Android 4.4 (Kit Kat) Tips and Tricks

First open your Contacts App and select a contact. Then press the phone’s Menu button and select Edit.

Then you should see a silhouette of a person. Press this, or a little + sign next to it and you will be given a number of options to create a photo or image for that contact.

A handy feature of Android is to quickly clear your notifications.

Simply pull down your notifications bar by swiping your finger from the top of your phone downwards.

Then when you see each individual notification, swipe your finger left or right to clear each one. You can do this with your Apps too – press and hold the home button. Then swipe left or right to close Apps.

If you already have an Android phone, then simply ensure each of your old Contacts are stored on Google (rather than the Phone memory). This means your contacts are stored on Google’s servers under your Google/Gmail login. Then once you get the new phone, log in with your Gmail account and your Contacts will be automatically synced.

If you do not have an Android device, you need to find a way to Export your old contacts to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file and save this to a PC. You may need to install the correct software for your phone first in order to do the export.

Then, if you don’t have a Gmail account, sign up for one.

Once that’s done, open Gmail. Go to Contacts, then press More – Import. Then import the CSV to your Gmail contacts.

Then on your phone, open the Contacts App. Press Menu and then Sync Contacts. This will pull the contacts from Gmail to your phone.

Depending on how your device is setup, sometimes when Apps are installed, a shortcut icon is automatically placed on your homescreens.

This can be annoying for users who want to keep their homescreens clutter-free.

To stop then, go to the Play Store and press the menu icon in the top right. Then choose Settings and untick Add icon to Home Screen

If you are browsing a website and want to see the HTML source code behind the page, then Android doesn’t offer you the ability to do this by default.

There is however a handy App called View Web Source which can be installed. Whenever you want to view the HTML of a web page, you just press the Menu – Share – View Web Source.

You can then browse the code or copy the content into the clipboard.

To delete or remove homescreen widgets, simply press and hold. Then drag the widget to the top-right corner of the screen and into the Trash icon.

While viewing your list of Contacts you can swipe from Right to Left to send a text message to the selected contact.

This might not work on all models.

If you are not happy with your notification light, then you can change and tweak it. Go to the Play Store and download an App called Lightflow.

You might need to enable the notification light before the App works. Go to Settings – My device – LED Indicator and tick Notifications.

To silence the phone when ringing there are two methods:

Either press the Volume Down (or Up) button or if the phone is on a surface facing up, simply flip it over so it is facing down.

Having GPS on your device is great, but it does slowly chew through your battery life.

Fortunately there is a way to improve this in recent version of Android. Pull down your notifications screen from the top of the phone. Then press and hold on GPS. Then select Mode – Power Saving.