Android 10 Tips and Tricks

To open a web page in a new tab, find a link on a web page. Then press on it and then choose to open the site in a new tab.

This tip is relatively obvious, but some users overlook it.

Once you go into your Home/Apps screen you should see a row of dots. This indicates which of the 5 Home/App screens you are on. Rather than flick between each screen, you can simply press one of the dots and you will jump to that homescreen.

Or alternatively, slide your finger across the dots to move between screens.

Android has an interesting new feature called Talkback which is designed for blind and low vision users.

The feature is an interesting way to navigate your phone however.

Simply go to Settings – Accessibility – Talkback to activate it.

Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

If you prefer a different voice when listening to the Google Maps voice navigation, you can select another language or accent.

To change this, go to Settings. Then select System – Language and input – Text-to-speech options. Then under the Preferred text-to-speech engine, press the gear icon.

From there, select Language and you will be able to choose from different languages or language variations.

If you would like to unmount your SD card for whatever reason, then drag down your notifications menu from the top of the screen and press the Settings icon.

Then find Storage – SD card – Unmount SD card.

If you are abroad and don’t want to pay high data roaming charges or travelling to an area with no network coverage, then you can save Google Maps for offline viewing later. ?Here are two ways to do this:

The first method will depend whether your phone supports it. First, open Google Maps and navigate to a section of the map that you want available offline. Then press on the search bar and scroll right to the bottom and select Make this map area available offline. You may need to repeat this with multiple areas.

Alternatively, open Google Maps and zoom down to street level. Then scroll around area you’ll be travelling too. If you’re visiting a city for example, do this at street level and cover as much area as you think you’ve be visiting. If you’re travelling outside a city, then street level view might be too detailed, so zoom out and just cover the main roads, towns etc. ?

This will load all the segments into your phone’s cache. Then when have arrived at your destination and you have data turned off, you will see the areas you’ve stored on the phone’s memory.

Note: this won’t give you your GPS location because that normally needs a data connection to pinpoint your position.

If you would prefer not to be told every time an Application has been updated, open the Play Store and tap on the menu key .

Then select Settings – Notifications.

Then untick/toggle the updates options.?

To change your default font, go to Settings – Display – Font.

Now you can change the font size.

Another option is to install the popular Go Launcher EX App. Then once this is installed, download their GoLauncher Fonts App.

You can speed up the page load speed on your browser by disabling JavaScript.

To do this, open your Browser, then press the Menu or More button and then Settings – Advanced. Then select Site setting and change the Enable JavaScript option.

Please note that this may affect the functionality of some sites.

To access the scientific calculator, simply open the calculator App and rotate the phone to landscape mode.

The calculator will automatically change to a scientific one.