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| Photo by Juairia Islam Shefa on Unsplash |
It’s all in the settings, master your Pixel 6, here’s how.
After the launch of Pixel 6 and 6pro, pixel 6a arrived in stores on 28th July. Pixel 6a priced at $450 is powered by the same tensor processor as in pixel 6.
Here are the tips and tricks you can use in the settings to make the most of the phone.
Toggle on the Google Pixels-themed icon feature.
Material You is one of the top features in Android 12. With this, you can customize the software color palette to match your wallpaper. As part of the “Material You” refresh, various features within specific apps, such as the keyboard in Messages and Gmail’s Compose button will have colored accents that match the wallpaper. When you go to Settings, you have a few options you can choose from.
That’s not all, you can give your app icons a colorful refresh matching your wallpaper.
To do this long press a blank space on the home screen. Tap on wallpaper and style and toggle on the themed icon feature. Once enabled, you will find the app icons are matching the wallpaper.
Turn off an alarm or phone call with short commands.
Hate that morning 5 alarm blaring in your ears. Nobody wants to get up to do that, and press the snooze/dismiss button, but here you don’t even need the ‘hey google’ command to trigger it. Just say “snooze” or “dismiss” for alarms and answer or decline the calls, that’s it, the Pixel 6 is smart enough to obey.
Turn this on by going to settings and selecting apps – tap assistant– and tap quick phrases. You will see options for alarms, timers, and incoming calls. toggle the switch next to each to enable them.
Make google assistant transcribe automated phone menus and wait on hold for you.
Waiting on Hold is the one tiresome thing we have to do when we are talking to a customer representative but pixel 6 has taken care of that too by the “Google’s hold for me” feature. Google Assistant will wait on hold and notify you when the representative is available to talk to you. You can also enable Direct My Call if you don’t want to remember which number to enter the next time you’re going through automated voice prompts. Direct My Call feature automates the transcription of menus so you don’t have to remember which number to dial to reach the right extension.
The Pixel 6, 6 Pro, or 6A phone app provides access to both of these features. Tap the three dots in the top right corner of the Phone app to launch it. Click on settings to find Hold for me and direct my call below the assistive section.
Although the Direct My Call function appears promising, it currently only supports toll-free English numbers. Due to the fact that many automated phone menus also typically read options in Spanish, this can make its transcriptions a little confusing.
Choose between battery life or performance
The battery life of Google’s Pixel phones can go a long way depending on how you use your phone. Optimizing battery life is good but will also affect the performance of the phone. At times you might want to disable battery optimization to get the best performance from the device.
From the settings Menu, select Battery and tap adaptive preferences. You can toggle it on or off whenever you want.
How to turn on Smart Storage in Pixel 6?
If you are a photo gig and take a lot of pictures and videos then you might be concerned with the storage. One option to deal with this is you can customize a pixel phone to auto-delete old pictures to free up space.
If you turn on this feature, your Pixel phone will delete all images that have been backed up to your Google Photos account for 60 days when the storage capacity is less than 25%
Turn this on by going to Settings, selecting Storage, and clicking Free up space. Then go to the menu icon in the top left corner and tap Settings. Enable Smart Storage.
To increase the capacity of your Pixel’s photos and videos, use Storage Saver.
How to turn on the pixel 6 storage saver feature?
Go to the camera app – tap the settings cog in the top left corner, click on more settings – select device storage – toggle on storage saver.
Customize volume key actions for taking photos
Go to the camera app – tap on the settings icon – Select more settings – click on gestures and in volume key actions choose the options.
Pixel screens auto orientation
You have to manually change the orientation of the phone from landscape to portrait and vice versa. This will be done automatically by this feature of the pixel, ok you might be thinking what’s new almost all phones have this, well there has to be something promising here and that is face detection. Turn on face detection to make orientation more accurate. Go to settings – tap display and turn on auto rotate screen.
Songs identifier on the lock screen
Sometimes you listen to a song in a cafe or restaurant and want to know about it. Google Pixel has a feature that recognizes the song and gives the details such as the name of the song and the artist on the lock screen itself.
Go to settings – click on display – tap on the lock screen. Tap on now playing and enable identify songs playing nearby.
Smoother scrolling or longer battery life
The Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro may enhance their refresh rates to enable faster scrolling and better animations, making the software feel more responsive overall. The Pixel 6 can increase its refresh rate to 90Hz, while the Pixel 6 Pro can increase it to 120Hz. However, because this feature consumes more battery power, you may want to disable it at times.
To get to this option, go to the Settings menu and select Display. Scroll down to Smooth Display and flick the switch to enable or disable it. The Pixel 6A does not have this function.
Captioning videos, podcasts, and phone calls.
Google’s Live Caption feature provides captions for media playing on your smartphone, and it is compatible with Pixels dating back to the second generation. It’s an accessibility tool, and it can also be beneficial if you don’t have headphones and need to hear the content of a video or podcast in public. To enable it, hold down the volume button and hit the Live Caption icon, which looks like a speech bubble. Remember Live Caption will consume more battery power.
To make it easier to access shortcuts, modify your quick settings.
The quick-settings menu is accessed by pulling it down from the top of the screen. Tap the pencil symbol to customize this menu and add your most often used options. Google provides a wide range of choices, including battery saving, microphone enable and disable, and alarm access. Airplane mode, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi are all standard features.
