Droid Incredible Tips & Tricks Thread

[BadPeekSell]

pressing and holding the home button will make it buzz twice and a menu will popup with 6 most recently used apps

 

[homsie]

For any text in the browser or email, you can press and hold to pop up a magnifying square which magnifies the text as you slide your finger over it.

When you release your finger, the magnifying window disappears and a new window plus two pins show up with the text in between them highlighted (selected) in green. You can drag the pins to change what is highlighted and then select one of three icons in the pop up window:

Copy to clipboard
Translate using google translate
Share (Friend stream, email, messages, peep).

If you copy to the clipboard, you can paste into other applications by long pressing and selecting paste in the text input field.

James

 

[droidrob3]

When you connect your Droid Incredible to your PC and mount as "Disk drive" to copy files to and from your SD card, make sure you select the proper "Removable Disk (x" folder on your computer to copy to because there are actually two removable disk folder options that show up from your phone; one is your phone's internal storage (the <8 gb or so) and the other is your SD card.

 

[jshaffer75]

When you connect your Droid Incredible to your PC and mount as "Disk drive" to copy files to and from your SD card, make sure you select the proper "Removable Disk (x" folder on your computer to copy to because there are actually two removable disk folder options that show up from your phone; one is your phone's internal storage (the <8 gb or so) and the other is your SD card.

I renamed my card "memory card" so I don't get them confused.

 

[AJFSTORM]

Pressing the Homescreen button twice shows all 6 homescreens as thumbnails so you can navigate to them directly rather than swiping to them.

 

[AJFSTORM]

There's this tiny white line just above the phone bar at the bottom of the screen. It changes position in relation to which screen you're on as you swipe left or right . Try it and you'll see what I mean.

 

[Cory Streater]

I stole this from HTC's website, but I like this tip, so I am going to quote them here:

Q. How do I increase my accuracy on the keyboard?

A. You can increase your accuracy on the keyboard by calibrating the keyboard to be more suited to your tapping habits:

From the Home screen tap Menu > Settings > Language & keyboard > Touch input > Text input > Calibration tool. Tap the given phrase and after you have completed the calibration, the keyboard should be more attuned to your touch screen habits.

 

[TBolt]

I stole this from HTC's website, but I like this tip, so I am going to quote them here:

It helps a lot. I calibrated after a few hours on the first day - big improvement.

Thanks for the tip.

 

[bmxfreak995]

cool thing i noticed, when your playing music and you lock the phone when you go to hit the unlock button at the top your music controls are on the screen without unlocking the phone. very useful!

 

[ryujin]

If you go into a contact and select Edit Contact then go into edit the person's name. It allows you to put in first and last in separate fields. It then shows your "Display Name" just below. On the right side of that "Display Name" field is an arrow pointing down. Press that arrow and it will allow you to swap how you want the name to be displayed. Either first last or last first.


To turn off the vibration when receiving a text. if you are in Messages, go to "All Messages" and click the Menu button. Click "Settings" and scroll down until you see "Vibrate" under "Received Messages."

Disable Mobile Web Pages
Open Internet Browser
Hit Menu
More
Settings
Untick "Mobile View"


Basically you turn off animations and it makes the phone feel much quicker.
Menu>Settings>Sound & Display>Animation
Set it to Animations Off. There are 3 settings: Show All Animations, Show Some Animations, and Turn Off Animations, the off options is the best for overall performance.

curious...why would you disable mobile web pages?
and what animations do you refer to?

 

[aaoflaca]

Download Advanced task killer and leave it on your home screen.
Power users especially - this is just an easy one click (closing sometimes 8 apps at a time) always there on your home screen. It doesn't kill the active background sink for updates.
Android automatically handles ram issues - but since the phone is pretty beastly it can have 15 apps open without seeing an stutter. But closing them frequently saves major battery - without any loss of performance (i promise)

Warning, if you have alarms setuped, using Advanced task killer will close the alarm program.

I found something intresting, if you put Advanced Task killer inside a folder, when you click on the app, a screen will show with all open apps to select which app(s) you want to kill, and also if you click menu you can setup the task killer app to which actions you want --- While if the task app is on the home screen it will just kill all apps

 

[CRKhead]

Go to a home screen, click the plus button, select folder. Then open the folder, click the plus button, and add the program.

 

[Coffeeman]

If you don't feel like swiping down on the lockscreen to unlock the phone, you can hit the "menu" button, which will also unlock the phone.

 

[mritter88]

Pressing the Homescreen button twice shows all 6 homescreens as thumbnails so you can navigate to them directly rather than swiping to them.

It's pressing the home button from the main home screen that does this. If you press the home button once from another screen it will take you to the main home screen (that's why pressing it a 2nd time will bring up this view).

You can also bring up the thumbnail by pinching two fingers in, from any of the home screens. And by the way there are 7 homescreens not 6 haha.

 

[dalixz25#AC]

From the home screen, if you swipe your finger down across the screen the time in the top toolbar where the 3G symbol resides, you'll pull down a list of Ongoing Apps running and Notifications. Found this by accident but it's pretty nifty if you ask me.

 

[jgurnett]

From the home screen, if you swipe your finger down across the screen the time in the top toolbar where the 3G symbol resides, you'll pull down a list of Ongoing Apps running and Notifications. Found this by accident but it's pretty nifty if you ask me.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Android...this my friend is stock feature! You can also access this list by pressing menu > notifications

 

[aaoflaca]

To change the name of a folder on your home screens, open the folder, press and hold on the top of the folder "where the name of the folder", a small windows will pop up for you to change the name

 

[patrick.butler]

not sure if this was pointed out.... but for all you former BB users that miss your suretype: From the home screen---->menu--->setting--> Language and keyboard---> Touch input---> Keyboard types and choose compact qwerty. i dont think the prediction is as good but it gets the job done!

 

[TBolt]

SMS/MMS Message Delivery Nofication

Messages shortcut (wherever you happen to have it) >
tap the All Messages view >
Menu > Settings -- notice the "Delivery Reports" option listed twice (once for SMS, another time for MMS)

Delivery Reports
Request a delivery report for each message you send.

When your SMS is delivered, you'll get a little envelope icon with a green exclamation mark. That serves as the confirmation.

 

[Limjelo]

Contacts' Birthdays on your Calendar

To have your Contacts Birthdays automatically added to your Calendar, go into GMAIL --> Calendar --> Other Calendars --> Add --> Browse Interesting Calendars --> More --> Contacts Birthdays and Events --> Subscribe.