Smartphone users, welcome to tips central. Here you’ll find a multitude of smartphone hints, shortcuts, workarounds, and more for six of the most popular smartphone operating systems available. Read on to learn the ins and outs of your device.

Android

Factory Reset

There are a variety of reasons you might want to perform a factory reset on your T-Mobile G1, including when you’re sending the device in for repair, returning it, selling it, or just looking for a clean slate. To factory reset your G1, start by powering off the unit. Press and hold the Home key and End key until you see a triangle with an exclamation point and the G1 icon, and then press and hold the ALT key and W key on the keypad simultaneously. Now, remove your memory cards, and suddenly your phone is bare as the day it was born.

Use Your Phone As A Portable Hard Drive

The folks at SanDisk have created microSD cards that hold an amazing 32GB of data, which gives you ample room to store an extensive music and video collection and anything else digital you want to transport from point A to point B. To use your G1 as a portable hard drive, start by enabling mass storage mode. Plug your G1 into your PC via a USB cable; press the Menu button; and then select Settings, SD Card & Phone Storage, and Use For USB Storage. At this point, you should be able to access a Windows Explorer folder on your PC. Now, just drag and drop anything and everything you need. The next time you plug your G1 into a PC, you should get an Auto Play prompt that lets you load or unload your phone’s memory card. If not, just access My Computer in Windows XP (Computer in Vista) to find your G1 as a mass storage device.

Voice Dialing

Voice dialing is a great way to quickly place a call without having to navigate the menu and contacts list. It can also help you keep your eyes on the road should you need to make a call while driving. To use voice dialing on your G1, press and hold the Send key, and then speak a name from your contacts list. Your G1 will recognize the name and dial the number for you.

Typing Shortcuts

As an avid smartphone user, you’re no doubt constantly looking for faster ways to type and send messages. To insert special characters, flip open your keypad and press ALT-Spacebar. To remove an entire line of text, press ALT-DEL. Not that you would purposefully type messages in all caps, but if you do need to emphasize a word, press the Shift key twice. To place the cursor at the end or beginning of a line of text, press the ALT key while scrolling the Trackball to the right or left, as desired. To insert a tab space, press ALT-Q. To highlight text to move it, or cut/copy, press the Shift key and roll the Trackball over the desired text.

Set Songs As Ringtones

Why would you buy a ringtone when you can use a song you already paid for? To set a song on your G1 as a ringtone, open the Application tab (press and drag upward), select Music and Songs, and then press and hold your finger over the song you want to make a ringtone. When the context menu appears, select Use As Phone Ringtone. That’s it. And for the sake of our sanity, we ask that you choose a song that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to let your mother hear.

BlackBerry

A Quick Fix

When your BlackBerry gets unruly, hangs, disobeys your commands and is generally being an ornery little smartphone, try the basic battery pull before you resort to harsher, more potentially destructive measures. Pulling out the battery is known to resolve application errors, theme issues, data failures, and more. With the device still powered on, remove your BlackBerry’s back cover to reveal the battery. Remove the battery, wait approximately 30 seconds before you reinsert it, and then reboot your BlackBerry. If this doesn’t do the trick, try a soft reset, which requires you to hold down the ALT-Right Shift-DEL keys for roughly two seconds.

Plug Memory Leaks

If your call logs and messages begin disappearing for no reason, your BlackBerry might have begun systematically deleting older content in an effort to free up enough internal memory to remain functioning. The first step is to check your device’s remaining free memory. In most cases, you would access Settings from the Home screen and then select Options and Status. Alternately, you can press and hold ALT-Shift-H. View the File Free status, measured in bytes. Mentally add commas to determine how many million bytes are free—this is equal to the number of megabytes available. You can safely assume that any more than 12MB free is sufficient and that your BlackBerry wouldn’t be gobbling up old data.

If you need to clear a small amount of data, try clearing the Browser cache. From the Home screen, scroll to the Browser application, press the trackball to launch the browser, press the Menu key, select Options, and then select Cache Operations. From this menu, you can clear History, Content Cache, Pushed Content, and Cookie Cache using individual Clear buttons. All content is cleared when no more buttons are available to select.

To free up additional space, remove any applications you no longer use. From the Home screen, select Settings, Options, Advanced Options, and Applications and then highlight the application you want to uninstall. Press the Menu key and select Delete to remove the app.

Another way to free memory is to delete the BlackBerry Sample Video that comes already loaded on your device. Select Settings from the Home screen and choose Options, Advanced Options, and Applications. Highlight the BlackBerry Sample Video, press the Menu key, and then select Delete.

iPhone

Force Quit

For those rare occasions when your iPhone is running slow or an app hangs and won’t let you quit or access other apps, the Force Quit option is a handy way to make a quick exit. To Force Quit, you want to hold the Home button for approximately 6 seconds. This closes all background processes and currently running applications. Keep in mind: Performing a Force Quit in Mobile Safari clears the cached pages, but when you relaunch the browser, your tabs will reload just as you left them. If you are using the newer iPhone 3G, you need to press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Slide To Power Off screen appears, and then press and hold the Home button for 6 seconds.

Recovery Mode

If your iPhone ever freezes and becomes unresponsive, even after rebooting and connecting the USB cable to your computer, then you might need to put it into Recovery Mode. This should work as long as you are running the latest version of iTunes. First, plug your USB cable into your computer (don’t plug in your iPhone just yet), and then hold the Power button down until you see the Slide To Power Off message. Turn your phone off and press and hold the Home button while connecting the USB cable to your iPhone. Continue holding the Home button until you see the Apple logo followed by the Connect To iTunes message. A message should appear that says iTunes has detected an iPhone in Recovery Mode.

Restore Your iPhone

Beware that if you do place your phone in Recovery Mode, you’ll need to reload it with data from a backup or restore it from scratch. Note that performing a restore will completely wipe the device of songs, videos, contacts, photos, calendar information, and any other data and files you added—your restored iPhone will be factory-fresh. Before performing a restore, make sure you’re running the latest version of iTunes, and if not, install it before proceeding. Next, connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC and select it in iTunes. If your iPhone is frozen and iTunes fails to recognize the device at this point, press and hold the Home and Power buttons for roughly 10 seconds, and then release the Power button while still holding the Home button. At this point, your iPhone is in DFU (Device Firmware Upgrade) mode and iTunes should detect your iPhone. Next, select the Summary tab (in DFU mode, the Summary tab may be the only available tab), click Restore, and then follow the on-screen prompts.

Symbian

View & Edit Microsoft Office Documents

For most of us, the documents we work with on a day-to-day basis are in Microsoft Office or Office-compatible formats, such as Word (DOC), Excel (XLS), and PowerPoint (PPT). But as a Nokia user, you don’t need a Windows Mobile device to get great Office document viewing and editing capabilities in the palm of your hand. Thanks to Quickoffice, you’re just a few button taps away from your work. To launch Quickoffice, press the Menu button, select the Office folder, and click Quickoffice. Quickword, Quicksheet, and Quickpoint let you view and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, respectively. Keep in mind that although Microsoft Office file types are viewable and editable, some advanced features are not available in Quickoffice.

Copy & Paste

The key commands to copy and paste text on your Nokia are identical to the commands used on your PC. Press and hold the Function key, which looks like an up arrow, on your Nokia E71; then scroll up, down, right, or left to highlight the word, phrase, or text you want to copy. Next, release the Function key.

Some Nokias have dedicated CTRL keys, but our E71 does not, so we used the Shift key to access the CTRL function of the CTRL/CHR key, as follows. Press the Shift key and the CTRL/CHR key (you should see CTRL in the upper-right corner of the screen), and then press C to copy the text to the clipboard. Next, position the cursor to where you want the text copied and press the Shift key again, followed by the CTRL/CHR key and then the V key. These commands work in the Notes application, text messages, Web forms, and in Quickoffice documents.

Turn Bluetooth & Infrared Off Or On

You can quickly enable and disable your Nokia’s Bluetooth or infrared radios without scrolling through menus. To turn on the Bluetooth radio, press and hold the Function key and CTRL. To turn on the infrared radio, press and hold the Function key and CHR. Perform the same commands a second time to disable the radios.

View Running Apps

Multitasking is a good feature to have on your smartphone, but without a taskbar, you might have trouble remembering which applications are currently taxing your battery. To quickly scan through your running applications via the application-switching window, press and hold the Menu key. Scroll down or up to highlight an application and then press the scroll key to switch to that app.

webOS

Yahoo! IM & Facebook Chat

They don’t call it the webOS for nothing. Palm’s latest creation can handle many of the Web applications you already use, directly from your Pre, including a couple popular instant messaging applications: Yahoo! Instant Messenger and Facebook Chat. To use Yahoo!’s chat client, just launch your browser and navigate to Yahoo!’s mobile page (m.yahoo.com) and sign in. To take advantage of Facebook chat, just launch the Pre’s browser and navigate to facebook.com, scroll down to the bottom-right corner of the interface, and click the Chat bar.

Data Transfer Assistant

Attention loyal Palm users: If you’re looking for a way to get your old Palm device data onto your new webOS-based Pre, look to the DTA (Data Transfer Assistant). The DTA lets you perform a one-time, one-way transfer of Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Memos from your computer to your phone. To get started, visit www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/pre/migration/moveontophone.html and click the appropriate Continue link for where your data resides, such as Palm Desktop for Windows or Mac, iCal & Address Book on a Mac, or Outlook. Next, download the DTA utility and update the Palm Desktop to version 6.2 if necessary. Before running the DTA utility, make sure you sync your old Palm device to your PC or Mac one last time. Then run the DTA utility and select the destination for your transferred data, such as Microsoft Exchange or Google Calendar and Contacts. Once complete, you’ll be able to retrieve this data using your Palm Pre.

Windows Mobile

Soft Reset

Most Windows Mobile phones feature a soft reset button you can press with the tip of a stylus or straightened paperclip. If you can’t find one, then it’s either tucked behind the battery cover or your phone doesn’t have one.

Hard Reset

The hard reset is a bit of a last resort, but when you need to perform one, it’s usually because your device is otherwise unusable. Hard resets are best for resolving unfixable network issues, messaging problems, error codes, broken applications, PC communication errors, and Bluetooth failures. Before you try this, keep in mind that a hard reset typically wipes the device’s system memory; deletes any third-party programs, themes, and files; and erases any files you created or copied to the device. If you hope to recover any data from your phone or don’t have any valid backups available for your valuable data, avoid performing a hard reset, if possible.

The trick about hard resets on the Windows Mobile platform is that almost every device requires a different key combination for performing one. To find the appropriate key combo for performing a hard reset on your device, simply visit www.hardreset.eu/index_en.html, make sure you click the In English link, find your phone manufacturer on the left side of the page, and then click the link for your phone model.

by Andrew Leibman