The new xel is in your hs ready to deliver on the promise of -designed smartphone bliss. There’s a lot to unpack, even if you’ve already been down the Nexus road before. has taken the integration of Android hardware to a new level, there are a lot of little features hiding just underneath the surface I’ve explored nearly every corner of the software in my xel X(the “very silver” model is quite nice!), recommend you do these 10 things first. It’ll make your experience more enjoyable rewarding, so you can show off to everyone else just how great your new phone is. However, you have to go claim it. To do this, go to otos > Settings > Back up sync. Turn this on ensure that your account is selected as the backup location. From here you can also choose if your photos or videos are backed up with through cellular data or only via -Fi. Then start snapping away with the xel’s excellent camera. And in true Android form, there’s more functionality than what you get with iOS. Touch hold one of the shortcuts, you can drag it onto the home screen. That will put a new button that lets you leap right into that action. This only works with a small group of apps for now, but the A is available to developers support is starting to roll out already. But you have to turn it on. Go to Settings > Moves to do that also see two other choices for custom moves: mp to Camera Flip Camera. mp to Camera lets you launch the camera with a double tap on the power button, while the Flip Camera trick lets you switch in out of selfie mode by double twisting the phone when the camera is open. If you’re setting up your xel fresh, you’ll want to make sure you go get this. The app uses your location, web search history, other data collects to offer you surveys about companies, places you visit, or other rom questions. The reward is monetary credits to your ay Store account. Sure, there’s the whole loss of privacy thing, but given how much knows about you anyway, you may as well cash in to upgrade your cards in Clash Royale. lo has some neat tricks with the Assistant (similar, but not identical, to the Assistant available from the home button on your xel) has some surpringly accurate autoresponse suggestions. Duo does video calling well, especially if you’ve had to use the somewhat glitchy Skype. Very few people I know have gone all-in with lo as their main messaging app, but Duo may help you stay in touch with those on iOS who can’t Facetime you. But the xel Xships with a fantastic set of ve llpapers. st hold down on an empty space on your home screen, choose llpapers, then look at the ve earth ve data categories. There are 3D lscapes from Earth, abstract shapes that are based on your calendar activity the weather, a real-time globe with accurate day/night cycle clouds. There’s even “Horizon,” a rendered sky where the sun rises as your battery charges sets as it drains. You can then drag drop the tiles wherever you’d like. has even created an A for third-party developers to implement their own links here as well, so keep an eye on this area as you install new apps over time. For example, Shazam has an “auto Shazam” quick settings button. From here you can turn on or off buttons from the quick settings menu. This is also how you enable the battery to always display the percentage: Touch Battery select ways show percentage. It’s odd that this feature is still hidden, but now you know what to do. You’ll want to spend some time here to learn all the different features. At first glance you may want to tell which news sources to hear from whether to start a shopping list for you in Keep (this is quite useful). You can even give your name, spelling it out so that it’s pronounced correctly. Much of how Now worked in the past is still here, but improved machine learning capabilities promise to take things to a new level. That’s right, if you buy the xel from Verizon it’ll only include My Verizon, Verizon Messages, Go90. I tried was able to uninstall any of them. (If you buy the phone from , there’s no bloatware at all.) However, I do recommend keeping the My Verizon app. It’s pretty decent at giving you updated account details, letting you pay your bill, finding out how much data you have left for the month.
