Android Ice Cream Sandwich hidden features
Therefore, most people will be interested about what cool tricks ICS can bring to the table. I have to admit though, even I didn’t know everything on this list before I did my research.
Take Screenshots
Did you know that you can easily take screenshots with your ICS device without installing an additional app? If an option to take a screenshot doesn’t appear in the menu which appears after you hold the power button, you can also take screenshots by simultaneously holding down either the power and home buttons, or power and volume down buttons. A frame will appear around your screen, letting you know it has taken the screenshot.
Multitask With Ease
Multitasking in ICS has been improved quite a bit. In fact, on any screen, you can hold your Home button and a list of all running applications will appear. From here, you can easily tap on one to switch to it, or swipe it away to close to completely. This is also a good way of making sure that an app is really closed when you told it to.
Contact Swipe Actions
While not a new feature in ICS, you can find a contact in your contacts list and swipe to the right to call them or swipe to the left to send them a text message. This is a quicker way of contacting them through your preferred method instead of having to make a couple extra taps.
Unlock With Your Face
There’s a new way to unlock your phone! Forget using PINs or patterns when you can just use your device’s front-facing camera to scan your face! While this technique is fun and quite easy to use when it works, it’s not fool-proof and requires multiple pictures of your face in different lighting environments for it to work most of the time. As a failsafe, you’ll also have to set up an alternative unlock method so you can still get into your phone.
Take Pictures While Shooting A Video
In the past, we’ve only been able to shoot videos or snap pictures, but not both. That’s all about to change, as our camera apps are now capable of doing them at the same time. While shooting a video, just tap on your screen to take a photo. Whala!
Speak Your Words
Also not a new feature in ICS, you can now use Voice to Text in many more applications. In fact, it should be available for any text box now where your keyboard appears. It’s been improved quite a bit in ICS, so it’s worth giving a spin to give your fingers some much-needed rest.
Advanced Call Options
You can now customize how you’d like to end or deny calls in ICS. In the options, you can opt to use the power button as a way to end or deny a call so you don’t have to go hunting for the red “End Call” button. You can also deny phone calls on-screen and choose to send a text message instead from a few different templates. These settings can be found in the “Call” section of your device’s overall settings. Makes keeping people informed quite easy!
Private Browsing
A fantastic addition to ICS is the ability to create “private” tabs, which behave exactly like the Private Browsing mode in Firefox or Incognito windows in Chrome. Generally speaking, the entire tab management has improved in Android’s default browser, but private tabs are a welcome addition.
Unlock Using Your Google Account
If you’ve forgotten your PIN, password, or pattern, no need to freak out. Your phone won’t lock you out, turning your expensive piece of hardware into an even more expensive paperweight. Instead, when you hit the “locked out” phase of your distress, you’ll instead be asked to simply log back into your Google account to unlock your phone. Be sure to remember which one you chose for your phone, or else you’ll really have a paperweight in your hands!
Track Data Usage
As most of today’s data plans have data caps — usually around 2GB in America — it’s become quite important for people to keep track of their data usage. ICS devices can now do this, and even warn you when you’re getting close to that limit. Just go into your settings and choose Data Usage. You can choose a different warning level, and even opt to disable mobile data entirely once a certain amount has been reached if your carrier will charge you extra for additional data. Scrolling down presents you a list of your most data-hungry apps.
Transfer Data with Android Beam
Android Beam is a brand new technology which makes transferring data between two capable devices extremely easy. The technology uses NFC, or near field communication, as the method of communication, but the phones need to be running ICS to be Android Beam capable. With it, you can easily transfer photos as well as other multimedia.
Resizeable Widgets
Provided you’re not using a third-party launcher, you’ll now find your widgets in your application menu by either tapping on the “Widgets” tab or by swiping past all your installed apps. All these widgets are also resizeable, so you’re not forced to hold back from a widget just because you don’t have enough screen real estate.
Weather On Your Lock Screen
If you’d like, you can tell your device to have the local weather conditions appear on your lock screen. There aren’t many settings to configure besides on/off and temperature units, as the device will use your current location. It’s a very quick and easy way of determining whether you’ll need an umbrella or sweater.
Swipe Away Selected Notifications
If you have plenty of notifications waiting for you in the notifications area, but don’t want to dismiss all of them, you can swipe away those who’d like to dismiss. Just swipe the one(s) you’d like to remove to the right, and away they go. As always, you can hit the X in the top right corner to dismiss all notifications.
Keyboard Layouts In Different Languages
Your device should be capable of supporting keyboard layouts for multiple languages. I know this is definitely the case for phones which use Swipe, where the languages only need to be enabled before you can switch them on the keyboard itself with a single tap. This is great for international users who constantly need to type in more than one language.
1. Add quick controls to the browser
One of the options buried beneath the Labs section of Android 4.0's web browser is the Quick Controls option. This adds a pop-out menu to the browser, which pulls in a little semi-circular collection of shortcuts to the main browser features, removing the URL bar and giving you more screen to play with. Also, holding down the Back button is the Android standard way of bringing up the bookmarks and history tool, too. But that's been around for years.
2. Long-press to uninstall
Long-pressing on an app within the app drawer lets you drag it to a Home screen, but it also pops up a couple of menus along the top of the screen. App Info gives you the boring technical stuff about how much memory it's taking up, or you can fling it off the other way to uninstall it.
3. Flying Android screensaver
One odd undocumented little secret within Android 4.0 is this strange little collection of flying Androids, which you can... look at. Look at for as long as you like. To activate it, head into the phone's About screen and hammer away at the Android Version tab and it'll all happen.
4. Save your eyes with inverted rendering
Inverted rendering is a posh way of saying it makes the pages black and turns the text white, so it looks like you're reading the internet from 1997. It also supposedly saves battery, plus is easier on the eyes if you're reading in the dark. It's under the browser's settings tab, within the accessibility area - and there's a contrast slider, too.
5. Set a custom rejection text message
When your Twitter action is rudely interrupted by someone actually telephoning you, there's a polite way to give the caller the boot. Android 4.0 lets users ping a rejection text message to callers - and you're able to customise this too. Just answer a call and ping the lock screen notification up to access to custom rejection messaging area.
6. Stop app icons automatically appearing
One of the many new ICS features is the way Google lets apps automatically add shortcuts to themselves on your Home screen when they've finished installing. It's useful, but if you're a control freak and wish to remain 100% in charge of your Home layout, head to the Google Play app's settings tab and untick the Auto-add Shortcuts toggle.
7. There's a Settings shortcut in the Notifications pane
That little settings icon in the ICS notifications area isn't just art to fill the space. It's a shortcut to your phone or tablet's settings area. So use that instead of giving it a Home screen icon slot all to itself.
8. Manually close apps
Google's lovely new recent apps multitasking menu also lets you close apps quickly, should you suspect one's gone rogue. A Long-press within the Recent Apps listing lets you visit the app's info page, from where you can easily force close it.
9. Remove the lock screen
It's possible to entirely bin your Android 4.0 lock screen, making the phone instantly turn itself on when you press the power button. It's a security nightmare, but if your phone lives entirely on your desk and you demand instant access without any unlocking, head to Security > Screen lock and select none. Then be very careful.
10. Folders in the dock
Android's new official love of folder formation makes it dead easy to combine app shortcuts and make folders, simply by dragging one icon on top of another. You can make these groups of apps even easier to access by dragging a folder onto the ICS floating dock, meaning you can squeeze stacks more content on to each creaking Home screen.
11. Take photos while recording video
The Android 4.0 camera app that arrived with the Galaxy Nexus has one cool little extra feature - the ability to fire off still photos while recording video clips. Simply tapping the screen takes a shot at full resolution, which is saved to the phone's gallery while the video's still happily recording away.
12. Bin animations and transitions
Hidden within the Developer Options section of the Ice Cream Sandwich software are quite a few nerdy ways to adapt your phone. Most won't be of any use to those who are just using their phone as a phone, but if you want it to feel faster, or at least look a little different, the scrolling, zooming effects on windows and menus can be edited in many ways.
13. Take a grab of your phone
Screen grabbing of your phone's display is finally in Android. On the Galaxy Nexus, it's activated through holding the power button and volume down switch. On HTC's new models it's done by holding the power button and pressing Home. Other phones had different techniques for doing this before Ice Cream Sandwich, but it's good to see this now becoming part of the standard Android feature set in Android 4.0.
14. Long-press dotted words
When typing on the Android 4.0 keyboard, you may see some suggested words appear with the "..." icon beneath. Doing a long-press on this one will pop up a much bigger window of suggested words, letting you bail out on some of that tedious typing a little quicker.
15. Experiment with GPU settings
Another hidden little gem found within the Development options tab is the hardware acceleration 'Force On' toggle. This makes ICS attempt to boost the performance of any apps that don't already use the feature. It may also break them in the process, though, so it's something of a trial and error fiddling exercise to do on a very rainy day.
16. Type like an adult
Make a stand for grammatical standards in this day and age by long-pressing on the stock Android 4.0 keyboard's full stop button. This brings up such doomed punctuation as commas and speech marks, plus even a semicolon for the extra brave mobile typist.
19. Nick wallpapers off the internet
Found a lovely photograph of some stars, a pretty computer generated planet or even the mighty Professor Brian Cox himself? Long-pressing on any image in the web browsers lets you instantly set it as your wallpaper, without the hassle of saving it, finding it, and setting it the long way.
20. Limit background process
If you fancy an even more serious bit of fiddling, the same ICS developer area contains the option to "limit background process" demands by the OS. You can use this to stop your phone or tablet storing so many apps in memory. Whether this has any effect of the actual battery life of us users is up for debate, but again, it's something to play with and see if it suits your phone use patterns.
219. Quickly access Notifications
Here's a simple yet huge change Google's made in Android 4.0 - the Notifications pane can be accessed from the lock screen. Press power, touch the Notifications area, then scroll down to read your latest messages. Obviously it's a bit of a security risk and lets anyone access your messages, so best be careful.
Quickly Send a Text Response When Dismissing a Call
If you’re in a meeting or driving a car, it can be inconvenient (or unsafe) to craft a text message letting someone know why you’ve dismissed their call. Thankfully, Ice Cream Sandwich provides a neat feature that allows users to quickly send a text message as a response to an incoming call.
- Swipe the selection cursor over the quick response icon (on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, pictured above, that means swiping up) that appears when you receive an incoming call.
- Select the response you want, such as “I’ll call you later.”
- Alternatively, create your own custom message.
Use Your Voice Instead of the Keyboard
Ice Cream Sandwich has brought the power of its voice input engine to every application that uses a keyboard and improved its accuracy to boot!
- Tap the microphone button at the bottom of the keyboard to launch the voice input engine.
- Tap on words underlined in red to fix typos when you’ve finished speaking.
- Tap on words underlined in grey to change any words (correctly spelled) that may have been misinterpreted by the voice input engine.
Organize Your Apps in Homescreen Folders
With the addition of homescreen folders, Android 4.0 has made it easier than ever to organize your apps and documents.
- Tap and drag an application over another app icon to automatically create a new homescreen folder.
- Tap on the folder to open it.
- Tap on the folder name at the bottom to rename the folder.
Share Information With Just a Tap of Your Phone
Since Beam’s launch last year as part of Ice Cream Sandwich, numerous apps have begun to incorporate Ice Cream Sandwich’s NFC functionality, including Foursquare, Shazam, BBC and others. Just tap two Android Beam-enabled phones together and the phones will automatically swap data such as YouTube videos, contact information, and other nuggets of information.
- Go to Settings.
- Tap on “More…”
- Tap on “Android Beam.”
- Tap the on/off switch to enable Android Beam.
Dismiss Notifications With a Swipe of the Finger
We already highlighted ICS’s ability to efficiently multitask by swiping away unused apps, but – as the folks at Google pointed out – the swipe-to-close functionality extends to email and notifications as well.
- Drag down the notifications menu.
- Press and drag notifications to the side to dismiss them.
Create Silly Faces and Add Backgrounds in Video Chat
Google Talk on Ice Cream Sandwich now supports face-distortion effects and custom backgrounds, making your video chat that much more lively.
- Open the camera app.
- Switch to video.
- Tap on the Effects button.
- Choose a background or face distortion effect.
Improve Your Surfing With Chrome Beta
Google is proud of the beta version of Chrome for Android, and rightfully so – the latest update of their browser offers a host of new functionality, including the option to quickly and easily download multiple files to your device; view the desktop version of websites with just two taps; and add bookmarks to your home screen. You can keep up with all the latest Chrome releases here.
Conclusion
And there you go! Those are 15 of the best tips available with Android Ice Cream Sandwich, all of which are extremely useful. Hopefully with this knowledge you can get a lot more done with your device, or just accomplish what you wish faster and more efficiently. Plus it’s a great way to brag to your iOS-toting friends about what your Android beast can do.
Don’t forget to check out our amazing MakeUseOf guide on Android!
Did I miss a tip? What are you still missing from Android, whether it be original or something found in iOS? Let us know in the comments!
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
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