Android 9 (Pie) Tips and Tricks
To add a widget, simply long press on a blank part of one of your homescreens. Then select Widget. Scroll through the list of available widgets and choose one. It will be placed on your homescreen and you can move it around as you desire.
The phone has the ability to send quick response text messages if your phone is ringing but you can’t answer it.
To change these, go to your Dialler App and press the Menu or More button.
Then select Settings – Quick Responses.
From here you can add or edit your reject messages.
Android manages your applications so if the phone is running low on memory, it will close the oldest running App.
If you do need to manually close an application go to Settings – Applications – Application manager. Then swipe the screen from right to left until you are on the Running screen.
Then choose the application you want to stop and select Force Stop.
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.
There is a hidden Android Easter egg on the phone that Google has built into your device.
Go to Settings. Then scroll down to About device. Then tap on the Android version option 5 times.
Once you see something on the screen, you can then rub the screen with your finger to produce another surprise. If rubbing doesn’t work then try tapping with your finger. A combination of the above should work.
By the way don’t expect to see an actual Easter Egg. That is just the name given to things hidden inside software or operating systems.
Checking Available RAM and CPU utilization on your Operating System Android 9 Pie is very helpful if you are thinking about removing more Apps.
Looking at which Apps drain your RAM, CPU time, and battery will help you decide which of them should be removed from your phone.
To do this, just follow the simple steps below:
- Go to your phone settings. You can do this by swiping down the home screen to reveal the notification bar. From there, tap on the gear icon to open Settings.
- Look for Device Maintenance → Memory
- Alternately, you can also tap on “Data Usage,” then scroll down to see which apps are taking up CPU power.
- You may also look for “Smart Manager.” You will see the status of your RAM and Storage in this area. If you tap RAM, you will see a list of apps that are taking up much of your RAM.
- For Huawei users, you can look for “Storage” under Settings.
All methods from 2 to 4 can be accessed on the Phone Settings alone. There are certain variations, depending on your phone or unit.
This section should also show what is taking up valuable CPU time. Useful if you think some Apps are draining your battery.
Android now comes with some great battery management built into the OS.
Pull down your notifications screen and select Settings. Then go to Battery ?and you will see some useful stats such as the time remaining. There are also two other options: Power saving mode and Ultra power saving mode. Select one of these to really make your phone last the distance.
Be warned that these can limit your device quite considerably.
You can also increase Battery Life by minimizing the numbers of Apps running in the background.
There are a couple of ways to bring up one of your contacts.
First, while in your Contacts App, simply start typing in the search bar at the top of the screen.
Or else a quicker method is to use the Google Search widget (installed by long pressing on a vacant part of your homescreen and installing the widget) and start typing the name of the contact you want to dial. This will quickly filter the correct contact.
To remove numbers from the call log that you don’t want anyone seeing, then open your Call Log.
This will normally be found on your Apps list or you can also go to your Dialler and find Logs or Call Logs.
Then press and hold on the contact you want to remove. When the Menu appears, press Delete.
If you want to remove the Google Search bar, simply tap and hold the bar and a remove button will appear at top of the screen, drag the bar to that remove button, and the bar will disappear.
If this is not working, go to Settings – Applications – Application manager. Then swipe from right to left so you are on the All screen. Scroll to Google search and press Disable.
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