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How To: Nexus 5 Keeps Restarting or Shutting Off? Here's the Fix

Every phone has its issues and quirks, and the Nexus 5 is no exception to this rule. One of the most common troubleshooting questions asked by its owners is "Why does my Nexus 5 keep shutting off or restarting?" where the device suddenly decides to reboot or power off randomly on its own.

How To: Draw & Send Messages to Your Friend's Lock Screen from Your Nexus 5

The level of customization that Android has to offer is insane. You can replace the stock keyboard and home screen with any third-party app of your choosing, allowing core experiences to be tailored to fit your needs.

How To: Entirely Replace Your Android's On-Screen Navigation Buttons with Gestures

On-screen navigation buttons offer many distinct advantages over physical buttons—they can change orientation along with your device, they're capable of visually morphing to indicate secondary functionality, and the user experience is more consistent when buttons and app elements require the same amount of force to press. Add to that the fact that they're far less likely to fail and can be themed or even switched out altogether, and it's hard to come up with an argument in favor of physical b...

How To: Make Your Android Boot Animation Display a Live Log of Events

If you've ever attempted to report a bug to a developer, no doubt you've heard the response, "Get a logcat." This is infinitely important to a developer because of the fact that a logcat captures a full report of every command that was recently executed on your Android device, and it allows them to see exactly where something went wrong.

How To: Turn Your Own Photos into 3D Wallpapers for Android

Google's new camera app has a highly innovative and unique feature dubbed Lens Blur, and the most interesting thing about it is not necessarily what it does, so much as how it does it.

How To: Get the Samsung Galaxy "Smart Alert" Feature on Your Nexus 5 or Other Android Phone

Samsung catches a lot of flak for all of the "bloatware" it preinstalls on its Galaxy line of devices. Many users complain that "TouchWiz," Samsung's custom Android skin, causes lag with its overabundance of features. But some of these features can actually be pretty handy, like Multi-Window Mode or Milk Music.

How To: Turn Your Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 into an LG G2 Clone

The advent of a new Nexus phone begins with the bigwigs at Google partnering with a manufacturer, then selecting that manufacturer's flagship as the model for the new Nexus hardware.

How To: View Battery Levels for All of Your Devices in One App

It's hard enough to keep tabs on the battery life of one device, let alone all of the different gadgets that a typical consumer owns in this day and age. Say your smartphone is running low on juice, so you switch to your tablet only to find out that it's almost dead as well. Better hope your laptop is fully charged, right?

How To: Prank Your WhatsApp Friends by Sending 100 Messages in Only 1 Second

When I got my first smartphone, it didn't take long before my friends and I created a game that we liked to call "Paste-Send." You see, instead of having to use T9 to type out text messages, the touch-based interface made copying and pasting incredibly easy. So that meant we could copy a piece of text, then paste it into text messages in rapid succession to text bomb the annoyed recipient. It was all in good fun, of course, and it usually evoked a stream of swear words from the guy on the oth...

How To: Give Your Friends Custom Voicemail Greetings & Unwanted Callers the Slip on Your Nexus 5

For my money, one of the greatest improvements brought about from the smartphone revolution is the advent of visual voicemail. No longer do we have to slog through dial menus or trudge through every single message to get to the next. We can just look at our messages, right there on our screens, organized neatly like emails or text messages.

How To: Make Your Android Auto-Wipe Your Data When Stolen

Losing your phone is a much bigger ordeal today than it was just 10 years ago. Our smartphones carry with them lots of sensitive data that, in the wrong hands, is capable of being used for identity theft and fraud.

How To: Fix Screen Burns on Your Nexus 6 or Other AMOLED Device

Many Nexus 6 owners, myself included, have already started to experience the dreaded burn-in issues that often come with AMOLED display technology. These displays are different than your typical LCD screen in that each pixel emits its own light instead of using a backlight, so this leaves AMOLED screens more susceptible to issues with dim or unresponsive pixels.

ElementalX: The Only Custom Kernel You Need on Your Nexus 5

Straight out of the box, the Nexus 5 is an awesome device, but even it can be faster with better battery life. Luckily, one of the things that makes it so awesome is that there are tons of developers creating mods for it, since it runs stock Android by default. When it comes to gaining speed and better battery life, flashing a custom kernel is the way to go.

How To: Add Custom Unicode Smilies to Your Android’s Google Keyboard

Emojis, smilies, emoticons—whatever you prefer to call them, these fun little guys can bring a text-based conversation to life. If you're worried that someone's sarcasm meter might be broken, just toss in a wink at the end of your message. Or perhaps you can't quite put your sentiment into words, but one of these little graphics suits the moment perfectly.

How To: Update Your Rooted Nexus to the Latest Version of Android 7.0 Nougat

Google has already issued a few updates to Android 7.0 Nougat. There aren't many headlining features, as these minor updates are mostly bug fixes and performance improvements. But there's a few security enhancements as well, so staying up-to-date with the latest patches is important for a number of reasons.

How To: Open Links Directly into Chrome's Incognito Mode on Android

Chrome's Incognito Mode is a great feature for folks that don't want their browsing history tracked. When it's enabled, Incognito Mode makes sure that all cookies and cache that are saved while you're browsing are deleted as soon as you leave a webpage.

How To: Bring Android's Command Prompt into the 21st Century with Material Terminal

Deep down, Android is a fork of Linux, which is a desktop operating system that started out as entirely command prompt-based. For that reason, many system-level tasks can still be executed within a terminal emulator app.

How To: Remove the Orange Bars in Battery Saver Mode on Android Lollipop

Android Lollipop has an awesome feature called "Battery saver" mode that reduces power consumption through various tweaks in order to squeeze in an extra hour or two of standby time when your battery is running low. It does this by disabling background processes as well as location services and transition animations, so the phone is essentially running at half-throttle.

How To: Permanently Browse in Desktop Mode on Android

The majority of Android web browsers carry a "desktop mode" feature that makes mobile websites look like normal computer versions. Mobile versions are designed to work faster and more efficiently on smartphones, but sometimes the desktop version looks better on large displays or has additional features not included in the mobile one.

How To: Glorious 8-Bit Video Game Sounds & Ringtones Are Here for Your Nexus

Practically every kid in the '80s would rush home after school to put in some time on the first-gen Nintendo before their parents got home. Games like Super Mario Bros. and Super Smash Bros. were synonymous with fun times, and to this day, call up a wave of nostalgia amongst Generation-Xers.

How To: The Fastest Way to Get OTA Updates with a Custom Recovery on Your Nexus 5

If you have a custom recovery installed on your Nexus 5, you're able to flash custom ROMs and lots of other cool Gadget Hacks. But when it comes time to receive and Over-the-Air (OTA) update directly from Google, having a custom recovery installed can be a fairly big hindrance—and for the upcoming Android L release, you're going to want to alleviate that.

How To: The Absolute Fastest Way to Take Photos on Android

How many times have you witnessed a beautiful moment that you would have loved to capture on film, only to watch it slip away as you struggled to unlock your phone and open your camera app?

How To: Download Songs from Google Play Music for Offline Use in Any App on Your Nexus 5

Google Play Music is one of the best cloud music services out there. Without ever paying a dime, you can upload as many as 20,000 songs to Google's servers, then use the app on your smartphone to stream these songs without taking up any of your storage space. And if you're willing to shell out $9.99 a month, you can even play songs from the massive All Access library.

How To: Expose Battery-Draining Apps on Your Nexus 5 & Deal with Them for Good

Android uses a set of permissions that apps can request to perform certain actions, and you're notified of these permissions each time you install an app. The problem here is the fact that you aren't given any built-in way to deny apps these permissions (although Danny just showed a workaround for this).

How To: Install a Custom Recovery on Your Nexus Without Using a Computer

With Geohot's Towelroot allowing us to root our Nexus devices in under a minute without ever leaving Android, many of you are probably enjoying all of the Gadget Hacks that root access has unlocked.

How To: Fix the Yellow Tint on Your Nexus 5's Display

The Nexus 5 has a known issue with its display. Affecting all models from the first manufacturing run and most models thereafter, this display issue is easiest to notice on something with a white background. A yellowish tint, most noticeable when compared to other devices, seems to emanate from the Nexus 5's screen.

How To: Unlock Nougat's Hidden Nav Bar Tuner to Customize Your Nexus' Buttons

Google has a habit of starting on new projects for Android, then hiding them away if they didn't quite complete them in time for a major release. We saw this with multi-window mode last year (which is now an official Nougat feature), and this year, there was the hidden night mode setting that was easily activated.

How To: Update Your Nexus Without Losing Root (No Computer Needed)

For many people, the two main advantages of buying a Nexus device are prompt updates and the ability to root without much hassle. But in a cruel twist of fate, these two features are almost mutually exclusive, since OTA updates will refuse to run on rooted devices.

How To: Install Android 6.0 Marshmallow on Your Nexus Right Now

Google has finally released the next version of the world's leading operating system—Android 6.0 Marshmallow. This latest iteration isn't as much of a visual overhaul as Lollipop was, but it packs in more new functionality than almost any update before it. Awesome features like Now on Tap, granular permissions control, and a deep sleep battery-saving feature called Doze round out the highlights, but there is far more to it than that.

How To: Automatically Change Brightness Levels Based on the Time of Day on Your Nexus 5

Android's auto brightness feature was recently updated, and as of version 5.0, a new "Adaptive brightness" feature was added. This allows users to set a preferred overall brightness level, but still have the ambient light sensor adjust the backlight accordingly.

How To: Change the Color of Android's Clock Widget

When it comes to theming your Android device, it's the little things that matter most. Whether you're tweaking your navigation buttons or changing the color of system menus, no theme is complete until even the smallest element matches the rest of your color palette.

How To: Take, Edit, & Send Photos Directly from Your Android Lock Screen

While shortcuts to your Camera and third-party apps like Snapchat are great for capturing fleeting moments, it still takes a few seconds to open them and snap a photo. That means you could potentially miss a great shot if you're not quick enough. But now there's a super-fast way to capture and send photos without having to waste time unlocking your device.

How To: Control Volume Directly from the Notification Tray in Lollipop

If there's one gripe I have with Android Lollipop, it's the new volume menu. When Priority mode was introduced, the stock volume panel was revamped to accommodate it, and somewhere along the way a bit of functionality was lost.

How To: Update TWRP Recovery with a Material Design Theme on Your Nexus 5

TWRP is hands-down the best custom recovery out there. Its interface, on the other hand, is... well, let's just call it utilitarian. The guys over at Team Win made sure that their product was robust, functional, and easy-to-use, but they didn't put a tremendous amount of effort into polishing the looks.

How To: Add No-Touch Scrolling to Your Android

It's really amazing how much you can do with root access on an Android device. From various themes to porting exclusive funtionality from other devices, the power of Superuser privileges is truly awesome.

How To: Recover Deleted Files & Photos on Android

Losing important data is the modern-day equivalent of misplacing your wallet or keys. We have tons of vital information stored in our digital worlds, and losing any of it can be devastating. But if you've accidentally deleted something important from your Android device, there's still hope.

How To: Customize TWRP Recovery with Free Themes

There are so many mods we can apply using a custom recovery. From themes to bug fixes and feature ports, a typical rooted user spends a decent chunk of time in TWRP Recovery.

How To: Get an Unlimited Call Log on Your Nexus 5 or Other Android Phone

In the past few weeks, the internet has been abuzz with nightmarish horror stories of Comcast's questionable decision-making and downright terrible customer service. The central theme of many of these disputes with the nation's largest cable provider is that without evidence, the conglomerate will refuse to acknowledge its mistake and place the burden of proof on the customer.

How To: Stop Nosy Friends from Viewing More Photos on Android Than You Intended

You have a cool picture that you want to show someone, but when you hand your phone over, they start swiping through all of your photos. Surely, you've encountered this scenario before. I definitely have.

How To: The Flat-Out Easiest Way to Create a Nandroid Backup on Android

If you have a custom recovery installed on your Android device, the first thing you should have done as soon as you finished installing it was to create a Nandroid backup. But if you didn't, I'm not here to judge—I'm here to show you a much easier way.