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Quick Settings review

Check out our 5-star review of Quick Settings, an Android productivity app that gives you instant control of every facet of your handset

Published on Mar 10, 2010

The dazzling number of different connectivity and functionality options afforded by modern smartphones is truly amazing, but managing those features can be something of an issue at times.

Toggling Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G and other communication options is an essential part of using these devices and very often the only way to do this is to dig deep into your phone’s settings.

As the title so clearly insinuates, Quick Settings is all about alleviating this troublesome problem. It’s an application which contains a wide selection of different options relating to the functionality of your Android device. For example, you can turn Wi-Fi on and off, shut down your 3G data connection or even force the screen to stay on even when you have an energy-saving shutdown in operation.

Other features – such as the ability to control all of the different volume options (ringer, media, alarm, etc), turn off your unlock pattern and even control how your screen auto-rotation works – are also present. In fact, there’s hardly anything this application doesn’t have some degree of control over.

The way in which you access Quick Settings is also applicable to customization. You can have it resting on your home screen as an icon or you can pin it to the notifications bar at the top of the display for instant-access.

It’s also possible to have it open up in a dialogue box rather than full-screen, and you can even customize the options which appear when the app is open up, picking out the ones you’re likely to use often and suppressing those you won’t. Every element of the program’s design has been thoroughly thought out and as a result the user experience is incredibly polished.

To round it all off, Quick Settings comes with a torch button (which turns your screen white and can be used to guide your way in darkness) and a battery monitor, which tells you how much power is left and even how healthy your battery is. These two features usually require you to download dedicated programs in order to use them, so to have them included here is a real stroke of genius.

Quick Settings is so slick and comprehensive it should be downloaded by every Android user without hesitation, and we hope that Google takes note and decides to include a similar degree of control in future versions of the Android OS.