Android recovery

1. Usually while switching on our phones, we press the power button. Android has another option – press Volume-up, Home and Power button at the same time. When your phone starts booting release the power button only (not the Home or Volume-up buttons). You’ll be able to open the Android System Recovery screen.

2. If you’re not comfortable with rooting your phone, you can install a free app to ‘fool’ your OS into thinking it has more memory than it does. On phones with very low internal memory (like HTC Wildfire S) install Link2SD to create an ext2 partition on sd card and move apps which can’t be moved to sd card there and fool the OS by creating a symlink in internal memory. This makes it easy for Android 1.6+ users with root privileges on their phone to move applications to the SD card.

3. You can replace the vague power icon with one that shows the percentage charge in Settings -> Interface -> Status Bar Tweaks -> Battery Percentage.

4. Want to automate the most mundane tasks in your life? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could set your phone to silent when you entered a movie hall, receive a notification when your phone detected open Wi-Fi networks and send your girlfriend an “I-love-you” text every day without thinking about it?
AutomateIt is a free app that lets you automate actions by setting certain triggers and assigning appropriate actions to those triggers. Triggers can be any change in the state of your device, like battery level, call, headset, location, etc. Actions can be pretty much anything you can do on the device.

5. Ice Cream Sandwich offers a pretty neat picture trick: taking a still frame from a video. While you’re shooting, just tap the frame to take a snapshot. It’ll automatically be added to your camera roll.

6. Some shortcuts for typing special characters while on the keyboard:
a) , (comma) => touch and hold the Full-stop key (.)

b)  ‘ or “ (single/double quotation mark) => touch and hold the Full-stop key, and slide to choose the symbol

c) Often type an equation? Touch and hold the #\< key, tap a sign and you’re back to the Number keyboard when you release the #\< key.

d) Instead of typing a period at the end of each sentence and follow by a space, you can tap the space bar twice to get the same result.

e) Need just a digit or symbol from the Number keyboard? Touch the ?123 key and slide to a digit or symbol key, and you’re back to the Alphabet keyboard automatically.

7. To run various tests and change your settings, you can enter into Service Mode by typing *#*#197328640#*#* in your dialer.

8. (Bonus) Open Settings -> Android and tap “Android version” repeatedly to discover an Easter Egg. Depending on your version, you might get: