Skip to footer

32 essential Android tips and tricks

Several weeks ago, we highlighted 40 useful iPhone tricks everyone should know. We got such good feedback from that feature that we wanted to share the love with Android users – who, after all, make up the largest proportion of the smart phone community.

9. Respond to a call with a text message

If an incoming call is important but you can't pick up right away, you can respond with a text instead of ignoring it outright.

  • By Jeff Ward-Bailey

Sometimes, important calls come at inopportune times, like when you're in a meeting or deep in face-to-face conversation. What do you do when you can't pick up, but don't want to blow the caller off? Android has you covered.

If you have a device running Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich, or Jelly Bean, the “incoming call” screen will give you three response options: pick up, ignore, or "ignore with text." The way to select that option varies from phone to phone (on most Samsung phones, you slide the call icon up rather than left or right), but the result is a list of canned text messages like "Can't talk now. Call me back in five minutes?" You can even include custom messages on this list to send to your caller, presumably averting uncomfortable “Why didn't you pick up your phone?” discussions later on.

If you're running Froyo, check out the free “Incoming Call Plus (beta)” app. It'll give you the same feature, although you'll have to put up with a different-looking “Incoming Call” screen.

9 of 32
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.