10 Tips and Tricks to make Android phone smart and fast

Android is everywhere. Most of the people who are using Android mobiles have a prior experience with other brand of mobile. But a considerable amount of people experience the Android mobile as their first mobile phone. Whether you are a newbie to the world of mobile phones or a geek of another brand, these tips and tricks may help you to take the maximum out of your Android mobile.

Tip #1. Search your contacts faster

Searching for a particular contact is one of the most frequent operations we are doing with our mobile. You can do this faster by using the Dial Pad. I always find it bit difficult to scroll through the contacts and then search for a contact. The alternate way is to use the dial pad and type the numbers which  have the letters on it.

Example: You want to search for “John“

Open dial pad, type 564 and you will see all contacts which match with letter combination available on keys 564. In this case, it matched with John.

Next select the contact and press the call button.

Tip #2. Open recently used applications quickly

Android has an option  to open recently used applications without having to look for those apps in that huge list. 

• Simply long press the home button to get the recently used apps pop up window. 
• Select the app which you need. 
• Also you may have an option to open the task manager where you will be able kill the apps/services which are long running.

Tip #3. Make a phone call or send a message from the call log itself

Ever felt that it would have been nice to quickly redial the last number from the log without having to first select the log entry and then press the call or message option. There is a way.

To call : Swipe the call log entry from left to right

To Message: Swipe the call log entry from right to left.

Tip #4. Hidden but not secret codes

You would like to do some system level testing on your own with some simple codes. Here some codes you can use to test your mobile phones various features.

*#*#4636#*#* - Shows Phone information, Battery information, Battery history, Usage statistics

*#*#8255#*#* - Show GTalk service monitor

*#*#1111#*#* - Service Mode

*#*#232331#*#* - Bluetooth test

*#*#3264#*#* - RAM version

*#*#0588#*#* - Proximity sensor test

*#*#2664#*#* - Touch screen test

*#*#0842#*#* - Vibration test

Tip #5. Make your device have enough memory to run the current application

Due to the way memory is managed in the Android OS, and the way Android apps are structured, the more apps you load, the less memory is available to actually run the apps, and the less memory is available, the slower the phone will run, as the phone must spend more time swapping apps in and out of the little working memory available. This affects both battery life and performance. You can make the device more smart and fast by following these tricks.

Trick 1: Uninstall the apps you rarely use

It is obvious, but it's still true: the less program you load, the more responsive the phone will be, because there are a LOT of free memory available. More memory will be available to the phone to actually RUN the programs.

If you want to save the app, use something like AppManager, AppMonster, or Titanium Backup to archive the apps you want to keep around to SD card. Or just redownload them when you need them.

Figure out which apps are taking up the most space by going to menu / Settings / Applications / Manage Applications / menu / sort by size (default is sort by alpha A-Z)

Trick 2: Move apps back from SD Card... if possible

Apps are really meant to be run from internal storage. Move2SD is a neat feature, but SD card is still not as fast as internal storage (unless you have a Class 10 or faster). For the apps you use often, move them BACK INTO phone. They'll actually run faster.

Trick 3: Use only the bare minimum number of widgets

Each widget loads a "service" or two to keep itself updated, and each service is 2-4 MB of space used, even if the widget itself is only like 50KB in size.

Look at the Services Screen yourself: How much is that pretty clock widget taking up? Probably 2-4 MB. Add another one for the music player, another one for the podcast player, another one for this, another one for that... They all add up.


Trick 4: Use a Static Wallpaper

Even a simple Live Wallpaper will take 2 MB or so of memory. Complicated ones may take up to 20MB. And that thing is running ALL THE TIME. It even sucks up CPU power (and battery). Thus, just use a static wallpaper.


Trick 5: Occasionally, Manually Kill Unnecessary Services

Seems every app nowadays comes with a service... and uses several MB of internal memory, even when they are NOT running.

Google Maps have a "Places" service that sometimes loads even when Maps is NOT loaded. Youtube sometimes loads a "widget service" even when it's not running and have no widgets on screen. When you exit an app, the associated services are not always stopped with it.

Kill them manually (see "Running Services" sidebar above), tap any service to kill it. Make their space available to other apps. In fact, if you rarely use that app, uninstall it altogether. (See Tip #1)


Trick 6: Do NOT Use Task Killers on Automatic or Schedule

Advanced Task Killer and similar apps may interfere with the built-in memory management. The memory they free up is only temporary and may include running apps, which will be reloaded by the system in moments.

The best way NOT to overburden the system is to load less apps in the first place