4 Tips every new Android user should know

Got yourself a new Android device? There are quite a few things that you will learn as you start using the phone or tablet more. However, below are four tips, that you should know even before you start playing around with the device as they will greatly help improve your overall user experience. 

Recent Apps

Unlike Windows Phone and iOS, Android has true multi-tasking, which allows apps to run in the background until they finish their prescribed task. This creates a problem that until and unless the user completely exits that app, it continues to run in the background occupying precious resources. You can use the Recents Apps list in Android to close such apps.

Sadly, since most Android devices come with a menu button instead of a Recents App one, most users have no idea how to access this list to close the apps present in the memory. If your Android device comes with a physical menu key, then you will need to double press on the home button or long press to bring up the Recents App list. You can then swipe away the apps to remove them from memory.

Swipe away notifications

The notification panel of Android is one of the key strengths of the OS. It not only displays notifications from all apps but also allows you to interact with them or dismiss them.

If your Android device is running Jelly Bean or higher, you can dismiss individual notifications by swiping them to the left or right. You can also try to expand them by dragging them down using a single finger gesture, which will either reveal more information or some action buttons so that you can interact directly with the app without actually opening it.

Lock screen Widgets

Widgets are a great way in Android to have all your important information available right on your home screen. Widgets, however, are not limited only to your home screen. You can also use them on your lock screen as well.

Simply swipe to the right from the lock screen and tap the + sign to add widgets to your lock screen. Keep in mind that you can have multiple lock screen pages but every page is limited to one widget.

Turn on Google Now

Google Now is easily one the best features to come out of Google’s headquarters in the last decade. It acts like your digital personal assistant and can automatically pull important data from your emails or location and show it just when you need it.

Booked a flight ticket? Google Now will automatically show your flight status, the weather of the destination you are travelling to and automatically remind you when is the best time to leave for the airport so that you don’t miss your flight. It can also keep you up to date on the latest breaking news, football and cricket scores, allow you to track your packages, remind you of your friends birthdays and much more.

Surprisingly though, Google Now is not activated by default on any Android device and neither are users prompted to enable it during the setup wizard. Turning the feature on is pretty simple and only requires users to tap on the Google Search widget on their home screen once. They will then get a Google Now wizard at the end of which they can enable the feature. If you use multiple Google IDs on your Android device, make sure to sign in with your primary one.

Missed any tip that every Android beginner should know about? Drop in a comment and let us know!

Credit:androidbeat.com

Forget your phone’s brightness settings, use Lux instead

The LG G2 has one the most crowded notification areas so I wouldn’t install an app that adds one more thing to it unless it was absolutely awesome, would I? That app is Lux and it forced me to make an exception for it because it solved all my screen brightness problems.

There are two important scenarios where I have previously struggled with screen brightness. For one, the automatic setting almost always seems a bit too low for me, especially outdoors. The second is the fact that no matter how low I set the brightness, the screen is always too bright for me when I’m chatting or reading in my bed at night. That issue, has been proven time and again in medical studies to be disturbing for the sleeping cycle.

Lux fixes both issues effortlessly and is chockfull of settings that would solve many more of your other brightness woes. The first time you launch it, you have to click the app’s power button to enable it and from there on, you can use it either in a fast and simple way, either delve into its many settings.

The simple way of using Lux

Lux sits by default in the notification area and consists of one line with the current brightness percentage and another with 6 different buttons:

• – and + let you manually change the brightness percentage by 10% increments from -100% to +100%, or the automatic brightness by 5% increments up to a 20% variation. Say for example the auto-brightness has decided to set a level of 45%, you can force it to be anywhere between 20% lower or 20% higher, and that readjustment will carry on no matter what the auto level is.
• Auto/man lets you select the current brightness mode.
• Refresh checks your conditions again and readjusts the automatic brightness.
• The three stars triggers a red overlay on top of the screen.
• The power button de/activates Lux.

Here are the Lux parameters in the notification area

Both of my brightness issues are fixed with a few clicks on these 6 buttons. During the day, I usually have Lux set on auto-brightness with a +20% adjustment. This ensures that my screen is always brighter than it thinks it should be, which is perfect for my outdoors problem and also keeps the screen quite vivid indoors.

When I’m reading, chatting or watching something at night, I switch to the manual mode, and lower the brightness to about -40%. Lux doesn’t actually reduce the screen’s level beyond zero, but it achieves this negative value by layering a transparent filter on top of the screen that darkens everything. It’s effective, makes my eyes hurt a lot less when using the G2 around bedtime, and doesn’t seem to affect my ability to fall asleep after looking at the phone for a while.

Lux adds a layer to reduce brightness below 0%

The more thorough side of Lux

If you open Lux from yous app drawer, or click on the brightness line in the notification, you will be greeted by another screen of the app. There you can slide the brightness as you want, set up profiles, tell it when to adjust the auto-brightness (periodically, dynamically, on wake, and so on), teach it the preferred level depending on your surroundings, and access the app’s exhaustive settings screen.

Nonetheless, you can tell that I have stuck with the free Lux offering. It does its job perfectly for me — and even has more options that I don’t need — which is why it has earned its spot on the notification drop-down on both my LG G2 and Nexus 7.

Credit:androidbeat.com

How to: Capture high quality stills from video footage on Samsung Galaxy smartphones

When you’re around action – whether it’s a local sporting event or, more usually, kids and pets, there’s a perennial tension between deciding whether to shoot stills or video on your camera phone. Stills will be of higher quality, but you’ll probably miss ‘the moment’, while video gets everything, but you can’t print it out and stick it on the fridge, or email it to Aunty Maud. Happily, if you have a fairly recent Samsung smartphone, there’s a ‘best of both worlds’ compromise.

The idea, you see, is that video capture is now such high resolution that it should be possible to grab stills of pretty good quality from video, i.e. you just shoot everything and worry about what still photos you want later. With 4K capture, as on the Galaxy Note 3 and Galaxy S5, you can effectively grab 8MP stills, while on 1080p capture devices like the Galaxy S4 and Note II, you can grab 2MP images – if the latter doesn’t sound very high resolution then note that it’s still much higher than most images shared online today.

But how do you – actually – grab the still images – on the phone at least? You can’t just try and time a screenshot for the appropriate moment during video playback – quite apart from being extremely tricky to time, you’d also then only get screen resolution – which is almost always at least one notch down from the native resolution of the captured video.

What’s needed is a way of pausing a video, and then advancing, frame by frame, until the shot required is reached, then to grab the whole frame as a JPG. And, despite the complexities of digital video (which I won’t bore you with, but it involves master frames and then changes since that frame), this isexactly what Samsung has implemented on most recent Galaxy devices. They have just hidden the functionality very well!

Step 1: The secret is to forego the usual Gallery application and to head instead for Samsung’s ‘Video’ player

Step 2: Now open up a video and pause playback (I’ve avoided using a personal, baby video here for privacy reasons – you’ll have to make do with a shot of a museum!) There’s nothing helpful on-screen yet, but don’t panic!

Step 3: Tap the (Samsung) menu control and you’ll see ‘Settings’

Step 4: Halfway down the dialog, you’ll see a check-box, simply marked ‘Capture’. Tick it!

Step 5: You’ll now see ‘nudge’ controls up at the top of the screen, along with a central capture control. Just nudge the video frame by frame, as needed, and grab the photo you want

You’ll find such grabbed photos in JPG format in a ‘Screenshots’ folder on your internal disk or microSD (according to your settings). It’s true that this procedure tends to produce something that’s not quite as crisp as a dedicated still photo, for two reasons:

• making up a photo from a master video frame plus a handful of ‘changed’ frames, in software, is a bit of a ‘bodge’, to say the least
• each frame will have been ‘exposed’ for around 1/30s, typically. This doesn’t sound very long, but is an eternity in the photographic world, where shutter speeds are routinely 1/250s or less in good light. As a result, anything moving in that 1/30s period will be slightly blurred. So fast moving kids or pets are still something of an issue here (hint: Xenon, article coming soon!)

And yes, we know that many smartphone camera applications (including the Samsung one) now let you grab stills during video capture, possibly giving the best of both worldsat capture time, but with kids and pets especially, I’ll bet you still miss the moment. Which takes us back to nudging through the video version again, using this handy frame navigation and capture trick!

Credit:androidbeat.com

How to optimise RAM, maximise performance on Android

There we go – if you’re in a hurry to move on, that’s a pretty easy takeaway! You see, after weeks of looking at tips and tricks and utilities and management schemes, I’ve ended up with the conclusion that it’s extremely easy to get to the point where the things you’re doing, and the apps you’re buying to try and increase performance in your Android smartphone, are actively getting in the way. Both your way and that of the OS, which (at Android 4.x) is now sufficiently sophisticated to make a better fist of things than anything else we can think of here. Having said that, some explanation and a few extra tips should prove more illuminating…

RAM (Random Access Memory) is the main thing to look at, of course. Short of extreme hackery in in terms of overlocking your phone’s processor (very definitely not for the faint hearted, or those who value their warranty!), the main performance factor in any smartphone is its RAM and what’s using it. You see, applications and data that are (running or stored) in RAM are much faster to access than the same stored in flash memory (i.e. the phone’s internal disk or microSD).

The author’s ageing Galaxy Nexus, with 300MB free RAM after booting, and optimised to within an inch of its life….!

So the ideal situation is to have all the applications you use the most in RAM at all times, for near instant switching (with the only remaining bottleneck being the device’s processor). The likely problem with this is that your phone’s RAM is finite and, at some point, something large (e.g. a game) that you run will end up demanding lots of RAM and ‘out’ go your core applications (Gmail, Twitter, Pocket Casts, etc.), with their states saved so that they can be restarted/resumed as exactly as possible in the near future. And, naturally, when it comes time to use one of your core applications again, this restart takes an awful lot longer than simply jumping to a fully running application in RAM.

Which brings us to two seemingly contradictory rules of thumb:

1. have as much free RAM as possible (so that there’s room to crank in new applications without disturbing any of your core apps that are already running)
2. fill RAM as much as possible with running apps (so that as many core apps as possible can be available for instant switching)

In fact, these two rules don’t fall foul of each other – they’re both true and both relevant in a modern Android smartphone. The second rule is taken care of by the Android OS, which naturally fills RAM as new applications are started – though a buffer of up to 100MB (or thereabouts) is usually tried for, so that there’s always room for the OS and processor to ‘breathe’ (work).

Though it’s tempting to suggest that the first rule is also taken out of user hands (hence my ‘Do nothing’ crack at the top!), in fact there are things you might be able to do, that make a difference in day to day use. And no, I don’t mean installing ‘free up’ style utilities, which essentially kill background Android services to free RAM and ignore the fact that most of them get restarted almost immediately – trust me, I’ve tried a number of these apps and ultimately de-installed each.

Nor do I mean choose a phone with more RAM in the first place, though that is rather an obvious starting point – if you’re a power user then you should prize RAM over all else, even over processor speed. More RAM = better web page handling, larger games handled smoothly, quicker switching between applications, and so on.

There are in fact two main things you can bear in mind when setting up your Android smartphone, both of which have a significant effect on free RAM, especially if you have a 1GB (or less) device.

1. Exercise restraint in setting up homescreens. Yes, your device lets you have up to nine of the things, each of which could be stocked with several ‘cool’ widgets, so it’s quite possible to end up with 20 or so widgets in place. Then add in a live wallpaper, for the ultimate in cool. Quite apart from such a homescreen map being too spread out to save you any time in the first place, it’s vital to understand that every widget is effectively a small application and requires RAM in order to exist and work (e.g. to display content). Ditto live wallpaper, which again is an Android application in its own right and can often use significant RAM.

Stick to a simple homescreen layout, maybe two or three, with a handful of your most valuable widgets, then use a static wallpaper (i.e. a still photo), and you’ll have more RAM for general Android application use.

2. Think about changing your homescreen/app-launcher altogether. If you’re an out-of-the-box sort of person then you may not want to tinker with this, but there are definitely RAM savings to be made here. As an example, I did some tests, detailed below, on my (now ageing) Galaxy Nexus. There’s a caveat in that the numbers tended to jump around, depending on exact network conditions and what data was being handled in real time, etc, but the broadstrokes comparison does apply, I think.

In each case, I set up the appropriate launcher with approximately the same shortcut icons and the same widget loadout (Google Now, Simple Bitcoin, Brightness Level, and Free Memory, in my case) and then rebooted, waiting a few minutes for all the typical Android services to get started, do their initial thing and then calm down – you’d be amazed how much free RAM fluctuates in the first few minutes after a phone is restarted!

Launcher	Average free RAM after booting had finished
Google Now (the ‘Google Experience’, etc.)	265MB
Trebuchet (the default own-brand/stock launcher that comes with Cyanogen Mod)	308MB
Novalauncher	284MB
Apex Launcher	293MB

Note again (in the table) that I used the word ‘average’ – the numbers really did vary quite a bit, though there was a very definite difference between the Trebuchet launcher from Cyanogen, effectively the stock Android launcher from v4.1 or so and the (slightly) more bloated Google Now system that has been coming on recent Nexus devices and other ‘Play Edition’ phones –. However, as with most newer software, it’s written (and tested) with higher specification devices in mind, and so its relative bloat has gone unchecked.

Picking a launcher, here in Settings/Apps/All under Android 4.4….

Add the two bits of advice together and I reckon on a possible difference of up to 75MB of free RAM in both simplifying homescreens massively and switching from the Google Now launcher to ‘Trebuchet’ (or ‘Apex Launcher’, for example), enough to make a significant difference on older hardware, at least.

Hopefully these insights and tips can you gain more free RAM in your own main smartphone and you’ll get a faster, smoother Android experience as a result. Comments welcome!

credit:androidbeat.com

Tips to make the most out of the HTC One M8 camera

The HTC One M8 comes with a measly 4MP ‘UltraPixel’ camera, which is awfully low when against the likes of the Galaxy S5 and Xperia Z2’s 16 and 20.7MP camera sensor, respectively. Nevertheless, the One M8 comes with the best camera app compared to its competition, which has quite a lot of neat features hidden up its sleeve.

If you own an HTC One M8 and have been looking for ways to extract the maximum juice from the 4MP sensor using the app, read below.

UFocus

The rear camera on the One M8 is accompanied by a depth sensor as well, which allows users to apply the ‘fake bokeh’ and other effects even after they have clicked a picture. While most of the other Android phones also offer this feature, they require the user to switch to the mode before clicking the picture. However, on the One M8, users can apply the effect after clicking the picture without worrying about switching to any particular mode.

To apply the UFocus effect to your picture, simply open the Gallery app and tap on the Edit option. Then select the UFocus option from the Effects tab and then proceed to tap the area on the photo which you would like to focus on. You can use the slider on the left to control the surrounding blur effect as well.

There are quite a few other effects that you can apply to your images like Foregrounder, Seasons and Dimensions Plus etc. but none of them are as impressive as the UFocus effect.

Dual Capture

Usually when I go out with my friends or family, I am the only one clicking pictures. This also means that I am almost always missing from most of the pictures. HTC has tried to alleviate that problem to a certain extent by adding a Dual Capture mode to the M8.

Under this mode, the camera will simultaneously click pictures from the back as well as the front camera, which means that the person clicking the image will also be present in the final image.

The One M8 will show the preview from the front camera inside a small box, which can be dragged around on the screen and positioned anywhere you like. To resize this box, use the two finger slide gesture.

Manual Mode

The HTC One M8 comes with a very effective and useful manual mode — a killer feature in the hands of any ace photographer. If you are looking to extract the maximum performance from the One M8’s ‘UltraPixel’ sensor, learn how to effectively use the manual mode.

Zoe and Gallery Highlights

Zoe and Gallery Highlights are two of my favorite features of the HTC One M8. Both these features are also present on the company’s previous flagship — the One M7.

In Zoe mode, the HTC One M8 records a short 3-second video while also taking burst shots. This will allow users access to many advanced editing features like object removal and Sequence shot.

In case you want to record a video longer than 3-seconds, simply keep the shutter button pressed for more than 3 seconds.

Gallery Highlights will combine your Zoe video and other images into a beautiful overview video of a specific day or event. You can customize the video theme, change the audio or even use a custom one if you wish to. The clips have a maximum length of 30 seconds.

Credit:androidbeat.com

TouchWiz’s Gallery: the Unsuspected Photographic Tragedy

The workflow is simple enough, for many hundred million Samsung smartphone owners worldwide. Use the phone to take a photo, then tap on the little thumbnail to bring up the photo just taken. Not quite right? Then use one of the many supplied editing functions to crop, tweak, apply an effect, and so on. Looks great, so delete the original to save space. Perfect! Except that it’s not. Unbeknown to the user, the TouchWiz Gallery software has massively downsampled the image too. Yep, we’ve just lost 75% of image detail/resolution. 

It’s telling that no one has actually noticed this before (as far as I can tell), given the astronomical number of Samsung smartphones sold – perhaps it’s that most people really didn’t need the full 9 Megapixels (or whatever, according to device) in the first place – certainly a 2MP downsampled version of a photo is still a good match for most people’s monitors, TV screens and, of course, phone displays. You could even argue that Samsung is doing everyone a big favour, improving photos with the effects and editing requested and also making the photos take up a lot less room on the phone’s internal disk or microSD card.

But no. NO, I tell you, it’s just wrong. Lost detail is lost detail. Three quarters of it!

An original 16:9 photo taken on the Galaxy S4. 9MP or thereabouts….

For example, something I’ve done often on other phones and using other software, you might take a shot of a group of people and then, a month later, decide that one of the faces is really special and then crop in on just that person. Starting with a full (e.g.) 9MP and cropping out around (say) 80% of the image, you’re still left with 2MP resolution and you have the perfect shot of the person you wanted.

A little auto-adjustment (or indeed ANY other editing function) later in Samsung’s software and the photo is now 2MP!

Using Samsung’s TouchWiz editing solution, there’s a good chance that you’ve already edited the image in question at least once, even to tweak brightness or coloration – in which case, the photo has already been silently (and criminally) reduced to around 2MP. Now snip out the person you want from the example group shot and you’re left with0.2MP or so (and no, that’s not a typo), blocky, pixellated and unusable on almost every display.

Now crop out a person or some other detail and – oh my, we’re down to only hundreds of pixels….

At this point, the user would scratch their head and wonder what had gone wrong. After all, didn’t they buy this top end smartphone from Samsung because it had a very high resolution ’13MP’ camera? Where have all the pixels gone? Samsung has ‘eaten’ them, it seems. And without telling anyone.

Crop comparison from original image and from scaled up ‘edited’ image in Samsung’s TouchWiz image editor…

Now, there are two obvious solutions:

1. Don’t delete the original of each photo. After editing in Samsung’s image editor, leave the original alone and use this as the ‘master’ photo, from which to start with for any future edits or crops. The problem with this approach (and maybe it’s just me) is that you end up with multiple copies of every photo, which makes the thumbnail views in the Gallery messy, to say the least. And it’s not always evident which one is the ‘master’, without diving into the ‘Details’ menu option.
2. Use a different image management application. In fact, Android now has something that Google-written and rather excellent, in Photos, the break-out application from the Google+ stable. This is a nigh-on perfect drop-in replacement for Samsung TouchWiz’s Gallery, and offers, if anything, even more editing functions and more polish. The catch? There’s no way to integrate a replacement like this into the Samsung Camera workflow. So whenever you try and edit quickly from Camera, you’ll always be thrust into Samsung’s software, whether you want it or not. And no, there’s no setting to change this.

Neither are ideal, then. I suppose there’s another option, if you have good enough connectivity and have Google+ set up to auto-backup everything immediately, even over cellular data – in which case you’ll possibly have a full resolution original to download from the Cloud. But, again, a little messy.

The stock Android Gallery application (i.e. what you get on the likes of the Nexus and Cyanogen firmwares) isn’t a slouch in the presentation and editing front and doesn’t have the same downsampling problems, so it’s quite clearly something Samsung has done, whether intentionally or unintentionally.

Leaving me without any good news to end on, other than having been able to educate the world as to what Samsung’s TouchWiz Camera/Gallery editing functions are doing in terms of losing information from our photos. Is this something Samsung can fix? Absolutely, though don’t hold your breath, large chunks of Samsung’s UI seem to now be set in stone.

In the meantime, if you edit on your Samsung Galaxy device, make sure you keep your original images!

Footnote: interestingly, there’s also a dedicated ‘Crop’ function on the main menu of TouchWiz’s Gallery application – and this also downsamples while cropping, but to a completely different degree to the crop function in the main editing interface. Samsung is either being extremely clever in trying to second guess what average users want – or its code is a complete mess and the programmers don’t know what they’re doing. Comments? Which one do you think it is?

credit:androidbeat.com

Top Google Nexus 6P tips & tricks

The Nexus 6P was easily among the best smartphones released last year. It did not excel in one particular department, but it did not disappoint in any either. 

The premium build quality, beefy battery, gorgeous 5.7-inch Quad HD AMOLED display, and 12.3MP shooter made it among the most desirable handsets released in the second half of 2015. Plus, Marshmallow and its price point further sweetened the deal.

If you already own this beauty from Huawei and are looking for some tips and tricks to make your experience of using it more enjoyable, check out our top tips and tricks for the Nexus 6P below.

Unlock the bootloader

If you are ever planning to root your Nexus 6P in the future or flash a custom ROM on it, it is highly recommended that you unlock its bootloader right away before you set the device up. This is because unlocking the 6P’s bootloader will wipe all your installed apps and their data, and once the bootloader is unlocked, you will have to go through the tedious process of setting up the device again.

Use a compatible fast charger

Like almost all major flagship Android devices released over the last year, the Nexus 6P also supports fast charging. However, the feature has been implemented in a slightly different way on the handset since it uses a USB Type-C connector. While using a Quick Charge/Fast Charge compatible charger like the one that is bundled with the Galaxy S6 will charge the 6P quickly, it will not do so as quickly as the stock charger that comes with the device will do.

Customise Quick Settings

With Marshmallow, Google is finally making it possible to customise the tiles that are displayed in Quick Settings. The option is hidden inside a hidden menu though. To enable it, expand Quick Settings and then press and hold the cog icon located at the top right corner of the display for a few seconds. You will then automatically get a toast notification saying that the hidden SystemUI tuner menu has been enabled.

Now head over to Settings -> SystemUI tuner -> Quick Settings and rearrange the tiles according to your liking. You can also add new tiles, though the options are pretty limited.

Turn off background Wi-Fi and Bluetooth location scanning

In Marshmallow, Google has moved the option to toggle background scanning of location using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth inside the Location menu. The feature might be handy, but privacy freaks are not particularly fond of it and disabling it does lead to a noticeable improvement in battery life.

You can turn off  (or on) background scanning of location using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on your Nexus 6P by going to Settings -> Location, then tap the 3-dot overflow menu, select ‘Scanning’ and then toggle the switches.

#6 Use a compatible USB Type-C cable

Since USB Type-C is a new spec, there is quite a lot of confusion surrounding it. This confusion has also led many third-party accessory makers to sell Type-C cables with outdated specs. This leads to them causing issues while charging or transferring data when used with the Nexus 6P. In some cases, these cables can also permanently damage the 6P.

To make sure that you are using a compatible Type-C cable with your Nexus 6P, you can use an application called CheckR from Google Play. Plug the cable in to your 6P, start CheckR and the app will inform you whether the cable is fully USB 3.1 Type-C compliant or not.

Quickly search through your installed apps

With Marshmallow, Google gave the app drawer in its Google Now launcher a much needed functionality update. It ditched the vertical app drawer in favor of a horizontally scrolling one, and added a search bar at the top as well.

But did you know that you can directly access this search bar from your homescreen instead of opening the app drawer and then tapping on it every time? Simply long press the app drawer icon on the Google now launcher for a few seconds and you will be directly taken to the search bar with your keyboard open.

Use a third-party camera app

The Nexus 6P is the first Nexus handset since the inception of the series to not come with a potato camera. The 12.3MP IMX377 sensor found on the device can rival the Samsung Note 5, LG G4 and the iPhone 6s Plus with its image quality despite coming with a lower resolution sensor. While Google also gave its stock camera app a huge overhaul for the 6P (and 5X), the app still feels a bit lacking in certain departments. Beside being faster, the app could have also provided some manual control over the different aspects of the camera.

Thankfully, since the Nexus 6P supports the camera2 APIs, you can use third-party camera apps from Google Play that offer this functionality. Some popular camera apps include Manual camera and ProShot. Both these apps will allow you to shoot images in RAW, control the ISO levels, shutter speed, exposure and more while clicking pictures.

Disable battery optimisation for important apps

Google has laid great importance on improving the battery life of Android devices with Marshmallow by introducing features like App Standby and Doze. These features prevent apps from unnecessarily waking up the device when they are not being used, which translates into significant power savings. An unintended side effect of this feature is that notifications from certain apps might be delayed.

Nonetheless, you can workaround this problem by disabling battery optimisaton for that specific app. To do this, head over to Settings -> Battery, tap the 3-dot overflow menu button, select ‘Battery optimisation’. From the menu that opens up, switch over to the ‘All apps’ list and then proceed to tap on the app that you don’t want to be optimised for battery saving and select the appropriate option from the dialog box that pops up.

Use Nexus Imprint to authorise purchases on Google Play

The Nexus 6P (and 5X) are among the first Nexus smartphones to feature a touch-based fingerprint scanner. Since Google has added native fingerprint support to Android with Marshmallow, the fingerprint scanner on the Nexus 6P can be used for more than just unlocking the device. For example, you can use the Nexus Imprint scanner on the handset to authorise your purchases from Google Play.

Wondering how? Simply open Play Store, bring up the navigation drawer by swiping from the left edge of the screen, tap on ‘Settings’ and enable the ‘Fingerprint authentication’ option. You need to confirm your selection by entering the password of your Google account once.

Credit:androidbeat.com

17 WhatsApp Tricks and Tips for Android

For countries like India, WhatsApp has become the default way of mobile communication. It has replaced SMS completely and soon might do so for VOIP calls as well. WhatsApp has more than a billion active users worldwide, and it is extremely popular in Asian countries. And while it might look like a simple SMS replacement app on the top, it’s filled with many rich features underneath.

Read on to know all about the little features, the hidden tricks and tips and lot more about WhatsApp.

1. Use WhatsApp on Your PC

WhatsApp users have been asking for this feature for years and finally we have it. It’s not exactly an app, it’s not even a standalone website, it’s a mix. You’ll need your phone around to be able to use WhatsApp from your PC but at least you can do it now.

To get started, open your web browser and go to “web.whatsapp.com”. Now, on your phone, tap the three dotted menu button and select “WhatsApp Web”.

You’ll be asked to scan the QR code you see on the website on your desktop with the phone’s camera. Once it’s scanned, you’ll be connected.

It’s important to note that both the phone and the PC need to be connected to the internet for this feature to work. But it doesn’t have to be the same network. Slightly tedious? Sure, but at least now you can continue your WhatsApp conversations from your PC as well.

2. Easily Share Documents

For people who use WhatsApp for business purposes, it is now easier than ever to share documents like PDFs with  contacts.

To share a document, tap the “Attach” menu in the top bar, and select “Document”.

A document picker will now show up. Navigate to where the file is stored and select it. The file will now be shared in the conversation and it will show up as a widget with the document name, its size and the page count.

In the same way, you can also attach your current location in a WhatsApp chat.

3. Send a Mass Message

WhatsApp is great for having group conversations. But what if you want to blast off a message to multiple contacts, without creating a group? There’s the Broadcast feature for you. It works much like Mail Merge, but it’s a thousand times simpler.

Tap the three dotted menu button and select “New Broadcast”. You’ll be asked to add the contacts you want to send the message to. From the chat screen, type out your message, tap “Send” and you’re done.

4. Hide Last Seen and Disable Read Receipts

The two blue check marks have achieved pop culture status. It means your message has been read. But what if you don’t want other people to know when exactly you’ve read their message? Simply disable the feature.

Go to “Settings” -> “Account” -> “Privacy” and turn off the “Read Receipts” option.

If you want to hide your Last Seen status, select “Last Seen” from the same page and change it from “Everyone” to “Nobody”.

5. Block Annoying People

Much like life itself, you’ll need to block some people from WhatsApp from time to time. Here’s how to do it.

From the same “Privacy” section, tap “Blocked Contacts” followed by the “Add” button and select the contact you want to block.

6. Mute Conversations

We all need some peace and quiet, especially from those family groups in WhatsApp where irrelevant messages are forwarded all day. To mute a conversation, tap the three dotted menu button and select “Mute”. You can choose the time from 8 hours to a year, and don’t forget to uncheck the “Show notifications” option.

7. Turn Off Media Auto Download to Save Data

We’re all a part of hilarious groups that send the same viral video every single time. If you’re on 3G or even on a capped Wi-Fi connection, all that data can add up. By default, WhatsApp downloads all media in the background, automatically.

To stop this behavior, go to “Settings” -> “Data Usage” -> “Media Auto-Download”. Now, you’ll see options for when using Wi-Fi or mobile data. Tap on each and you can disable auto download for Images, Audio and Videos individually.

8. Manually Delete WhatsApp Media

If you’re using a file manager like Solid Explorer or something that came with your phone, you can easily navigate to the WhatsApp folder on your phone’s internal memory to see just how much space all the media is taking up.

WhatsApp media is divided into folders like Audio, Images, Video and more. So you can just go into those folders, select all files or the ones you want to delete and just delete them. That’s it.

You can also copy them to your PC by connecting your phone to your PC and then navigating to these folders.

9. View Read Receipts

Viewing read receipts for one on one conversations is quite simple. Just long press on the message in question, select the “i” icon and a popup will tell you what you need to know.

When you’re in a group, the process is similar. Only you’ll see a list of contacts who have read your message. Tapping a contact will give you a detailed view of when the message was delivered and when it was read.

10. Set Custom Notifications for Contacts

If you want some of your loved ones to stand out when it comes to WhatsApp, just give them a custom notification for their messages.

To do this, tap on the person’s profile and select “Custom notifications”.

11. Star Important Messages and Get Back to Them

It’s easy to get lost when you have lots of chats going on at the same time. If you’ve received something important via WhatsApp, like directions to a place, you should star it so you can go back to it easily.

To star a message, long press any message and tap on the “Star” button.

To view a starred message later, tap the three-dotted-menu from the app’s homescreen and select “Starred messages”.

12. Optimize Data for Voice Calls

WhatsApp is one of the best ways to make free calls to your friends over the internet. But WhatsApp has a hidden feature to even make this better for slow internet connection.

Under “Settings” -> “Data Usage”, you’ll find an option called “Low data usage”.

13. Customize Google Drive Backup

Android users can now backup (with encryption) their entire chat history including voice messages, photos and videos to Google Drive. It’s a great way to make sure your conversations are never lost and we totally recommend you turn on this feature.

To enable it, tap the three dotted menu button, select “Settings” -> “Chats” -> “Chat backup” and tap on “Back up”.

From the same page, you can also customize your backup. You can uncheck the “Include videos” option to stop backup up videos and saving cloud space. You can also select how often the backups take place.

14. Crop Videos and Edit Photos Before Sending

If you send a lot of photos using WhatsApp, you might know that WhatsApp now lets you edit them as well. Simple things like cropping.

In fact, you can do this for videos as well now. Tapping the crop icon will bring up a tool that will let you select parts of the video to crop out.

15. Bold, Italics and More

A recent WhatsApp update has added this really fun feature. It might seem straight out of a 90s Office app but the ability to format text is certainly nice. And you can have some fun with it. Everyone’s getting tired of using ALL CAPS as the only option for emphasis. Well now, you can be a gentleman and use bold and italics.

Credit: TechCrunch.

Here’s how it works. Wrap the text you want to format using modifier keys like asterisks to format the text. Here are some examples:

Bold: Wrap the text with asterisks (*).

Italics: Wrap the text with an underscore (_).

Strikethrough: Wrap the text with a tilde (~).

16. Send Messages With Your Voice Using Google Now

There’s nothing cooler than using your voice to make your phone do stuff, without even touching it. If you’re familiar with Google Now, you already know that it lets you do things like set an alarm, and call people using your voice.

You can now do the same for WhatsApp messages.

Say “Ok, Google, send WhatsApp message to (person name)” and Google Now will respond by asking you the message.

You can also just say “Ok Google, send WhatsApp Message to (person name), (message content)”.

17. Add Conversations as Homescreen Shortcuts

If there are 2-3 conversations you end up going to all the time, it’s better to just add a shortcut to them to your launcher’s homescreen. To do this, just long press on the conversation from the “Chats” screen and select “Add chat shortcut”. Also, you can use the WhatsApp widget to quickly jump into conversations.

That’s it from our end. Share your favorite tips and tricks for WhatsApp in the comments below. Also, do you use any third party apps to enhance your WhatsApp experience on Android?

Credit:androidbeat.com