Galaxy S II: The Missing Manual

Accounts and Sync

HERE’S WHERE YOU MAKE changes to or add Gmail accounts, and accounts for social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. If you have accounts for Web-based mail services, such as Windows Live Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, or a corporate email account, they’ll show up here as well.

• Background data. Your Galaxy S II regularly checks whether you’ve got email, looks for the latest weather updates, and sees whether there are updates to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. When it finds changes, it syncs them in the background. That’s a good thing, but uses up a bit of battery life. If you don’t care about having the Galaxy S II check for new updates and want to save some battery life, turn this setting off.

  Note

  If you turn off the box next to “Background data,” you won’t be able to use the Android Market. When you try to use the Market, you get a warning that you first need to turn on the “Background data” setting, and you’re sent to this screen to do so.

• Auto-sync. This setting controls whether your apps sync data automatically.

The next section, Manage Accounts, lists your Google account, and any social networking accounts and Web-based email accounts you may have. Detailing the options on every single account is beyond the scope of this book, but the following are examples of what you’ll find in this section:

Google

This section handles how you synchronize ...