NUU Mobile | Tutorial Tuesday | Episode 10 | Exploring the Android Clock
NUU Mobile | Tutorial Tuesday | Episode 10 | Exploring the Android Clock
It’s our tenth week of Tutorial Tuesdays, and this week’s tutorial is going to seem unusually simple, but we’ve had people asking about it, so we thought we’d better cover it.
(This tutorial was done on stock Android 10 - there may be slight differences on other versions)
If you’ve never gone into the Clock app before, you might be surprised to find that it has quite a bit of functionality that could be useful to you, so let’s have a look!
Go into the app drawer, and head for the Clock app.
Inside, if you look at the bottom, the Clock app is actually split into four sections, with the first one selected - which is the first useful function of the Clock app - the alarm.
The alarm typically comes with a couple of pre-sets - one for the weekdays, timed at 8:30am, and another for the weekend, at 9am.
But let’s start a whole new one from scratch. Hit the “+” button at the bottom of the list.
An analog clock face pops up, and lets you set the time for the alarm. If you’d prefer digital entry, you can tap the little keyboard icon at the lower-left.
Anyway, let’s set a time for this - maybe 6:30pm.
And now we see a new preset has been made, with the time that we set, but we have some extra options for this alarm that we can look at.
“Repeat” is a key feature, as it will determine whether your alarm should simply go off within today and never again, or whether you’d want this alarm to be an ongoing scheduled alarm within each week. If you tap it, you’ll see a series of bubbles appear, each representing days of the week, and you can tap them on or off.
They’re all on here, so as we tap them, we’re eliminating days from this alarm.
Next is the selection of the alarm sound itself, with the little bell icon beside it.
In here you’ve got all of the various alarms included with Android that you can choose from, or you can add your own here if you’ve got a sound file that you like. Interestingly, Android also gives you an option to use YouTube Music or Spotify (if installed) to choose an alarm sound from a music track.
To the right, there’s a checkbox for whether the alarm should cause the phone to vibrate or not.
Below, there’s a field for a Label, if you want to give a custom alarm a specific name.
Next is an interesting one - a tie-in to Google Assistant, which makes the cancelation of the alarm a trigger for all kinds of other actions in your Google Ecosystem.
Finally, ‘Dismiss’ simply disables the alarm, while ‘Delete’ does away with the pre-set altogether.
Moving along from ‘Alarm’, and into ‘Clock’, here we have what just looks like a larger version of the clock, but we can actually add other clocks to this screen - from other timezones. Tap the Globe button below…
And then type in a city to search for, and you’ve got an easy reference for other times in the world. You can also remove these by long-pressing each one and dragging them into the trash can that appears.
Moving on from “Clock”, we’ve got “Timer”, and this one is pretty self explanatory; enter a time that you want to count back from, and tap the play button below, and your Timer is running.
At this point, you can add a label to it and you can also add one-minute increments.
Now, because we added a label to our Timer, we can even add a 2nd timer, and add a label to that one as well, and then we can easily scroll between both of the timers which are running simultaneously - you can even see how many total timers you have by the number of ‘pips’ on the right side of the screen.
Moving onto the final section of the Clock app, the Stopwatch - in case you’ve never used one before; the Stopwatch is sort of the opposite of the Timer - it counts up instead of down. This can be used for keeping track of how long something is taking. Push play, and it begins. You can then tap the “Lap” button to start a ‘new’ segment, and it will begin listing segments in order, showing segment time and total time.
The Play button also becomes a Pause button, which functions as you’d guess, but when it’s paused, the “Lap” button becomes a “Share” button - which is convenient for sending your best times in whatever you’re doing to your friends, and it even adds a randomly cute title to each instance of sharing.
Reset in the bottom-left corner lets you start over from scratch.
And that’s it! An overview of the immensely useful Clock app in your Android phone.
As always, feel free to leave any comments - questions I didn’t answer here, any suggestions, or requests for new tutorials - it’s all welcome. See you next Tuesday!
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