Slacy’s Blog

It’s easy to install lots of great Android applications that end up eating up all your standby battery power refreshing.

Big culprits are the FaceBook application, and any Twitter clients that you may be using.  When you install them, they generally come with a very aggressive and frequent update interval.  These updates will really shorten your phone battery life.

Personally, I prefer to just manually update these messages, and all these applications usually include a “Refresh” option to manually refresh their data.

So, disable those automatic FaceBook notifications (or set them to a very long amount, like 8 hours), and use the “Refresh” menu option instead!

I really like knowing when I get a new e-mail or calendar entry on my phone, but I get annoyed when my phone makes too much noise with notifications.

My preferred setup is to enable notifications, but to set the notification ringtone to “silent” for most things.

You can set the default notification ringtone to “Silent” if you want to disable all notification sounds.

1. Press Home
2. Press Menu
3. Select “Settings”
4. Select “Sound & Display”
5. Select “Notification Ringtone”
6. Choose “Silent” (the first item in the list)

If you want sounds for some notifications, but not others, then you’ll have to do this on a per-application basis.  For example, if you want everything to be silent except for GMail, then do the above to set your default ringtone to silent, then use GMail’s settings to override the notification ringtone to something else:

1. Run GMail
2. Press Menu
3. Select “Settings”
4. Select “Select Ringtone”
5. Choose the ringtone you like

You can follow a very similar procedure for SMS, Calendar, GMail, FaceBook, and any other applications that generate notifications.

One problem you might find if you send all your e-mail to your phone is that you’re constantly getting the “new e-mail” notification, and that means it becomes sort of useless, and you’ll begin to ignore your inbox (again).

The best solution to this is to create a set of filters for your e-mail, and apply labels to messages you don’t want to receive notifications for.  What other e-mail programs call “Folders”, are referred to as “Labels” in GMail.  (Although, unlike folders, one message can have multiple Labels)

One other thing you’ll need to remember is that GMail uses the term “Archive” to mean “Remove from your inbox”.  Archived messages are only visible through the Web UI and searches.  Think of it like “I’m done reading this but I don’t want to delete it.”

There’s a fairly easy way to set up Filters & Labels built into GMail:

1. Go to your GMail Inbox
2. Select a bunch of related messages (from a mailing list, of a given topic, etc.) that you’d rather not receive notifications for on your phone.
3. Click on “More Actions” in the top bar of buttons, and pull down to “Filter messages like these”
4. Make sure that the list of matching messages looks correct to you and click “Next Step”
5. Select the “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the label” checkboxes.  Use the dropdown to create a new label if you’d like.
6. Click Create Filter

Done!  Now, all messages that are of the type you selected will skip the inbox (be automatically Archived) and will also get the label you selected.

By default, the GMail application on your phone only sync’s your Inbox, but you can always view other labels on your phone, and you can even set up syncing for those labels as well.   You can view messages with any label by pressing Menu from inside the GMail application, then selecting “View Labels”

To set which labels are sync’d to the phoneOn your Android, run the GMail application, and…

1. Press Menu
2. Select “Settings”
3. Select “Labels”
4. Find the labels you want and set the sync durations for those labels.

If you find that your phone often says “Lodaing…” when viewing your Inbox, then you need to sync more days of your Inbox.

When you activated your Android phone, you had to provide a “Google Account” to sync it to.  Generally, this is an @gmail.com address, but could actually be any google-provided account, for example, if you use Google Apps for your Domain, you can provide your own domain’s e-mail account and password.

Once you’ve set up the phone and tied it to your Google account, your mail & contacts from GMail will be automatically syncchronized with your phone, almost instantaneously.

So, what you should do is take your address book (in whatever format you currently have it) and import it into your GMail contacts.

1. Log in to GMail, using the account you’ve snyc’d with your phone
2. Click “contacts” on the left hand side.
3. Click “import” in the upper right hand corner.
4. Upload your export file, adding these contacts to a new group called something like “Imported Contacts”
5. Use the web interface to manually edit & add to any of the contacts, moving them to new groups if necessary.

Remember that it’s always possible to add & edit contacts via the GMail user interface — you don’t have to use your phone!  I find it much easier to use the web interface than the phone interface.

If the import process created duplicate contacts, then you can easily de-dupe them in the contacts UI.

1. Go to the contacts section of GMail
2. Type a search term that matches 2 or more duplicate entries. (If there is no such term, just skip this step)
3. Select the checkbox next to each item you’d like to merge together
4. There should be a link on the right that says “Merge these 2 contacts”   Click on it
5. You’ll be taken to the merged contact info.  Make sure it’s correct, and save the contact.

Remember that it’s also useful to create contacts in GMail even if people don’t have an e-mail address (for example, your grandparents) because it’ll show up on your phone and you can call them.

If you add an address to the contact, then it’ll be very easy to Navigate to their address using the builtin navigation system!

I even like creating contacts for things like my favorite restaurants and take-out places.  It makes them easy to call, and easy to navigate to!