Home

Home Button

This is the most universal of buttons, besides, perhaps, the power switch. Tap it at any time on your phone, and it drops out of whatever application you're using, bringing you right back to your central home screen. The Home button doesn't usually "close" that application, though, so if you're in the middle of writing an email, clicking on Gmail again should return you to that text field, with none of your text lost. That's a nice thing for the sanity of the thick-fingered, no? If you're on a different section of your home screens than the center, hitting Home brings you back to the center.

On HTC phones, pressing the Home button while on the central home screen brings up a Mac-style layout of all your home panels and their contents so you can easily switch to, say, your Twitter and Facebook widgets on the far-right screen. On some of Motorola's Droid models, pressing Home while on the central home screen pops up your app list, just as if you'd pressed the middle icon at the bottom of your phone's screen.

Holding down the Home button has a different effect: launching a pop-up window that shows the six most recent applications you've opened and used from your phone. You can tap any of them with your finger to pop them open, or scroll to an app with your tracking device and press to open. It's kind of a complimentary function to the tapping function—if you accidentally tapped Home while you were reading Facebook updates, holding down Home will let you click back into Facebook, right where you left off.

Back

Back Button

Back does pretty much just what you'd think it does. In most applications, hitting Back brings you to the screen you were on before the one you're currently looking at. Holding it down in some applications flips (very) rapidly back, likely bringing you back to the home screen. In other applications, holding down Back simply counts as if you're pressed it once.

The one default application where Back has a special purpose is the browser. In your standard Browser, and most other browsers you can download, Back works like the back button in a browser, taking you to the previous web page you had visited. Hold down Back, and you'll see your browser history listed, from which you can tap and pick any page you were on in the recent past.

Search

Search Button

From the home screen, or from most applications, tapping the magnifying glass icon of the Search button brings up the Quick Search Box. It loads up a text box at the top of your screen, brings up the keyboard, and searches nearly your entire phone for whatever you're typing. Next to the text box, there's another magnifying glass button that performs the search, and a microphone icon that lets you speak your search rather than type it. Voice commands are a fairly amazing part of using an Android phone, and we're covering that in the next chapter.

You can change what Quick Search covers in your Settings ("Searchable items," under the Search sub-menu), but without changing anything, you'll see contact names and data, browser bookmarks and history, and installed applications show up as you start to type. Type out a web address (lifehacker.com), hit Enter or the search button up top, and you'll head there. Write a search phrase ("best custard Boston"), and you'll get quick Google results (unless your phone is set to use another search engine as its default).

What You're Searching for is Described in the Search Bar

In most applications, hitting the Search button brings up the universal Quick Search bar. In some applications, like Mail, Contacts, and some third-party apps you might install, tapping Search searches the application you're in—digging through email messages, looking up contacts, or displaying something related to the application. To know whether you're pulling off a universal search of your phone data, versus seaching in that application, pay attention to the text that's inside the text box when it pops up. If you're performing a general search, the faded grey text will read "Quick Search Box." If the application you're in has a special use for the Search button, it will read something like "Search mail," "Search contacts," or the like.

What happens when you press and hold down on the Search button? No matter what you're doing on the phone, it launches the Voice Search application. More to the point, it gears up for a second, then starts listening to what you've got to say. In most cases, what you say turns into a search on Google, after the audio is passed to Google and its servers have a chance to transcribe your spoken words into text. You can also call contacts and get turn-by-turn directions to a location by simply stating its name—again, a cool thing we'll cover just a few pages further in.

Menu

Menu Button

Pressing the Menu button does something different on almost every screen of your phone. In almost every case, it pops up a white tiled menu on the bottom of your screen, giving you access to things that are either deeper options, that don't quite fit on the screen, or that are just more explicitly explained.

From the home screen, for instance, the Menu key offers options to add an item to that screen, change the wallpaper, open the Quick Search Box, see what notifications are waiting, or enter the system settings. All but the last of these options can be accessed elsewhere on the screen—pressing and holding on a blank space, tapping the Search button, pulling down the notification "shade," etc. In other applications, tapping the Menu key might offer some crucial functionality that isn't easy to incorporate into a screen—a link for composing a new email or Twitter message, adding a new contact, or changing the settings. If you can't figure out how to do something in an application from looking at it, the answer is, more often than not, tucked in the Menu key's pop-up.

Menu Button on a Droid X

Some phone makers have changed the look and feel of the Menu button from Google's own design. Motorola prefers a somewhat abstract four-square icon, with the upper-left icon filled in.

Tapping and holding on the Menu key brings up the keyboard for typing under any circumstance. It's a helpful fall-back for when applications fail to bring up the keyboard on their own and, if you start typing, it's a shortcut to using the Quick Search Box to pull off Google searches from anywhere on your phone.

The Trackball

Moving an App Icon

There is nothing the trackball does that you can't do with your fingers, and that's why some Android phones have skipped them entirely. For a few things, though, the trackball—or, on some phones, the optical tracking sensor—is more convenient.

The main thing Android users need the trackball for is fixing up text. While typing with the on-screen keyboard, scrolling the trackball left and right moves the cursor around in a more precise fashion than stabbing around with your finger trying to pinpoint the spot between the "T" and the "H" in "the." When selecting text to copy from a web page or other text, the trackball is how you map out the amount of text you want copied.

The trackball is also a handy tool for apps that let you draw, control a cursor, or otherwise get semi-precise control, and a few games have made clever use of it. It can sometimes be more comfortable to scroll through a long list of items—email, messages, items for sale—with the trackball than having to "push" the screen upwards. Clicking down with the trackball serves the same function as pressing with your finger, and holding down the trackball replicates the behavior of pressing and holding with a finger. When you're navigating web pages with tiny links and controls designed for laptops and desktop computer browsers, the trackball can be very handy indeed.

The trackball on the Nexus One, and likely future Android phones, also serves as an indicator for new messages. When new emails, SMS messages, updates to Market applications, or other notifications from your applications arrive, the trackball will pulse with a white glow. In the settings for each application, you can change or disable the light-up behavior of the trackball (or LED light near the top of the screen, on some phones).

Finger Controls

How to control things on your Android phone with your fingers should be, for the most part, obvious. Swipe up to scroll down, and swipe down to scroll up, as if you had a long scroll of paper in front of you, or were using a microfilm projector. Pressing down briefly on an item is the equivalent of the "clicking" you'd do with a computer mouse. Pressing and holding is the thing as a "right click" on a standard computer—it reveals further actions you can perform on whatever you've selected.

Long Pressing (press and hold) brings up extra actions, like a right click on a PC

Check Boxes to perform one action to multiple items

Some applications you can download, and some in your own phone, prefer a few other kinds of controls, either for style or perceived ease of use. In applications such as Gmail, where you might want to do the same thing to a lot of different things, you'll get check boxes to toggle and buttons that pop up to let you do something to those items you checked.

Pressing an Email

Some applications also have tucked all the additional things you can do to an object into an arrow or some other kind of pointing marker on the sides. In the example of the official Android application from the messaging service Twitter, clicking a tweet doesn't actually do anything, but clicking the downward-facing arrow to the right brings up a dialog-balloon-style menu of options.

Drop Down Action Menu on Twitter App

In certain applications, like the browser, the photo Gallery, and some document viewers, you can use your fingers to zoom in and out of an image—the "pinch-to-zoom" action that iPhone users learn as second nature. It's hard to put in a picture, but you'll likely figure it out. Place two fingers on the screen, close to the center, and expand them, as if you had an expandable magnifying glass between your fingers that focused in closer as you spread your fingers apart. Bring your fingers in together in a "pinch" motion, and you'll zoom out. We'll dig into how zooming and focusing works in the browser and Gallery apps in the section devoted to those applications.

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