How to Adjust Your Android Phone’s Volume and Display Settings

Android Smartphones For Dummies

Android phones feature a plethora of options and settings for you to adjust. You can fix things that annoy you or make things better to please your tastes. The whole idea is to make your phone more usable for you.

Setting the incoming call volume

Whether the phone rings, vibrates, or explodes depends on how you’ve configured it to signal you for an incoming call. Abide by these steps to set the various options (but not explosions) for your phone:

Open the Settings app.
Choose Sound.

On some Samsung phones, the Sound option is found on the Settings app’s Device tab.
Set the phone’s ringer volume by touching Volumes or Volume.
Manipulate the Ringtone slider left or right to specify how loud the phone rings for an incoming call.

After you release the slider, you hear an example of how loudly the phone rings.
Touch OK to set the ringer volume.

If you’d rather mute the phone, touch the Silent Mode option on the main Sound settings screen.
To activate vibration when the phone rings, touch Vibrate or Vibrate When Ringing.

Some phones have a single Vibration option; others have several settings from which you can choose.

When the next call comes in, the phone alerts you using the volume setting or vibration options you’ve just set.

Turning on vibration puts a wee extra drain on the battery.

Changing display settings

The Display item in the Settings app deals with touchscreen settings. Two popular settings worthy of your attention are the Brightness and Screen Timeout options.

To access the Display screen, open the Settings app and choose Display. On some Samsung phones, this item is found on the Settings app’s Device tab.

Screen brightness: Choose Display, and then choose Brightness. Use the slider to adjust the touchscreen’s intensity. Some phones feature the Automatic Brightness setting. It uses the phone’s magical light sensor to determine how bright it is where you are.

Screen timeout: Choose Display, and then choose Screen Timeout. Select a timeout value from the list. This duration specifies when the phone automatically locks the touchscreen.

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.