Hopefully many of you out there will have had a great Christmas, and received this fantastic phone from a loved one! Or more likely, treated yourself to something nice…! I’ve gathered some of the best tips for features and functionality you might not have realised existed within the Galaxy Nexus. A lot of these tips are actually Ice Cream Sandwich, rather than the phone, so if you have another phone with Ice Cream Sandwich installed, you should also have a look through too, you might learn something new! This is part one of this post, there are plenty more tips to come!

I’ll be showing you 15 quick tips and tweaks that can really improve your Android experience on the Samsung Galaxy S2. Some of these work just for the S2, but others work on Android in general, so even if you’ve got a different Android phone this is still worth a read.

This will allow non-Americans to download FREE apps from the Amazon App store. It won’t work for paid apps because you will be using a fake credit card number. However, it WILL WORK for those daily free premium apps, which is one of the major reasons you’d want to use this.

Word of caution, you are best off creating a new Amazon account using a new email address for this, as Amazon are likely to ban your account if they find out Full details after the break!

So you have an android phone, but your main email account isn’t a gmail one. What do you do? Well lets get the important thing over with first. Make gmail your #1 main email! You won’t regret it. It works so flawlessly with android that it would be silly not to. Not to mention its fantastic on your PC, especially if you use Chrome browser (and if not, why the hell not?!). Anyway, I know lots of people have other, non-gmail accounts (me included). So I thought I’d write up a guide on how to best manage these alternative emails you have within android. I’ll be using hotmail as the example alternative email, simply because its the most common email you guys will have.

If you are rooted, and cannot install the new market via the apk method, then this is for you. A flashable zip that will give your phone the new (and very funky) android market! Once again, follow the jump for full details!

So you must have seen the reports about the new additional tab that can be seen in the android market? If not check out the screenshot below. This is only available on devices running froyo, and if you don’t have it yet, just follow the instructions after the jump to force the update through! Remember, froyo only, sorry!

Well, after both my TallMin (20,000+ downloads) and aSmoothstar (10,000+ downloads) icons have been so popular with you guys, please hello to my new icon set, UberCon! I have to say, personally these are my favourite text icons I have created yet. They really do look fantastic on your phone. The idea behind these icons was again a single line icon with a unique font face. Something that was readable, but more importantly LARGE! One of the issues facing me and others as text icon creators is we are limited in what we can fit into the space provided. That generally means words are stretched, or squeezed in to make room for the whole word.

For some people this is ok, but it didn’t sit totally right with me. So with the UberCon set I set myself a maximum number of characters for each word in an icon. This meant for some words/apps I had to be inventive with the name, in some cases shortening the word by removing some characters whilst either still making the word readable, or thereby making the word a sort of abbreviated alternative. I’m sure most of you have seen the paragraph below before?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

If mixing the characters up in a word still allows us to read it, then might the same be true by removing a character? Well who knows, you can decide after trying it out yourself!

I’m also going to stagger the release of different colours. This pack will include the white version, which I think is quite a popular colour, but feel free to request the next colour to be released in the comments. I’m more likely to release one that has been asked for the most! If you wish to donate to show your thanks, then your vote for colours may come sooner (and you’ll also have the internal satisfaction about helping me keep this site up!)

Oh, and did I mention that there are 313 icons in this set? The biggest yet!

Yesterday I posted a screenshot of my current lock screen on my HTC Desire. It’s very minimalist, but I think it looks quite beautiful. I posted the question of whether it’s too bare, or if the fact that there is little going on makes it gorgeous. Well the majority of responses loved it! Those that didn’t seem to have a need to knowledge and so their lock screens are more packed with that info, which is also great. I mean one of the great things about android is the fact that you can easily tailor it to your own needs and preferences right?

Well, many people also asked how I made my homescreen like this, it’s very simple, and you do not need to be rooted either, every android phone can do this with no modification! Instructions after the jump:

With the Froyo 2.2 release of android, we also gained the ability to install some* apps to the sd card. This is something that many people wanted to enable us to install more apps and more games than previously possible. However one of the poor features of froyo a2sd is the fact that we can only move those apps to the sd card that the app developer has allowed us to, something many forget to code when releasing their app. There is also the fact that we have to manually click to move apps to the sdcard, when for most of us this is the required default behaviour.

Well, there is actually a way to force your android phone running 2.2 or above to install all apps to your sd card by default, regardless of whether the developer has allowed you to do it or not. Oh, and you do not need be rooted to do this (in fact, there is a much easier way if you are rooted)! Just follow the jump for instructions!