The Long Press

There's one Android trick that always seems to blow people's minds. It's not that this trick is a huge secret or particularly revolutionary, or even unique to android phones; in fact this concept is one that you're probably already familiar with but maybe you've never thought to use it on your Android. I'm talking about the 'Long Press' which is essentially the equivalent of right clicking your mouse on your desktop computer. Depending on the context a long-press will give you options that otherwise are not available and often times the answer to your question only one long press away.

To demonstrate the long-press I'm going to walk you through adding a Direct Dial for one of your contacts to the home screen. When we're finished, instead of scrolling through all 200 of the names in your phone book to find the person you call most you can just tap their picture on the home screen and you'll call them with just one touch.

1. Navigate to one of your home screens where you have some free space. If you're not sure where that is just press the home button and then swipe your finger to the right or left until you see some empty space. Once you've decided on a place to put your Direct Dial contact think of the person who you want to add and keep them in mind for the upcoming steps.

2. Press on the place where you want to add the Direct Dial Contact and hold your finger there until you see a menu titled 'Add to Home screen' pop up. It should have a few options which may vary slightly depending on your version of Android. Mine gives 4 options: Shortcuts, Widgets, Folders and Wallpapers.

3. Select 'Shortcuts' for now(I'll discuss those other options in a later post). The next list will be titled 'Select shortcut' and will have options like 'Applications' 'Contact' 'Direct Dial' 'Bookmark' etc. For this exercise we'll select 'Direct Dial'.

4. Once you select Direct Dial you should be taken to your phone book. Remember when I asked you to keep someone in mind for later steps? This is where we'll put that to use. Select that person's name and an icon with their name will be added to the place where you long pressed.

5. Now instead of searching through your phone book to call that person just tap on their name on the home screen. Better yet if you already have a picture attached to that person's contact info it will show up on the icon!

Next up I'll teach you how to add a picture to someone's contact info just in case you want to do that. Let me know if I can make the instructions above any clearer for you or if there is a particular topic you'd like me to cover for future posts. Your feedback really helps!

-John