Galaxy S II: The Missing Manual

Home Screen

WELCOME TO YOUR NEW home, the Galaxy S II Home screen. Get to it by pressing the Home key no matter where you are.

Note

When you first visit your Home screen, you see a green robot icon (he’s a droid—slang for android). Touch him to get a few basic tips about getting started with the Galaxy S II. After that, though, you don’t need him, so press and hold the icon until a Trash can appears at the bottom of the screen. Then you can drag him to the Trash.

At first glance, it’s a relatively bare screen, populated by the following:

• Notification bar. As detailed on Status Bar Icons, this bar displays the status of many phone features and a variety of notifications, like when you’ve got email waiting for you.

• App icons. Typically, the Home screen has four icons—one for checking your calendar, one for checking email (right on the icon you’ll see how many new messages you’ve got), one for using the camera, and one, titled Market, to let you search for and download new apps—tens of thousands of them, many of them free. As you’ll see later in this section, you can add or delete icons from the Home screen.

• Dock. Just below the app icons are four icons. They sit in an area called the Dock, and they’re different from the app icons. Unlike the app icons, you can’t delete them. As you’ll see in a little bit, there are other screens you can move to, called panes or panels, but the icons in the ...