So, if Google Chrome is your favorite browser, give the Google Chrome Incredible StartPage featured extension a try. Startpages ideally need to be uncluttered, but none of us would mind a touch of visual chutzpah thrown in. Incredible StartPage is not as full featured as the well-known names of its tribe because it is designed to replace Chrome’s default ‘New Tab’ page. But as we will see, there’s a fair bit more…

The Visual Theme

The Chrome Web Store has quite a few startpage extensions but Incredible StartPage seems to be one of the popular ones with a good installed user base. One reason can be attributed to its easy-on-the-eye looks. Incredible StartPage has a theme based interface which is customizable to a fair degree. It uses Flickr API to grab images and display it as wallpaper and it gives you a few categories to choose from. Pick from clouds, sunset, nature, star, or go for a custom image from an URL. Click on the arrows to move ahead or back for more photos. Background and font color can also be tweaked.

It’s Not Only about Looks

As you are familiar with, this is how a default ‘new tab’ looks like:

Incredible StartPage gives it a facelift by turning it into the one you can see in the first screenshot.

The startpage is divided into three main panels:

The biggest panel is for displaying your bookmarks and apps against the backdrop of a Flickr image. You can click on Advanced Options and set it up to show it all in three columns.

The first frame on the left (Closed) displays all your recently closed tabs. You can go into Advanced Options and set a number for the maximum items you want displayed. A way to get into the browsing history would have been helpful here, but that’s absent. Clear it all with a click on the Clear button. The one quirk is that though this panel displays a previously opened Extensions tab, it won’t let you open it from here.

The frame that holds your bookmarks is where you probably will click most often. Of course, you can make your browsing more efficient by dragging and dropping some of the more frequently used ones to the Flickr image adorned My Bookmarks panel on the right (as shown by the hand icon in the screenshot below). This way you can keep the ones with which you start the day close by for one-click access. In fact, you can choose any folder and set it to be displayed as the main one on the bigger My Bookmarks panel.

Probably, the feature which puts an extra notch on this startpage as a productivity enhancer is the Notes feature. Scribble anything on the yellow Post-It style note and it stays there across your browsing sessions and even if you clear your cache. Quite handily, you can post your notes to your Gmail and Google Calendar accounts.

That sounds like a nifty way of setting up quick tasks and reminders. I also use it to share links with friends as clicking on Post to Gmail opens up a new tab with the note pasted into the main letter body.

Incredible StartPage consumes a bit of memory (around 15K), but that’s not much when you trade it off against the beautiful facelift and the productivity. What’s your take?

If you like Windows’ new user interface design, you can implement that look on your browser’s start page with the help of Eight. It’s a Windows 8 start page theme which will give you more than just eye candy. Eight allows you to customize its elements to suit your needs. The last update of Eight is compatible with Firefox 4.0.1, Chrome 12, Opera 11.11, and Internet Explorer 8.

Using Eight

The concept of the start page has become popular for the past several years in the browser world. Every time a user opens a new tab, they will see a graphical list of the sites they visited the most. So instead of repeatedly typing in the URLs of those favorite sites, users can just click on the sites on the start page.

For the following walkthrough, I used Firefox. But the steps should be more or less the same under any other compatible browser.

• Replacing your browser’s default Windows 8 start page with Eight is easy. First, you have to download the 2.5MB theme package (top right of the page under “Add To Favorites“) and extract it to a folder in your computer. Please make sure that this folder will not be moved or changed in the future, since doing so will break the file path used by your browser.

• Then, use the “File – Open File” menu in your browser to navigate to and open the “index.htm” inside Eight’s folder. Close all other opened tabs before you continue.

• To set Eight as the default start page, go to “Preferences – General” (under Tools menu in Windows or the Firefox menu in Mac) and choose “Show my home page” from “Startup – When Firefox starts“.

• Then, click the “Use current pages” button, and close the Preferences window. If you have other open tabs while doing this, other tabs will also be recorded as the home page.  So make sure they are closed.

Now, every time you open your browser, Eight will show up. You can click on one of the links to open the URL destination.

Customizing Eight

Eight comes with twelve default pre-set links: YouTube, Yahoo!, Facebook, BBC News, CNN, Grooveshark, Last.fm, DeviantArt, Twitter, Wikipedia, iTunes, and Google. Users can quickly go to those sites by clicking on the visual links. But everybody has their own preferences, and luckily Eight is fully customizable. You can change the destination links, logos, and even the background color of each visual link according to your preferences.

If you want to customize Eight, you can find a very short explanation in the Readme.txt file inside Eight’s folder. But let’s now replace one of the visual links (thumbnails) with MakeUseOf’s link, so we can fully understand how the process works.

• First, let’s open the “Sketch.jpg” file for our guidance. We can see the reference number, location, and maximum icon size for each thumbnail.

• Let’s pick one square as the location for the MakeUseOf visual link. I picked box number 10 because I want the largest possible size but I don’t want to replace Google (box number 6). This means I should put the logo inside a 420 x 205 pixel image area with a transparent background. You can use any decent image application to prepare the thumbnail. The instructions suggest that you use a white logo for clarity, but you can use any kind of color for your logo. Give a name to your thumbnail logo and put the image file inside the thumbs folder.
• The next step is to open the “source.xml” file using a simple text editor to edit the source parameters.

• Find the entry that you want to edit and change the name, URL, and image name. You’ll see the new thumbnail after refreshing the page. You can repeat the process to change the other thumbnails. Please note that the numbering in the source starts with 0 while in the sketch, it starts with 1.

Customizing thumbnails in Eight is not difficult, but the setting up could take up to a couple of hours, especially the image editing process. However, once everything is set up, all of your favorite sites will be on the tip of your mouse.

Do you use a start page? Would you try Eight? Do you know any other similar tools? Tell us what you think and share your opinions using the comments below.

With 498 votes taken, the division was this: 43% voted for Facebook; 40% voted for Twitter; and 17% just don’t really like either of them. And before you start thinking that this is definitive, note that the 3% difference is made up of 11 votes only and that it was neck and neck all week.

Full results and this week’s poll after the jump.

See just how close this is?

This week’s poll question is: Do You Use A Start Page Or Saved Sessions In Your Browser?

Most of us rely on our browsers for just about all our internet activities: work, play and all the rest. How do you like to start your browsing? With a customised start page so you can see everything at a glance? Or with saved sessions of tabs that you used last time? Does your browser “home” page have several tabs you use all the time? Or maybe you use some combination of these? Let us know!

If you have some other ingenious solution or you use a particularly effective combination of these tools, let us know in the comments – we’d love to hear it!

One of the things I’ve been toying with is making portable web servers, like my article on Server2Go, which was borrowed from ideas from Dave’s article on XAMPP. After successfully configuring a few portable web server setups, I started looking at my mobile phone and wondering about other possibilities. What if I could set up a mobile web server on my phone, and then anywhere that I am (where there’s a Wi-Fi network), share out any web content that I have? Furthermore, what if I could carry around a customized start page that I could use to access my own important weblinks from any computer on that network, or share those out to others on the network?

The good news is that using two tools – the PAW Mobile Web Server, and the SPGM (Simple Picture Gallery Manager) – this is all possible.

Installing The Mobile PAW Web Server

While searching for the best tool that would allow me to transform my Android into a portable web server, I stumbled across the PAW Web Server solution.

The PAW mobile web server is the coolest Android web server I’ve ever seen. Why’s it so cool? Because there’s ZERO setup. That’s right, you install it, click this cool little run button, and it tells you what the URL is.  You’re done.

Of course, there is the usual setup when you want to actually serve out content, like a shared Internet start page. Think about what this tool lets you do. Anywhere that you’re visiting, if there’s a Wi-Fi network available, you can launch this app and open up your own mobile web server to anyone on that network. All they have to do is type in the IP address of your phone – cool!

Once PAW is running on your phone, it hosts all content in the /PAW/HTML/ directory on your SD card, to the entire network.

The system defaults to system tools stored in the App folder, which includes some pretty cool features once you’re connected to your phone through your browser. You can make calls, send SMS or email messages, browse through your phone using a file manager, and a whole lot more.

For our purposes, there’s only one thing you have to do. Open a browser and type in the IP address your phone provided once PAW was running. After creating a login ID, you’ll be in the admin area. Click on “Add-Ons“, then “Plug-ins” and install the PHP plugin.

Set your timezone and then click “Install“. This will enable the ability to host PHP webpages – a requirement if you’re going to use SPGM. You’ll have to stop and start the server on your phone. The next time you log in, you should see PHP installed under the “Plug-ins” menu item.

The next step is to take that new-found ability and make something useful out of it.

Installing The Simple Picture Gallery Manager

There are two things that I thought people would like to do with such a web server.

• It would be cool to launch a mobile Wi-Fi web server on a network so anyone on that network can view your picture gallery of photos you have on your phone – directly from any web browser on the network.
• The PAW web server also lets you carry around a “startpage” that you can customize and then host, letting both you and your friends access your favorite websites, online documents and more, all linked from your own personal starting page.

The cool thing is that you can accomplish both of these tasks using the Simple Picture Gallery Manager (SPGM). All you have to do is download the entire collection of files into your PAW HTML folder. At this point, you’re already prepared to start serving picture galleries.

All you have to do to set it up is run Gallery Mage and use it to open any directory on your computer or mobile phone that has the pictures you want to host. Export those to SPGM format. Copy that entire exported directory to your HTML folder on your phone, and your gallery is live!

To see your picture galleries, all people have to do is type in the IP address of your phone appended with the SPGM folder. For example, people can access mine on a local network by visiting: http://192.168.1.101:8080/spgm/index.php. All gallery folders you import will automatically display.

Creating A Start Page

The last thing I want to do is create that cool launch page. You can do this when you export those SPGM picture files to your phone by editing the pic-desc.txt file that gets exported along with them. Just add the URL links to the captions.

Once you do that, import your new “start page” gallery to your PAW server, and you’ll see all of the link icons on the gallery page.

You or your friends can click on any of the images, and then click on the URL link below the image to visit the site. This is a useful way to organize links to pictures, online documents, websites and more, all stored on your mobile phone and ready to share out as an internet start page, so long as you have access to a wi-fi network.

Did you try this setup and can you think of any other awesome uses for it? Do you know of any other PHP apps that might run on this mobile web server that would transform your mobile phone into a powerful little Wi-Fi web server? Share your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.

Most of us need to mix up our organising with a little creativity to keep ourselves motivated. We need to be able to see not just the tasks at hand, but reminders of our goals and all the useful things we found along the way. What we need is a way to bring it all together visually and memorably. To have all your pictures, links, tasks relevant to this aspect of your life together and ready for action. This is where Netvibes becomes an amazing asset.

It doesn’t really have to be Netvibes. iGoogle or maybe another similar RSS/portal/start page would do the trick just as well. The goal here is to create a place online where you can easily access a selection of your favourite life focus points, projects or whatever. One online destination, many tabs for your goals.

I’m personally a fan of Netvibes as a start page for many reasons. It’s not my main feed reader, but there are good reasons for duplicating a few RSS feeds in to Netvibes. You’ll see why soon as I outline how you can use Netvibes.

The Set Up

It’s surprisingly easy to set up, too. Head over to Netvibes and get an account. Create a new tab for your goal. For instance, I’ve chosen to make a “Holidays” tab. A project you might have in mind could be your online job search.

You can choose how you want the column layout of the tab to be by choosing “edit”.

Now, you want to add a module for your tasks. If you’re using Remember The Milk, there’s a great ready-made module. If you can’t find a widget for your usual task manager, see if you can get an RSS feed for your tasks. Then you can simply add the RSS feed as a module.

You can find modules on Netvibes for most of the popular online to-do lists. Remember The Milk is my to-do list of choice, but each to their own.

Set up your task module so that it only shows the relevant tasks for this part of your life. In RTM, it’s easy to pick a pre-made smartlist (the picture above shows how to save a search as a smartlist in RTM). For others, you might be able to filter by tag or something.

Now, make a module for your links. If you’re using Delicious or some other link manager with RSS, you can use an RSS widget to bring in your relevant links. For instance, links tagged with “Holiday” would be brought in to mine.

Also grab a few pictures that remind you of your goals. There’s a Flickr module which brings in a grid of pictures using RSS. I love this module particularly because the feed doesn’t have to come from Flickr – it can be any picture RSS feed. Bring in relevant picture RSS feeds from your albums on Flickr or ideas on Tumblr. Bring in Flickr group photos that remind you of your goals.

Take a look at the sorts of RSS feeds you can get from Delicious bookmarks. Mix that with a little strategy for organising your studies using Delicious and you can see that we’re able to get some extremely useful information by RSS.

Then add a few inspiring RSS feeds of blogs relevant to your goal. For instance, in my “Holidays” tab I’ve added travel advisories, French travel blogs and French learning blogs. If you want to mix and match your RSS feeds before importing, use something like Yahoo pipes to tweak them first.

As you can see, with everything together like this, it’s hard not to feel motivation towards your goal. Also, when you focus the page on the tasks you really want to work on, then you’re not going to wind up feeling like you should be doing everyday tasks instead of focusing on your goals.

Do you use a system like this? Which apps do you use? What priorities have you dedicated a tab to and why? Let us know your great ideas!

Image Credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

Most interfaces now try to solve that by neglecting the problem. They just give you a blank slate that you can litter any way you like. Although the freedom of a sandbox interface is enticing, that doesn’t seem to be the way to do it.

Some companies (and home programmers) have been redefining the way we think about content placement, and redesigning the main interface of popular devices and applications. Slide Screen is most prominent, in the way it revamps the face of the Android, an already hot smartphone.

Slide Screen

Different Android phones (e.g. HTC versus Motorolla) tend to pack a different home screen — basically the desktop of your phone. Slide Screen, although it certainly has the feel of a custom ROM, is simply another home screen replacement. It redefines the face of your phone, and does so intelligently and beautifully.

With an eye on these heavy (Android) phone users, those people swimming in emails and RSS feeds, Slide Screen tries to facilitate a better overview of the data pool. The application shows you a clean and simplistic overview, packed with as much information possible, without creating a clutter.

The general overview consists of an upper and a lower part, divided by a center bar that supplies you with the most rudimentary information; date, time, weather and available data connections.

Personal data is placed on the top of the screen. This includes phone calls, messages, emails and the calendar. Currently, Slide Screen only syncs with the Gmail application, though. At the bottom of the screen are your RSS news feeds, stock quotes and Tweets. Facebook support is due to be added in a later version of the application. All these “˜applications’ are color-coded to allow for easy distinction. And besides, it looks pretty.

This center bar can be slid up- or downwards to prioritize one branch of information, and reallocate the available space on your screen. You can also filter the information flow by hitting one of the icons on the righthand side of the screen. For example, tapping the Twitter icon will open that application, momentarily showing only Tweets, as can be seen in the screenshot above.

Integrated RSS Reader

As can be expected, if you instead hit one of the items in the list, it will open the post, email or stock information in full screen. This feature works incredible with your RSS news feeds. And don’t expect it to fire up your browser, or a third-party RSS reader. Slide Screen will show you your articles without you having to leave the slick, black interface.

Instead of having to switch between interfaces tenfold, you can keep yourself focused on the data at hand. Currently these applications only extend to the aforementioned. However, Slide Screen appears to be working on an API that will make it possible for other developers to create compatible applications.

Revamped Application Overview

Slide Screen also made work of the application overview, a part of the Android user interface that stands separate from the “˜real’ home screen. Redesigning the application overview, Slide Screen closes the GUI loop.

As can be expected, there weren’t any radical reforms here. The application overview has already proven its usability. It was redesigned to fit in with the rest of Slide Screen, and now allows you to pin a number of favorite applications – those that otherwise would’ve ended up on your home screen.

What do you think of Slide Screen? Is this the direction you want future mobile interfaces to go? It certainly shares some qualities with the new Windows Mobile OS. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

A simple workaround is to create a personalized browser start page. You can add all your favorite links to that page and open it wherever you are. All you have to remember is the URL of that page.

In this article, I will describe 3 websites that offer the best customizable Internet start page.

3x3Links

I’m sure most of you have a Gmail account. Well, in that case you don’t need to create a new account with 3x3Links because it allows you to log in with your Google account.

After you’ve logged in, hit > Customize. You have to manually enter all the URLs you wish to add, but it’s easy as pie. You can also create new folders to sort your links. 3x3Links will automatically fetch website logos, but you can customize them.

To move links around, for example into a folder, click them in their top left corner and drag them to the desired location. A menu will pop up and you have to pick an action. Unfortunately, when you’re trying to move links, they will automatically switch position with other links, rather than moving everything else one position further down.

When you need to add a lot of links on your Internet start page, it may be be easier to switch from grid into > list view and make your changes there. The selection to switch between grid and list view is located in the top right of the page. However, there is no easy way to organize your links in the list view.

Once you’re done editing, click > Finish Customizing in the top right and enjoy. Move the mouse over > Hotkeys to learn some shortcuts. In > Options you can adjust the look of your page, make links open in a new tab, or export your data.

This is what the result may look like:

Only2Clicks

Once you complete the signup process, you land on your personal Only2Clicks page. To enter your first bookmark, click the > add link button in the top left, enter the details and click > Submit. Only2Clicks will prepare an automatic snapshot of the page you’ve added. Alternatively, you can upload your own image.

You can sort your bookmarks alphabetically in ascending or descending order or you can drag and drop them around. Drag and drop works intuitively and is much better than what we’ve seen for 3x3Links. Be sure to grab the entry by its top menu bar to drag and drop.

To move a bookmark into a different category, move the mouse over the pen icon in the top right corner of the entry and a menu with the options Copy, Move, and Edit will come up.

You can edit your categories, change their sort order, remove categories or add new ones by clicking the folder icon at the very end of your category list.

Only2Clicks does support importing and exporting bookmarks. However, importing my bookmarks took forever and I quit the process prematurely. Then I found that many of the bookmarks, including folders (categories) had already been added, which created a huge mess. So unfortunately, you’re not given the chance to make a selection.

Here is a preview of an entire Internet start page with the Noir skin:

start.io

After signing up, you are directed to the page where you can manage your groups and links. It’s straight forward, just click the > + for a new link, enter the site name, the URL and click > Add. To edit an entry, click the little wheel icon to its right. You can enable updates and change the color or delete the bookmark. To add a new group, simply add its name in the text field at the top and click > Create.

A great advantage of start.io is that you can import your existing bookmarks. In Firefox, the HTML file containing your bookmarks is located in your profile folder. A site with all links from your bookmarks will appear and you can check the boxes of links you want to add. When done click > Add Links at the bottom.

Once the site contains all your desired links, you can focus on the appearance. Within > Settings > Layouts you’ll find several designs to choose from or you’ll eventually be able to upload a > Custom design. At this point, the custom option doesn’t seem to be working. Within > Account you can select a custom background color for your start.io page.

This is a full page preview of my start.io page using the Edition layout:

We have previously covered other Internet start pages. Have a look at these selected articles for even more options:

• How To Set Your Browser Homepage in 5 Browsers by Simon
• 12 Awesome Homepages Readers Shared With Us by Justin
• Top 4 Sites To Access Your Favourite Links From One Page by Nancy
• Feedly ““ A New Firefox Start Page Addon You Can’t Afford To Miss by Shankar
• Why I Decided To Make Google My Home Page and Never Looked Back by Justin

What do you use as your start page?

Image credits: emilbacik

One con is that after a while, your bookmarks can become hard to manage. Using a visual bookmarking website as your homepage is the best way to access favorites at hand for quick and easy access.

Each of these services have their own unique added features, including RSS feeds, inbuilt search, tabs, groups, and bookmarklets for easily adding new bookmarks.

Favetop

Favetop serves as a desktop for your favourite links, websites and media online. Using the website as your homepage would give you quick access to sites that you visit frequently.

You can quickly populate your Favetop favourite websites with the recommended sites which include Bing, Google, Twitter, Amazon and Facebook, amongst many others. Going into the settings allows you to delete the sites you would prefer not to add to your front page. Alternatively, you can choose to manually enter each of the websites yourself.

Other than your favourite websites, you can also add your favourite online videos, photos, music, games and bookmarks to specific blog posts, articles and so forth.

You don’t actually have to sign up for an account to be able to add content to Favetop, but the same doesn’t go for deleting. If you want to be able to remove content from your page, you will have to sign up for a free account.

You can also use Favetop to perform searches, choosing between Google, Yahoo and Bing as your search engine.

Getwapps

After signing up and activating your account, you’re ready to start setting up your own personal customised page on Getwapps.

Using their setup wizard, you can select a few of your favourite websites or services, give the list a name, and then choose whether or not turn on your Meebo Bar to chat with friends using Facebook Chat, GTalk, AIM, MSN etc.

Getwapps’ default homepage features a variety of websites they have chosen for you including Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, amongst others. The appearance is highly customisable, allowing you to change the title, and the image associated with the site, with the added ability of instantly taking a screenshot from the site without ever leaving your Getwapps page.

Getwapps’ main aim is to keep you organized with the ability to create as many lists as you want, featuring large buttons for each site. It also has a mini list in the right hand sidebar. One of Getwapps’ interesting features is the fact that you can search sites directly from within the button that appears on your homepage. If you want to be able to search Amazon, for instance, from within Getwapps, be sure to add Amazon using the Wapps Store.

Another similar website to Getwapps that deserves a mention is Only2Clicks. It has a very similar interface to Getwapps with the added bonus of tabbed pages, an iPhone interface, and a variety of skins to change the appearance of the entire page.

Start.io

Start.io takes a minimalist approach, which will appeal to people who prefer a simple and uncluttered start page. You can create as many groups as you like, and add websites to those groups. Start.io also has an import feature, allowing you to import your bookmarks if you would prefer to use it as a starting point for all of the sites that you use, rather than just your favourites. Your links appear as a series of categorised lists.

Once you’ve got your links set up, you can choose whether or not to make your start page public or private, whether or not to open links in a new page, and to customize your background.

Start.io has a bookmarklet making it easy to add new websites to your Start.io webpage from the comfort of your bookmark bar.

A coloured bullet point will appear next to any page which features new updates since you last visited it.

43Marks

43Marks sets itself apart from the rest of this list by allowing you to add not only your favourite bookmarks, but also allows you to add your favourite RSS feeds.

Default bookmarks are added for you, which you can remove, as well as the categories themselves, including Email, Social, Photo, Movies and more. The appearance can also be customised by rearranging categories, changing the colours of each category, and the RSS feeds can be displayed as expanded or collapsed.

From your 43Marks homepage, you can search Google, Bing, Yahoo and Wikipedia, and can choose whether or not to share your 43Marks page publicly or keep it private.

Do you have a special system for accessing your favourite websites? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Ben Lancaster

This year seems to be the beginning of the full launch of Android as a powerful mobile operating system. Now that so many people are transitioning to Android, what are some of the coolest tricks and tips Google has hidden in its OS?

Below is a taste of the less known features you can find.

Please note : due to the large variety of models and carriers, not all of these features are available for all Android versions and phone models.

Gesture Search

One of the new Labs applications forAndroid operating system 2.0 phones is called Gesture Search. It allows you to search your phone by using your fingers to write letters on the screen instead of using the keyboard.

Instead of typing letter by letter on a search bar, simply tap the little hand sign on the screen and draw a letter. Android will search your phone for anything starting with the letters you type.

Gesture Search can be configured to search through your whole phone, or you can select it to search only through certain specific folders, such as contacts or music.  You can also erase a query by gesturing.

Going across it horizontally, left to right, erases the entire query, and going across right to left removes the last letter or space in the query.

Creating Shortcuts & Adding Slots To Your Homepage

You can create a shortcut to your favorite websites on your homepage by simply pressing and holding any site in your browser’s bookmarks and then selecting “Add Shortcut to Home”.

Now what happens when your home slots are full?

Download a little free app called “UltimateFaves Carousel” from Google Market. It allows you to add 16 new icons to one slot, but using a very cool 3D rotating viewer to a single slot.

The Many Uses Of The Search Key

The search key on Android gives you specific search options according to where you are, particularly with Google sites. For example, if you click the search button while on Google Maps, you’ll get a prompt for street, city and zip code, but if you click the search key while on YouTube, it will search YouTube for the term you selected.

Unfortunately ATT has disabled several of Android’s features and added their own choices to the phone and locked them in place, so the search feature on ATT phones uses Yahoo, not Google, so the features don’t work the same way.

Browsers & Their Perks

The full HTML browser from Google does a great job at showing sites in full HTML, but a few other Android-compatible browsers have their own charm. One of them is the Dolphin browser, which is an app that allows you to download YouTube videos to your phone to watch on the go. It is fully integrated with social networks, allows you to sync with Google Bookmarks and to save webpages to read later. The Gesture Search feature also works with the Dolphin browser.

Voice Dial & Its Other Uses

Voice Dial is one of the apps that come with Android, and it has more uses than it seems. You can, of course, use it to call people without having to look for their number. Simply click on voice dial and say the name of the person you want to call or say “call (name of person)”  to make a call.  But you can use Voice Dial to search for many other shortcuts.

Want to know detailed information about your battery, such as charge and voltage? Open the Voice Dial app and say “Open battery Info“. You can basically open most programs by saying “open” and the name of the program. Make sure you pronounce things clearly though. I’ve called the wrong person before.

Shortcut To Programs You Used Last

On some phone models, Android will show you the last six programs you used if you press and hold the home button.

Voice Search

Currently available for Android 2.0 and up. Simply click the microphone button on the search widget and wait for the ‘Speak Now” prompt. You can just say what you are looking for and Android will find it for you.

That feature is also available on the Android browser. Press the “Menu” button and tap “Search“. You will see the microphone there and you can use it for search words or for website URLs.

Connecting To Your Computer To Transfer Your Files

You don’t need to have any special software to connect your Android phone to your computer. Some models will automatically detect if you are connected via USB and prompt you with options.

If that doesn’t happen, after attaching the phone via the USB cable (it usually comes with the phone), an image of a USB appears on the top bar. Tap on it and drag down, then click on the USB connected box and the option to mount appears. Click on it and you can now drag and drop files to it like you would do to an external drive.

A Few Other Tips

• Sync your Outlook contacts without using an Exchange server, by using an open-source utility called GO Contact Sync.
• You can cut, copy & paste – just press and hold on any text until select appears. Click on it and use your finger to highlight the part you want to copy. An option to copy or search appears. It doesn’t work on every version of Android or with every browser. I tested it with a few browsers (seems to work on all versions with Opera Browser) and several Android 2.0 versions.
• Download the Google Voice app for full integration with Android’s address book and contacts. You can even call numbers on most websites simply by pressing and holding the numbers on the webpages.

With so many features, there are sure to be many other tricks you discovered and we missed. Share them with us in the comments.