Samsung Galaxy S II Tricks

The following tricks/hacks are a list of things which I’ve either discovered or found elsewhere on the internet.

Screen Brightness
If you prefer to set the screen brightness down to zero, you’ll find that outside you can’t see the screen. Instead of hunting through the menus you can do this quick trick to whack the brightness up to full.
Press on the Status Bar at the top around the middle, hold for about a second, now drag to the right. As you reach the right hand side of the screen it should get brighter. You can do the same dragging to the left to decrease the brightness.
This can be tricky to start with, however once mastered can be done without much effort.

Screen Shots
Want to capture a winning score in Angry Birds, or show how great your desktop is? Trying to find a way to get an image of the screen? On other Android models your options were to root your phone and install ShootMe or to connect your phone to your computer via USB, install ADB and run some software. However Samsung have stolen taken inspiration from Apple, and allow you to hold the Home button and press the Power button to capture the screen. Images can be found in the Gallery in the Screenshot folder.

Stop the Home Button Waking the phone Root only
I liked the fact that on my Nexus to access the phone you had to use the Power Button, whilst others wanted Trackball Wake, I wanted the screen to stay off unless I really wanted it on. However the Galaxy, like the iPhone wakes just by pressing Home, and my daughter already knows this trick.
To stop the phone waking, you will need to be rooted, have something like Root Explorer. Here navigate to /system/usr/keylayout, mount the phone for R/W and edit sec_key.kl.
You are looking for the line
key 102    HOME     WAKE
just delete the word WAKE, save the file and reboot the phone.

Any more I come across will be added to this post.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Human test: Enter Ryan backwards