Five brilliant Padfone Infinity tricks

Reviewers around the world are already raving about the ASUS Padfone Infinity. That’s hardly any surprise, because it is undoubtedly is one of the best Android smartphones ever made.

Most commentators understandably draw attention to the Padfone Infinity’s headline features, such as its beautiful aluminium body, Full HD 5-inch display, 1.7GHz quad-core processor and 13-megapixel camera.

However, the new ASUS handset has very many other tricks up its sleeve. Read on to discover five brilliant ways to improve your Infinity.

Shave seconds off start-up

Thanks to its quad-core processor, the Padfone Infinity isn’t exactly slow at starting up, but if every second counts, you can slice a few moments off the time it takes Android to power on – by using a special ASUS ‘Fast Boot-up’ mode.

To do this, tap Settings followed by ASUS Customised Settings then tap to tick the Enable Fast Boot-up box.

Customise the custom launcher

ASUS has added a custom quick-launcher to the Padfone Infinity – reveal it by tapping and holding the Home button. Now, without lifting your finger from the screen, slide over to one of the shortcut icons to launch the associated app right away.

Better still, these shortcuts can be customised. Tap and hold the Home button then slide over to the cog icon (labelled ‘Select Shortcuts’). Free up space on the shortcuts bar at the bottom by dragging and dropping an existing shortcut into the shortcuts area above, and then perform a similar action in reverse to add a new shortcut to the bar.

Make instant GIFs

The Padfone Infinity’s 13-megapixel camera takes fantastic photographs – but it’s also great for a bit of web fun. How? Well, with a quick tap the Infinity’s snapper can be turned into a GIF animator, so you can use it to record short animations for posting to the web.

Launch the camera app in the usual way then tap the Camera Mode button, which is the second in from the top left when held in portrait mode. Tap to select the ‘GIF animation’ radio button then you’re good to GIF.

All you have to do now is point the Infinity at your subject and hold down the shutter button to capture a GIF animation of up to 30 frames.

Home from Home

Android lets you set up multiple app screens for all your icons but navigating them by swiping is tiresome. That’s why ASUS added a brilliant overview mode to the Padfone Infinity.

To jump quickly from one app screen to any other, pinch your fingers together to view an overview of all app screens and then just tap the one you want. Simple!

Tap to snap screenshots

You might know that keeping both the power button and volume-down rocker depressed will cause Android to take a snapshot of whatever’s on the smartphone’s screen – but the ASUS Padfone Infinity makes this job far easier.

Instead of trying to avoid brushing the display while contorting your fingers into awkward positions, just tap and hold the Recents button (to the right of the Home) button.

Alternatively, this same gesture can be used to open the menu in any app – just select the ‘Tap and hold to show menu’ radio button in the ASUS Customised Settings screen.