Android tips and tricks

Android tips and tricks

Many of the tips are specific to Android 2.3 so mind it.

                       Tips

• 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.

Keyboard tricks

• Shift+Key to capitalize a word: In Gingerbread (and supported hardware), you can Shift+Key to capitalize a letter instead of going to a separate all caps keyboard.
• Auto-complete: The space bar lights up when auto-complete can finish a word.
• Quick replace: Tap on any previously typed word, then tap on a suggestion to automatically replace it with the suggested word.
• Easy access to special characters (like numbers, punctuation): Press and hold any key to go to the special character keyboard. You can also press and hold the "," key for an extensive punctuation keyboard.

Applications

• Angry Birds: Popular game that lets you knock down blocks by slingshotting birds.
• Astro: Awesome file explorer app. Browse and access the directories on your phone, and take full advantage of its capabilities. Great if you’re a power user.
• Chrome to Phone: This one is really useful for Chrome users. You can send anything you browse on your computer to your phone. So if you are heading out to a restaurant or party and look up directions on your computer, just click the “send to phone” button (requires Chrome to Phone extension) and that exact page will open on your phone. Same with virtually any webpage.
• Flash: Install from Android Market to watch Flash videos embedded throughout the web. Runs even better on Gingerbread.
• Fruit Ninja: A juicy action game that tests your ability to smash flying fruit. A fun time-killer on the bus or train.
• FXCamera: Popular photo sharing app with slick effects and filters.
• Google Maps: Use your device as a GPS navigation system with free turn-by-turn voice guidance, and take advantage of other Google Maps features like Street View, Latitude and Places.
• Instant Heart Rate: Measure your heart rate using your camera.
• Phoneanlyzr: Track your phone usage: who you text most, call most, average call length distribution, etc.
• RemoteDroid: Control your computer from your phone. Gives you a mobile wireless mouse and keyboard. Great if you’re using your computer for music or movies.
• Shazam: Identifies virtually any song you are listening to.
• SoundHound: Record a snippet of a song and get it identified instantly. You can even hum (if you can carry a tune!).
• Tango: A free, high-quality video call app that works on both 3G and Wi-Fi. If your device has a front facing camera (e.g., Nexus S), you will love this app.
• YouTube: New UI. Plus, portrait-mode player, and view comments and drop-down box video information

Do inform me for any more tricks on this issue.....

Google Expands to a New Frontier: The Human Body

GOOGLE'S NEW BODY BROWSER

With Google's new Body Browser, you can unravel the human body and -- of course -- search for any organ or bodily structure.

The company that wants to be your everything for search has just brought its technology to a new area: the human body. 

Google has just unveiled Body Browser, a detailed 3D model of the human body. Running only in browsers that support the new WebGL graphics standard (currently just Google Chrome or the latest Firefox beta), Body Browser lets you peel back the body's anatomical layers, zoom in, and navigate to parts that interest you. 

Click to identify bits of the human anatomy, or search for muscles, organs, bones and more. The ability to zoom in and out of the body, and to unravel it at the click of a mouse, is entertaining and informative.

You can also share the exact scene you are viewing by copying and pasting the corresponding URL. Can't recall quite what the fibular collateral ligament looks like, for example? That's the one on the outside of the knee, of course; you can find it with a quick search and share it with your anatomically inquisitive friends. Hunting for a close up view of the sternum? You can see that, as well. 

The product is available currently from the Google Labs site, where the company unveils early versions of new projects.

Google Fiber to make 100 times faster

GOOGLE FIBER 

Earlier this year we announced an experiment we hope will help make Internet access better and faster for everyone: to provide a community with ultra high-speed broadband, 100 times faster than what most people have access to today.

This week I joined Google as vice president of Access Services to oversee the Google Fiber team. Over the past several months I’ve been following the progress the team has already made—from experimenting with new fiber deployment technologies here on Google’s campus, to announcing a “beta” NETWORK OF 850 HOMES AT STANFORD—and I’m excited for us to bring our ultra high-speed network to a community.

We had planned to announce our selected community or communities by the end of this year, but the level of interest was incredible—nearly 1,100 communities across the country responded to our announcement—and exceeded our expectations. While we’re moving ahead full steam on this project, we’re not quite ready to make that announcement.


 Stay tuned for an announcement in early 2011.

Google's Chrome OS

Using Google's Chrome OS Laptop of the Future

The Chrome Cr-48 netbook might just be a reference design—as in, most folks won't ever be able to use it—but it is what Google thinks a Chrome laptop should be. And it has some pretty nice touches. Updated. Here are some quick impressions on the hardware and software that we gleaned from about an hour's worth of usage. Advantages:- • Plain matte finish both inside and outside the lid feels nice—the antithesis of shiny MacBooks • The trackpad really does not like having two fingers on it at once. It's not multitouch, but you can use two fingers for right clicking. • Window switching with Alt+Tab is fast, and feels like switching workspaces (Spaces on OS X) • Fairly light and fairly thin • The keyboard keys are separated like MacBook and Envy, so I'm definitely used to typing on it • No function keys, instead, you have actually web-useful keys like back, forward, reload, fullscreen, next window and several standard laptop keys • Shutdown and resume really is almost instant • The screen doesn't get incredibly bright, but it gets bright enough for indoor use • Gmail calling works! It's only slightly laggy, and I sound like I'm in a closet, but otherwise, it works Dis Adv:- • It's definitely still a netbook—there's an Atom processor inside—so heavy duty computing is out of the question • YouTube is limited to 480p, even on 1080p videos. There's just no option to select the higher quality • Hulu is choppy, but it's not unwatchable • Gmail noticeably is slower than on a MacBook Pro • There's only one USB port Update: Extended impressions. Google really wants people to use the web, and having a web-only computer pretty much forces you to do so. I've been using the Cr-48 for a few hours now, and I can both say that it's the best netbook I've ever used, as well as the most limiting computer I've ever used. The experience of using a web computer Being locked into a browser for everything you do on a computer can be frustrating. It's modal computing—something that Apple seems to be pushing with their OS X Lion—so you're always working in one maximized window. You can still multitask in the sense that things are going on in tabs and windows that you're not looking at, but you can't really see more than one thing at once. Except, as a notable example, the fact that GChat windows pop up no matter where you are, effectively enabling web-based apps to transcend the window they belong to. Some quirks and pains of using a web browser are more significant when you're using one as an operating system. The search button, Google's "replacement" for the caps lock key, brings up a new tab. Logically, you'd assume the search button allowed you to say, search in Gmail, if you were in a Gmail window, or search your previous chat transcripts if you were in GChat. Also, Flash has crashed a lot. It doesn't take down the tab that it's in when it crashes, but you have to reload every single tab that you have that uses Flash. But overall, working entirely in a web browser isn't too bad, as long as you have web-based versions of things you need to do. I'm not quite there, but I'm convinced that with a few weeks effort, I can be. The prototype hardware Again, because Google doesn't intend this particular Cr-48 model to be an actual product, there's no need to review the hardware. However, there are touches, ideas and themes that Google has put in that they would like their hardware partners to carry on. The SD card reader on the side is quite handy, as is the existence of a USB port. The keyboard is also matted and nice to type on, and matches the rest of the finish. And I can't emphasize enough how cool it is to be using an unbranded, unmarked, totally generic laptop. This is like the Nexus One/S of notebooks. I suppose the fact that this is running an Atom processor is holding it back from being a blazing fast experience, even if all you're doing is web-based computing. Alt-tabbing may be fast, but everything else, like Google docs, Gchat, and other things that are supposedly lightweight will run slower than you're used to. I mean, when was the last time that Google Docs lagged on keypresses for you? So, hopefully the third-party manufacturers that do do Chrome OS notebooks find a way to balance extended battery life with the need for slightly more powerful hardware. It's a very good secondary machine, or travel machine, but in order for it to be a primary machine, you're gonna need more juice.

Discover more than 3 million Google eBooks from your choice of booksellers and devices

Google eBooks :To improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we term them as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest bestsellers like James Patterson’s Cross Fire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, dig into popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels. We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks—everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage. In addition to a full-featured web reader, free apps for Android and Apple devices will make it possible to shop and read on the go. For many books you can select which font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing suits you—and pick up on the page where you left off when switching devices. You can discover and buy new ebooks from the Google eBookstore or get them from one of our independent bookseller partners: Powell’s, Alibris and participating members of the American Booksellers Association. You can choose where to buy your ebooks like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them. When Google Books first launched in 2004, we set out to make the information stored in the world’s books accessible and useful online. Since then, we’ve digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40 libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages. This deep repository of knowledge and culture will continue to be searchable throughGoogle Books search in the research section alongside the ebookstore. Launching Google eBooks is an initial step toward giving you greater access to the vast variety of information and entertainment found in books. Our journey has just begun...