Quick Launch Feature for Android Phone Apps

Android Smartphones For Dummies

If your Android phone features a physical keyboard, you’re in for a treat: You can assign app shortcuts to the 36 keys on that keyboard. That’s one shortcut per letter key, A through Z, plus 10 for the numbers 1 through 9 and 0. The keyboard shortcuts make up the Quick Launch function. Setting them up works like this:

At the Home screen, press the Menu soft button.
Choose Settings, and then choose Applications.
Choose Quick Launch.

You see various entries titled Assign Application, followed by the 36 keys from the keyboard, A through Z, and then 0 through 9. If an app is already assigned to a key, you see the app listed. Otherwise, you see the text No Shortcut.
Choose a letter to assign an app to that key.

For example, choose the C key.
Select an app to assign to the Quick Launch key.

Pluck an app from the scrolling menu, such as Calculator.
Repeat Steps 4 and 5 to assign more apps to Quick Launch keys.

To use a Quick Launch shortcut, press and hold the Search key on the device keyboard, and then touch the Quick Launch key shortcut, such as Search+C to launch the app associated with the C key.

To reassign an app to a key, repeat the steps and choose a new app in Step 5.

To remove an app from a key, long-press its entry on the Quick Launch screen. Touch the OK button to confirm that that you’re clearing the key.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.