Making the Samsung Galaxy S5 Phone Your Own
- Customizing the Home Screen
- Setting the Apps View
- Changing System Settings
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
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Topics include the following:
- Customizing the Home screen with new wallpaper, shortcuts, folders, and widgets
- Setting the Apps view
- Changing system settings
Nothing prevents you from using the phone exactly as it was when you first opened the box—keeping the default wallpaper, installing no additional widgets, downloading no new apps, and ignoring Settings for the operating system and apps. But the fun of having a powerful smartphone is in customizing it—personalizing the phone in ways that make it easier, more efficient, and fun to use.
Customizing the Home Screen
The easiest and most obvious way to personalize the phone is to customize its Home screen. In fact, many of the Home screen customization options, such as changing the wallpaper, adding widgets, and adding shortcuts to your favorite apps, are what users do first with their new phones.
Select Wallpaper
The simplest way to customize the phone is to change its Home screen background (called wallpaper) by selecting an image that’s aesthetically pleasing, amusing, or touching. Wallpaper can be a static image or a live, moving image. The image you choose is applied to all Home screen pages.
On the Home screen, press and hold the Recent Apps key and tap the Wallpapers icon at the bottom of the screen.
Tap Home Screen, Lock Screen, or Home and Lock Screens—depending on the screen(s) for which you want to select a new wallpaper image.
- Scroll through and tap thumbnails to view the available types of wallpaper. Options include More Images (a cropped area of a photo or other image that’s stored on the phone or in an online account), personal images you’ve previously used as wallpaper, static images provided by Samsung and your carrier, and live wallpaper.
To apply an image or live wallpaper shown in the scrolling list, select its thumbnail and tap Set Wallpaper. If you want to use a photo or image that isn’t in the Wallpapers list, continue with Step 5.
Tap the More Images thumbnail.
If a Complete Action Using dialog box appears, select an app or image source, and tap Just Once.
Open the folder that contains the image. Tap the thumbnail to open the image for cropping, resize and move the selection rectangle as necessary to select the desired area, and tap Done.
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Managing Personal Wallpaper Images
Each time you try out a personal image as wallpaper (Step 5), an image thumbnail is added to the scrolling Wallpapers list. To remove any image that you don’t intend to reuse, perform Steps 1–2, press and hold one of the images to select it, select other images that you want to remove, and then tap the Trash icon at the top of the screen.
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Rearrange, Remove, and Add Home Screen Pages
The default Home screen has four horizontally scrolling pages, plus a special page dedicated to My Magazine/Flipboard—a news and social networking aggregator. You can rearrange the pages, remove ones that you don’t need, or add new pages (up to the maximum of seven).
On the Home screen, press and hold the Recent Apps key, or press and hold (or pinch) an empty spot on a Home screen page.
Move a page. To change the position of a page, press and hold it, and then drag to the left or right. As you drag, affected pages automatically slide out of the way to make room for the page. Release the page when it’s in the correct position.
Designate a different main page. The main page (marked with a house icon) can be any Home screen page, not just the first one. Whenever you’re on the Home screen, pressing the Home key always takes you to this main page. To set a new main page, tap the house icon at the top of the page.
Delete a page. Press and hold a page’s thumbnail, and then drag it onto the Remove icon at the top of the screen. If the page contains one or more items, a confirmation dialog appears. Tap OK to confirm the deletion.
Add a new page. You can have a maximum of seven Home screen pages. To create a new page, scroll to the last page (marked with a plus (+) symbol) and tap the symbol. After adding a new page, you can optionally change its position (see Step 2).
- When you finish editing, complete the process by pressing the Back key, pressing the Home key, or tapping the thumbnail of the Home screen page that you want to view.
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Add Shortcuts
You can place shortcuts to your favorite apps on the Home screen. When you tap an app shortcut, the app that it represents launches. An Android shortcut is the equivalent of a Mac alias or a Windows shortcut.
Navigate to the Home screen page to which you want to add the shortcut, ensure that it has an open space for the shortcut, and tap the Apps icon. (You can add the shortcut to any page, but the current one is initially offered as the destination.)
Find the app for which you want to create a shortcut.
Press and hold the app’s icon, drag it into an open spot on the current Home screen page, and release the icon.
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Creating a Bookmark Shortcut
You can also create shortcuts to your favorite web pages. In the Internet or Chrome app, open the page or site for viewing. In Internet, tap the menu icon and choose Add Shortcut to Home Screen. In Chrome, tap the menu icon and choose Add to Homescreen, edit the name, and tap Add. The bookmark is added to a Home screen page.
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Add Widgets
A widget is an application that runs on the Home screen. Many, such as Weather, aren’t interactive or are only minimally so. For example, you can tap the refresh icon on the Weather widget to force an update of the weather info. Otherwise, such widgets simply provide continuously updated information. Other widgets, such as Music, are designed for interaction. By tapping its buttons, you can pause or restart playback, and skip to the next or previous song.
You can add a widget in any free space on a Home screen page, as long as there’s room for it. Widgets come in a variety of sizes, from one- or two-section widgets to full-screen ones. In addition to the widgets supplied with your phone, downloaded applications sometimes include their own widgets.
Navigate to the Home screen page to which you want to add the widget and ensure that it has an open space for the widget.
Press and hold the Recent Apps key, and then tap the Widgets icon.
Find the widget that you want to install. Above each widget is the number of screen sections (horizontal × vertical) it requires. To assist in your search, you can do any of the following:
- Navigate the widget pages by swiping left and right or by tapping navigation dots.
- Search for a widget by tapping the menu icon and choosing Search Widgets. Enter part of the widget’s name. As you type, matches are displayed. To dismiss the search box, tap the less than (<) icon on the box’s left edge.
- Any widget followed by a greater than (>) icon is a widget group. To view or select one of its widgets, tap the > icon.
Press and hold the widget, and then drag it into position on the current (or another) Home screen page.
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>>>Go Further: Widget Shortcuts
Shortcuts in Android provide great flexibility because they can be direct links to a variety of things other than apps, such as files, records, and operating system elements. For instance, you can create a Direct Dial shortcut that automatically dials a person’s phone number when you tap it. After adding the Direct Dial widget to a Home screen page, you select the person’s Contacts record to link it to the shortcut.
Here are some other widget-based shortcuts you can add:
- Book. Links to a downloaded ebook.
- Bookmark. Links to a web page in Internet or Chrome.
- Contact. Links to a person’s record in Contacts, enabling you to easily call, message, email, or locate the person.
- Direct Dial. Automatically dials the specified number, based on a selected record in Contacts.
- Direct Message. Enables you to create a new text or multimedia message to a specific person in Contacts.
- Directions. Provides turn-by-turn navigation to a single specified destination.
Dropbox Folder. Enables you to open a specific folder in your Dropbox account.
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Create Folders
To help organize your Home screen shortcuts, you can add folders in which to store them.
On the Home screen, navigate to the page to which you want to add a folder. Press and hold the first shortcut that you want to add to the folder and drag it onto the Create Folder icon at the top of the screen.
- Type a name for the folder in the text box.
To populate the folder, do one of the following:
- Tap the Done key. When desired, you can add other shortcuts to the folder (or any other folder) by long-pressing each shortcut and dragging it onto the folder icon.
- Tap the + (plus) icon, select apps by tapping each one’s icon, and then tap Done. A shortcut is created for each checked app and inserted into the folder.
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>>>Go Further: Working with Folders
Of course, creating a folder is just the first step. Adding and organizing shortcuts within the folders is what makes them useful. Here’s how to use, organize, and manage folders and their contents.
- Tap a folder to view the items it contains. In the pop-up window that appears, tap an item to launch or open it. To reposition an item in the folder, press and hold it, and then drag it to a new position. To close an open folder, tap anywhere outside of the folder.
To change a folder’s background color, open the folder, tap the menu icon, and then tap a color swatch.
- To remove an item from a folder, tap the folder to open it, press and hold the item’s icon, and then drag it to any location outside of the folder. (To delete an app shortcut that’s in a folder, drag the shortcut out of the folder. Then press and hold the shortcut, and drag it onto the Remove icon.)
- Finally, like other Home screen items, you can reposition a folder by pressing and holding its icon, and then dragging it to a destination on the current or a different Home screen page.
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Reposition and Remove Home Screen Items
Part of the fun of setting up your Home screen pages is that you can freely rearrange items. Because many items are shortcuts, removing them from the Home screen has no effect on the actual items they represent. Follow these steps to reposition or remove Home screen items.
On the Home screen page, press and hold the item you want to reposition or remove.
Remove the item by dragging it onto the Remove icon that appears at the top of the screen. When you release the item, it is removed.
Reposition the item by dragging it to an empty or occupied spot on the current or another Home screen page. If the destination is occupied, items will shift to make room (if possible). When you release the item, the move is completed.
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>>>Go Further: Rearranging and Replacing the Primary Shortcuts
At the bottom of every Home screen page are the five primary shortcuts: Phone, Contacts, Messages, Internet (or Chrome), and Apps. If desired, you can rearrange, remove, or replace any of the first four.
- To rearrange the primary shortcuts, press and hold the one you want to move, drag it to the left or right, and then release it when it’s in the correct position.
- To remove a primary shortcut, press and hold it, and then drag it to the Remove icon at the top of the page. If you want to remove the primary shortcut from the bottom of the screen but keep it on the page, drag it to any blank spot on the current Home screen page.
To replace a primary shortcut (or add one, if you have less than four), drag the replacement or addition from a Home screen or Apps page onto the primary shortcut you want to replace or into position between a pair, respectively.
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