduce data
usage."
Flip the switch to turn the
feature on-- shazam! Chrome willstart optimizing content to decrease the amount of data sent to your
phone.
3. Take control of your
home screen
Your phone's home screen is the
starting point for everything you do, so why not make it work the way you want?
A custom
Android launcher can
make your phone infinitely more flexible and productive. It replaces your
entire home screen and app drawer with a different and generally far more
customizable environment.
There are plenty of
interesting launchers worth exploring. My favorite is Nova Launcher (pictured),
which emulates the stock Android environment but allows you to tweak and
improve all sorts of details with the setup. Other launchers, like EverythingMe and Terrain Home,
reimagine the home screen experience more dramatically with features like
context-sensitive panels and card-centric layouts.
4. Step up your task
switching
Find yourself jumping between
apps a lot? Android's native Recent Apps feature can help, but you can give
multitasking even more oomph with a third-party task manager likeSwitchr.
Switchr lets you swipe in from
the edge of your phone's display to bring up a specific set of commonly used or
recently used applications. It allows you to set up which area of the phone's
edge acts as the trigger and control exactly which apps appear in the list. You
can customize all sorts of stuff about how the list looks and works, too,
allowing you to create an experience that's tailored to your personal workflow.
5. Make your display
smarter
Your Android phone can
automatically keep your display on when you're actively using it and off when
you're not -- if you give it the right tools to get the job done.
An app called Screebl is all
you need. Screebl uses your device's accelerometer to detect how you're holding
the phone. If the device is in a position that indicates active use, it'll keep
the display lit up; if not, it'll shut it off.
It's simple and effective: No
more wasted power -- and no more annoying instances of your screen
automatically going dark when you're trying to read something.
6. Fix your phone's
autobrightness system
While we're on the subject of
smartphone screen improvements, let's make your device's autobrightness system
a little more effective, shall we?
An app called Lux does
what your phone should do by default: It regulates your screen's brightness in a way that
actually makes sense -- both
for your eyes and for your battery life. The latter is especially important, as
display use is almost always the single biggest consumer of battery with
today's big and bright screens.
Lux is far more aggressive and
effective than most stock setups, and it even lets you make adjustments to
"teach" it your own personal preferences for different lighting
environments if you want. Fire it up, and watch your phone's stamina improve.
7. Get a better keyboard
Most Android phones ship with
decent virtual keyboards, but nine times out of 10, you can find one that's
better. So why settle for OK when outstanding is an option?
The Google Play Store is full
of excellent third-party
keyboard choices. I like SwiftKey (pictured),
which combines personalized next-word prediction with superb swipe-to-type
functionality and a host of opportunities for customization.Swype and TouchPal are a
couple of other popular contenders.
8. Make your lock screen
more useful
Android allows you to put
widgets not only on your home screen but also on
your lock screen -- the
first thing you see when you press your phone's power button.
Lock-screen widgets can give
you a quick glance at info like the weather, upcoming appointments, your
phone's battery percentage, or the latest news without having to unlock your
device. You can combine multiple lock-screen widgets so that you can access
different types of info with a single swipe.
Tons of possibilities are out
there; head to the Security section of your phone's settings to make sure
lock-screen widgets are enabled, then look for the apps that
provide you with the info you need.
9. Take control of notifications
Android's notification system can be incredibly handy -- until
an overzealous app starts filling up your notification panel with information
you don't need.
Android has a built-in mechanism for taming such pesky programs.
If you can't find an option within the app itself to disable its notifications,
mosey over to the Apps section of your phone's system settings. Scroll through
the list until you find the app in question, tap on its name, then uncheck the
box labeled "Show notifications."
The app will never annoy you again.
10. Don't let an
important email go unnoticed
Speaking of notifications,
wouldn't Gmail alerts on your device be far more useful if they could alert you
only whenimportant messages arrive?
Turns out they can -- if you
know the trick. The first step is to sign into the Gmail Web
interface and create a filter that'll assign a special label to any
messages you consider important. You might want to base the filter on a
sender's name, for instance, or the presence of certain words in the subject.
The next slide shows how to
complete the process, shifting attention to your phone.
Once the filter's saved, go
into the settings section of the Gmail app on your phone and select your
account from the list that appears. Select "Manage labels" and tap on
the label you just created.
Now tap "Sync
messages" and change the setting to "Sync: Last 30 days." Last
but not least, check the box for "Label notifications" and tap the
Sound option to select what sound will play whenever an important message comes
in.
Repeat the process to create
multiple labels -- each with its own set of triggering conditions -- to get
alerted with different sounds for different types of important emails.
11. Let yourself zoom free
Most websites these days are optimized for mobile viewing, but
that doesn't mean you never need to zoom in to see something more closely.
Unfortunately -- and somewhat bafflingly -- many mobile pages don't allow you
to do that.
Here's how to get around that irksome restriction: Go into the
settings of the Chrome Android browser and hop into the Accessibility section.
Check the box labeled "Force enable zoom."
That's it: You can now pinch or tap to zoom as you please, even
on a site that doesn't natively allow it. So long, squinting.
12. Free your phone's
intelligence
Perhaps the most powerful
action Android allows is the ability to make your phone contextually
intelligent. Maybe you want your device to sense when you're at home, then
activate Wi-Fi and connect to your home network. Or maybe you want it to lock
your screen and go into silent mode anytime you place it face down. The
possibilities are practically endless.
For simple contextual
intelligence, an app called Agent is a
good place to start. Agent has recipes for basic tasks like modifying how your
phone acts based on the time of day or current calendar events. It can detect
when you're driving and, for example, read your text messages aloud and let you
respond without touching your phone.
13. Take the learning up
a notch
If you really want to get wild
-- and don't mind getting geeky -- an app called Tasker takes
it to another level. It lets you create a massive range of if-then-style
profiles to control how your phone acts based on almost any variable you can
imagine -- location, battery level, the phone's physical orientation, what app
is actively open, or almost anything else the phone can detect. I even use
Tasker to route my
calls to different numbers when I'm in specific places.
Tasker's interface isn't easy
to navigate, but if you're reasonably tech-savvy and willing to take the time
to figure it out, it has the potential to make your phone more powerful than
you thought possible.
Comments
Post a Comment