32 essential Android tips and tricks

Several weeks ago, we highlighted 40 useful iPhone tricks everyone should know. We got such good feedback from that feature that we wanted to share the love with Android users – who, after all, make up the largest proportion of the smart phone community.

19. Browser "quick controls"

"Quick controls" save some screen real estate on phone displays by putting the address bar and other functions in a compact radial menu. Here, browser quick controls are invoked on a phone running Ice Cream Sandwich.

If you're a Gmail user, you're probably familiar with Labs, nifty experimental features that extend the program's functionality. This model extends to the stock web browser on 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and 3.1 Honeycomb, as well. From the browser's settings page, click "Labs," then enable “Quick Controls” on the following screen. The URL and status bars will disappear from the phone's top edge, giving you a little more screen real estate. If you want to open a new page, access settings, or do a web search, just put your thumb on the far left or right edge of the screen – a circular menu will open up giving you navigation options.

19 of 32

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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