Getting started with a new smartphone is always an adventure. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with its capabilities and make the most of it. Small features can make all the difference in day-to-day use and cool apps will tailor the device to your needs.
Maybe this is your first Android phone, or maybe you’ve already gone through half a dozen. Regardless, there are many things that need doing when you first start putting your new phone to use.
1. Familiarize Yourself With The Basic Features
If this is your first Android phone (or maybe even your first smartphone of any kind), you should start with the basics. Before you look at more specific features, you should familiarise yourself with the Android interface and its basic features.
A good place to start is Christian Cawley’s article for new Android users. Or take a look at The Complete Android Guide for Everyone. You’ll learn what’s what and where it’s at; how to place a call and take a picture. Import your contacts and synchronize them with your Google account. Play around with these basic features until you get a feel for them. Don’t worry, you’ll be up and running in no time.
2. Install Widgets To Your Home Screens
Widgets are a topic not every Android user agrees on. You either hate them or love them. Personally, I think widgets are one of the biggest advantage of the Android over the iOS home screen. Instead of just populating your home screen with an icon for your weather app, you can add an area showing the weather forecast right there.
To install a widget, long-press your home screen or (depending on the app launcher installed on your phone) try going through the app drawer.
You don’t have to go far to find interesting widgets. Some of the default Android apps come with widgets, and some of the apps you installed later on probably do too. In particular, take a look at the Clock, Google Search, Calendar and Music widgets. Perhaps the simplest widget is the contact tile, where you can add a button to your homescreen for a single contact, so you can instantly reach out to your significant other, family member or friend.
3. Automatically Update Your Apps
As the apps start mounting on your phone, so does the work to manage them. Take a break and have your phone automatically update your apps to always have the latest and greatest features and compatibility, as well as any security patches.
Open the Play Store and press the menu button on your phone to get additional options for the app. Go to Settings > Auto-update apps. Here you’ll find three options. Either do not auto-update apps (which leaves you to manage everything manually), auto-update apps at any time, or auto-update apps over Wi-Fi.
The middle option should be used with caution, as your phone will also download apps when you’re on a 3G network. If you don’t watch out, you could incur a lot of extra costs from your provider. The last option is the prudent one as it will only update the apps when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.
4. Upload Your Photos To The Cloud
If you use your phone as a camera, it becomes more than just a shiny piece of hardware. It’s filled with memories. It’s easy to underestimate just how ephemeral this collection is. If you don’t make back-ups, all of those memories can disappear in a flash. Drop your phone or leave it in a cab and… all gone.
Upload your photos to the cloud to keep them safe. Even if you lose your phone tomorrow, you’ll keep your photos and your memories. Dropbox will do just that. It’ll upload your photos when you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network and you can sleep easy. Google+, Flickr and SkyDrive are also able to back up your photos. For a more information check out these 5 tools to auto-upload images from your Android phone.
5. Receive and Send Texts On Your Computer
A phone is plenty useful when you’re on the road, but when you’re at home a regular sized keyboard is much more practical to work with. More so, when you’re behind your computer at home, you might miss messages sent to your phone. All of this becomes much easier if you keep your texts synced between your computer and your smartphone. Text messages sent to your phone will pop up on your computer and you can answer then and there.
There are more than a few apps that offer this functionality. Read Danny Stieben’s preferred 3 ways to manage texts on your computer, or my older round-up of three applications that let you manage your texts in your browser. Another app that deserves to be mentioned is Krome, because it not only syncs your texts, but all Android notifications to your computer.
What’s the first thing you add to a new phone? Let us know in the comments below the article!
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