Save Time With Android’s Hardware Keyboard Shortcuts

You probably use a lot of keyboard shortcuts on your computer, but you might not have known that your Android phone has similar keyboard shortcuts. If you have a hardware keyboard, here are some of the cool things you can do with it.

There’s a pretty big list of Android keyboard shortcuts, so we won’t go through every one, but they’re definitely worth checking out. For example, you can:

• Launch apps. For example, if you hit the Search button and B on your keyboard, your phone will launch the browser. You can actually make your own app-launching shortcuts in Settings > Applications > Quick Launch.
• Browse better. When you’re browsing, just hit Menu + B to open your bookmarks, or Menu + J to go back a page. There are quite a few of these.
• Sift through Gmail. Similar to Gmail on the desktop, you can just hit R to reply to the current message, or hit Y to archive it.
• Type faster. When you’re typing something, you can hit Alt + Del to delete an entire line, or Alt + Left to move the cursor to the beginning of the line. Again, there are quite a few of these.

These are the four categories of keyboard shortcuts in Android; but there are a number of different shortcuts per category. You can check out a full list of shortcuts here. You can customise the app launching shortcuts in Settings > Applications > Quick Launch too, and if you want to see the shortcuts for any given app, just open up the app, hit the Menu button to bring up the menu, then hold the Menu button to see the shortcuts available to you. Check out the video above to see a few of these in action.