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The Official Google Blog just posted some nifty tips and tricks for us to take advantage of. A lot of the things listed are pretty obvious, but quite a few can serve as a great refresher for all of the little things we may have forgotten over time as we developed our Android habits. When reading over the list, bear in mind that it was written in the eyes of Gingerbread so a few things haven’t quite made it to the majority of our devices.
Here is about half of the tips they provided:
- Visual cue for scrolling: When you are in a scrollable list (like your Gmail inbox) and you reach the end of the list it shows an orange hue—a visual cue that you can’t scroll anymore.
- Notification bar icons (Wi-Fi, network coverage bars, etc.): Turn green when you have an uninhibited connection to Google, white when you don’t. Hint: if you’re in a hotel or airport using Wi-Fi, the bars won’t turn green until you launch the browser and get past the captive portal.
- Voice actions: Tell your phone what to do by pressing the microphone icon next to the search box on the home screen, or long press the magnifying glass. You can tell it to send an email or text message (“send text to mom, see you for pizza at 7”), call someone (“call mom”), navigate somewhere (“navigate to pizza”), or listen to music (“listen to Mamma Mia”).
- Find things you’ve downloaded from your browser: Your downloads are now neatly collected in a Downloads manager, which you can find in the apps drawer.
- Turn a Gallery stack into a slideshow: In Gallery, when you are looking at a stack of photos, put two fingers on the stack and spread them. The stack spreads out and the pictures flow from one finger to the other, a moving slideshow that lets you see all of the photos.
- Walk, don’t drive: Once you’ve gotten directions within Google Maps, click on the walking person icon to get walking directions.
- Easy text copy/paste from a webpage: To copy/paste from a webpage, long press some text, drag the handles around to select the text you want to copy, and press somewhere in the highlighted region. To paste, simply long press a text entry box and select paste. Gmail is a bit different: you need to go to Menu > More > Select Text.
- Turn your phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot: Go to Settings > Wireless & Networks > Tethering & Portable Hotspot. (You may have to pay extra for this feature.)
- Look at Maps in 3D: With the latest release of Google Maps, you can now look at 3D maps. Tilt the map by sliding two fingers vertically up/down the screen, and rotate it by placing two fingers on the map and sliding in a circular motion, e.g., from 12 and 6 o’clock to 3 and 9.
- Cool shutdown effect: When you put the phone to sleep, you’ll see an animation that resembles an old cathode tube TV turning off.
Definitely hit the link below and check out the rest of the T&T.
[via Official Google Blog]
Cathode tube set turning off…..thought the g1 did that anyway
that’s cool, but some of these features, such as the slide-show seem more suited to tablets. i wouldn’t complain if i had access to them though.
Cant wait for Gingerbread for EVO
Stupidly, they suggest that we use Tango to video chat and that we’ll love it if we’re on the Nexus S. However, it does not support the front facing camera on the Nexus S. GOOGLE PRODUCT MANAGER FAIL.
#4 Tango does now support Nexus S FFC.
#1 is pretty good – the orange visual cue when you reach the end of a scrollable area, but I think the “bounce” (yes, like the iphone) would be better.
Sometimes and depending what the background color of the screen you are looking at – you can hardly see the orange hue, especially if the background is white. The orange hue indication works best when the background is black and so that’s why I think that the bounce would be better.