Straight out of the box you’ll be able to connect your phone to a computer via USB and drag files to and from its internal.
When connecting your phone to a computer via USB, select the Disk drive option so that you can access its internal SD memory as if it were an external hard drive or memory stick. SD storage. With a visit to the Market you’ll be able to move files around more effectively within the phone itself using a decent file manager. You’ll also find programs that let you shift files around between phone and computer via Wi-Fi, FTP and any other way imaginable. There are also x and other popular online storage/backup solutions.
Can I use my phone as a touch-sensitive control pad for my Mac or PC?
There are a few apps in the Market that let you use your phone as a wireless keyboard, mouse or touchpad to control your computer. Some of these work over Wi-Fi and some over Bluetooth. USB Bluetooth dongles for PC or Mac can be found for under ten dollars if you want to go down that route.
RemoteDroid is a highly regarded free wireless touchpad app, as is GRemotePro. These kinds of apps usually require you to download and install a server application to your computer in order to work, so there may be a small amount of setting up involved, but nothing too complicated.
GRemotePro can be used in a variety of ways to replace or augment your computer’s keyboard, mouse, media player controls and more.
I’ve heard about Android phones having poor battery life – is this true?
You’ll find that after you’ve “broken in” your phone’s battery after a few charges its capacity will improve greatly. If you’re still having battery issues there are a number of tweaks you can make to conserve power.
Menu > Settings > About phone > Battery > Battery use will give you an invaluable insight into which functions are chewing up your phone’s battery charge. If you’re concerned that something is running your phone down all the time, place a shortcut to this page on one of your home screens and check every now and again to find out which function is the culprit.
I’ve heard that can install an “app killer” to improve performance and get more life out of my battery. Should do that?
The short answer is no. There’s a lot of debate about applications you can use to stop other applications running in the background, such as the much-touted Advanced Task Killer, and how running these programs will help save your phone’s battery power. These claims are, however, based on a popular misconception about the way the Android platform handles your phone’s memory. Application managers are useful if you have a program that seems to have crashed or isn’t responding properly, but you won’t see any performance improvements from using them to force-quit programs running in the background.
It’s tempting to select every running task in an app killer to free up RAM, and speed up your phone, but generally you should just use it to nip problem apps in the bud.