Getting Started with your New Android Phone

Starting up your Android Phone first time….!

Excited about buying your new Android Phone..? Well you should be. Let’s look at what happens when you switch on your Android Phone for the first time. The first screen that appears when you turn on your new Android device usually varies depending upon the device make and model and the customizations the device manufacturer has done to the operating system. Most manufacturers today have defined their own templates making it difficult to freeze on a particular screenshot. We will take a look at a couple of them here.

When you boot up the phone for the first time (usually by pressing down the power button for a few seconds), it will prompt you for a few necessary settings such as language settings, time and date settings. After you make appropriate choices for these settings, it will ask for your Google account details. If you don’t have an existing Google account, we recommend signing up for one at this stage. Needless to say, an Internet connection is mandatory to perform this step. Alternatively, you may choose to skip this step and add the Gmail account details later. A note of caution is that Google Account is needed for browsing the Android market store Google Play and downloading applications from the store.

This is how you may expect the screens to look on a Samsung Galaxy S3 –

(Picture Source - http://sharetel.com.au)

For HTC users, we would recommend a visit to this link (HTC One X) – HTC One X

Android devices usually come with a number of pre-installed Google applications like Google Maps, Google Navigator, Gtalk, Gmail &  the application market ‘Google Play’ that brings to you more than 675,000 Applications, paid & free.

Locate the Android market in the Applications section. It is called Google play in most versions of Android. The first screen launches a wizard that helps you configure your Google Account for access. The Wizard starts with a provision to either login using your existing Google Account or helps you create one. To create a new account would require your First Name, Last Name and desired Gmail ID. The name selected for the account would be your future Gmail login ID which will be verified for availability with Google Servers, the moment you select next. Having an account created or signing in using existing account requires Internet connectivity, and will take a few minutes to verify and activate the play store.

Once the account is created or an existing account activated, you can now download free or buy paid apps from Play Store. The beautiful part of having your Gmail ID synced with Play store is, whenever you login into your Gmail Account from your desktop and jump to Play Store, you can view the number of handsets configured with your Gmail ID and the applications currently installed on them. We will explore this in more details in the near future.

Happy browsing an exciting world of apps on the Play Store…

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