Help Couple of newbie questions

[EdNerd]

Just got my LG Vortex and have the following questions:

-- I put a Contact shortcut onto the Home screen so I can have a speed dial. But I get a single line of less than a dozen characters. Can this be changed? Can I rename it, at least?

-- I deleted a lot of out-of-the-box shortcuts from the Home screen. Is there a quick and easy way to gather the rest onto the main Home screen? Or do I have to drag each one at a time?

-- Call me old school, but I don't like the idea of my phone always being connected to the 'net and my apps doing data things anytime they want. I don't have an unlimited data package, so I'm trying to watch the connection usage. And so I turned off the Background Data and Auto-Sync options. I do have a couple of gmail accounts on the phone. Will these automatically sunc and update when I try to check the account? If not, can I put a "turn on sync connection" shortcut on the Home screen? Or do I have to go into the Settings each time and activate this before checking my email?

Ed

 

[EdNerd]

Add this one:

-- How do I delete the Verizon home bookmark and set another page as Home? This thing refuses to cooperate!!

Ed

 

[jinwons]

Just got my LG Vortex and have the following questions:

-- I put a Contact shortcut onto the Home screen so I can have a speed dial. But I get a single line of less than a dozen characters. Can this be changed? Can I rename it, at least?

-- I deleted a lot of out-of-the-box shortcuts from the Home screen. Is there a quick and easy way to gather the rest onto the main Home screen? Or do I have to drag each one at a time?

-- Call me old school, but I don't like the idea of my phone always being connected to the 'net and my apps doing data things anytime they want. I don't have an unlimited data package, so I'm trying to watch the connection usage. And so I turned off the Background Data and Auto-Sync options. I do have a couple of gmail accounts on the phone. Will these automatically sunc and update when I try to check the account? If not, can I put a "turn on sync connection" shortcut on the Home screen? Or do I have to go into the Settings each time and activate this before checking my email?

Ed

Welcome to Vortex forum.
I'm not sure of your first question, but can answer other two. As far as I know, we can create/delete drag app icon one by one only. Maybe we can try multi-touch to drag multiple icons, but I didn't try it yet.

For your last question, yes you can put handy power control widget on home screen that allows to switch on/off WiFi, GPS, Auto-sync, etc. Turning off background data will automatically shut down auto-sync too. That will surely help to keep minimum data access. When you open your email app, you can still manually refresh it to update your emails.

I personally keep both background data, auto-sync on but I don't use any screen widgets like news, weather, SNS that automatically access data periodically. So my data usage don't creep up out of control although I'm with unlimited data plan.

 

[EdNerd]

Hi, jinwons! Thanks for responding.

yes you can put handy power control widget on home screen

What "power control widget" do you use?

I've read posts about people trying to kill apps before they're done and doing more harm than good. I was originally looking for something like that, similar to the Task Manager on my computer. After reading the other articles, though, I'm fine with not killing the apps.

The data connection, however, is a different story - for me, anyway; maybe in reality it isn't. I do a bit of browsing, but have no way to decisively tell my phone I'm done with the browser. All I can do is press the Back button until I get to the Home screen, or press the Home button (sometimes two or three times) until I see my wallpaper. But I'm not sure the browser is closed and disconnected, and I want to be.

If you can point me in a good direction, I'd be most appreciative.

Ed

 

[jinwons]

Looks like Vortex is your first android phone. You will enjoy more and more it once you learn and understand it better.

The power control widget is from default widgets that android OS offers. You can get it by long pressing on empty home screen. Then it pops up a menu window and you can go into widget part and find it from there. Just make sure there is enough space on home screen to put it. It looks like black tool bar with multiple square buttons. You will have WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, auto-sync, brightness buttons on it.

Now as for closing apps in android, you need to first realize that the way android OS works is not like Windows in PC. Having some apps running in the memory doesn't necessarily mean that it's actually doing something or using CPU/memory resources. It's just there with minimum footprint just in case you need it again. Android itself handles redistributing the memory resources between apps and automatically closes apps not needed or not used for long time. This is especially true with version 2.2 froyo and newer versions. So you really don't need to use task killer kind of apps. Like you found yourself, it does more harm to system and consumes more power than not using it. You can monitor what are running by going into setting/applications/running apps and force close some apps if you want.

Most apps don't have exit button though some apps has it in menu. The stock android browser doesn't have exit button. So the only way to get out of browser is either pressing home button or pressing back button until it gets back to home screen. The stock browser app remains in memory to be ready for re-opening later while keeping minimum memory footprint, cache. But if you don't like this behavior anyway and want to make sure it's closed, there are other browser apps you and download from market such as Dolphin mini or HD. I personally use Dolphin mini as it's small, has tabs and allows to use external micro SD as cache space instead of internal memory. It also has exit button in the menu, so I can get out of it and don't leave it in memory at all. But stock android browser is also solid browser with good speed. You just have to live without exit button.

 

[EdNerd]

Thanks to all for your help and support, but ....
just wanted to let you know I turned the Vortex back in.
Me 'n Android just don't work well together.

Cheers!
Ed

 

[jinwons]

Sorry to hear that. Hope you can come back to android phone later.
Maybe my previous answer looked too complicated for you and I guess I should have explained it better. But just rest assured that android is just as easy as Apple devices.
You just need to use home or back button to get out of apps that don't have exit button. Don't worry about apps running in background. Android will take care of them.