Phone and Tablet Tips Revamp your phone’s home screen

Brilliant things to do on your device

ANDROID Give your phone’s home screen a makeover

Android phones have a category of apps called ‘launchers’. These let you customise your home screen and app drawer (the screen that displays all the apps on your device). One of the best free launcher apps is Nova Launcher ( www.snipca.com/23001), which comes with lots of customisation options. When you first open the app, you need to choose a theme (light or dark), how you want your app drawer to look and whether you want to use a button-press or swipe to launch your app drawer.

Next, tap Nova Launcher in your list of apps and you’ll see a new home screen without any icons. To add these, tap the circular icon with six dots or swipe up your screen to access your app drawer, then drag the app icons (one by one) and arrange them on your home screen.

Open the Nova Settings app within the app drawer. Here, you’ll see several sections that let you customise the look and feel of your phone (see screenshot below left). For example, tap Desktop for options relating to how many rows and columns of apps you want on your home screen. You can also add a Google search bar to it, customise this search bar and change the side-scroll effects (when moving between pages of your home screen).

The ‘App & drawer widgets’ section lets you customise the app drawer in the same way. Dock lets you change how the stationary icons at the bottom of your home screen appear. Folders lets you customise how apps will look when you drag and drop them on top of each other to create folders.

To set Nova Launcher as your default home app, select it, then tap Always in the notification that appears. If you don’t see this, go to Settings, tap Home, then select Nova Launcher.

ANDROID Save web pages to read offline

The latest version of Chrome (Android’s default browser) has a new Downloads section. As well as letting you access any files you have downloaded, it lets you download entire web pages to read offline at your convenience.

To do this, open Chrome, then open any article you want to save for later. When it loads, tap the three dots at the top right, then the Download icon at the top (see screenshot above left). You’ll see a notification when it finishes downloading.

To read this content when you’re offline, open Chrome, tap the three dots at the top right, then tap the Downloads section (see screenshot above left). You’ll see all your saved web pages – simply tap the one you want to read. These pages take up space on your device, so it’s a good idea to delete them after reading. To do that, go to the Downloads section, then tap and hold an unwanted web page until it’s highlighted. Now select all web pages you’ve finished reading, then tap the bin icon at the top right to delete them.