I don’t pretend to be an expert at Android; I haven’t even rooted my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and I still use TouchWiz. But I do like to think that I know most of the functions of Android, enough to be able to pick up any phone and use it quite extensively. So when I came across something on my Note 2 yesterday that I’d never seen before, I had a bit of a ‘mind-blown’ moment. Time for a story…
It was Christmas Day, the night was winding down and I was at the table with friends playing word games. One of my friends commented that Siri on her iPhone was configured to Cantonese and that it would always detect that she was saying something, even when she wasn’t. To counter this, she needed to find the menu to change Siri’s native language, a feat which was only accessible through the search menu, which in iOS 7 is now ‘hidden’ unintuitively (preditable, really). As it turns out, you access it by swiping down in the middle of the screen, but before arriving at this conclusion, another friend was convinced that this menu could be accessed by swiping down with two fingers. Naturally, this was incorrect, but I thought to myself “does swiping down with two fingers even do anything on an Android phone?”. As it turns out, it does.
Many of you will be familiar with this screen, or at least a variation of it, on your Android device. This is just the standard navigation menu when swiping down with one finger from the top. Lo’ and behold, if you swipe down with two fingers instead, you are greeted with this instead:
Now, I did consider that this was specific to the Note 2 running Android 4.3 as this second menu as seen above is just all the quick menu buttons on the one screen, but I tested this on my friend’s Nexus 4 as well and swiping down with two fingers brought about a different menu as well.
The question here is not if you have this functionality, though it would be nice to know which phones and software builds can actually do this; rather, I’d like to ask everyone whether you’ve had a similar ‘mind-blown’ moment where you realised how amazing Android is or been surprised that there’s actually been a function you’d not known existed before and is very useful. Let us know your stories in the comments below. And Merry Christmas to you all!
