Most Android smartphones and tablets, whatever brand they are, have several common features and are composed of at least 3 physical buttons : the one to turn the phone on and off and those to turn the volume up and down . Beyond their basic functions, there are various ways of using these three buttons by pressing them together in various combinations to use hidden phone functions or to open emergency menus which are important to know.
1) When the phone rings and you do not want to answer it, to ignore the call without attacking it and without being disturbed by the sound of the ringing, you can press the Volume down key which puts the ringing in silent mode .
2) On an Android smartphone, if you want to photograph the screen and, therefore, save an image of what you are seeing, there is no need to use external applications, just just press the power and volume down keys together, at the same time.
The screenshot is acquired and automatically saved in a dedicated folder visible from the Photos application.
Just be careful that pressing the Volume key or the power key too early will have a different result which may be the general lowering of the volume and the turning off of the screen respectively.
Note : On Samsung, the key combination for the screenshot is different and is done by pressing the power and home keys together.
3) The most important key combination of an Android phone is that it is needed to restart it if everything seems to be blocked .
If the phone becomes immobile, to restart it, you must press the power button and the volume up button and hold them for several seconds until the screen turns black and the phone restarts.
NOTE: Depending on the phone model, as already seen, there are various keys to be pressed together to restart Android in safe mode, without loading any app.
4) Depending on the smartphone model, there is always a combination of physical buttons that is used to enter the system recovery mode .
This mode is useful when the phone appears dead and no longer turns on.
In another article we have already explained how to reset and restore Android even if the mobile phone or tablet does not start and, specifically, how to do the hard reset to format a Samsung smartphone.
5) The Volume keys, depending on the camera application used, can work to take a photo .
For example, in the Google Camera app, you can press the key to turn down the volume to take the photo and the key to turn the volume up just to focus.
In another article, we also saw how you can use the Volume keys on Android to take photos, make calls or do something else.
