Dibakar Ghosh is a tech journalist at How-To Geek, where he focuses on Linux, Windows, and productivity tools. His goal is simple—help readers at every skill level get more done with the tech they use every day.
He began his writing career in 2016 with WordPress tutorials, later moving into digital marketing, where he spent years reviewing complex tools for marketers. His work has also appeared on Authority Hacker, where he’s shared in-depth guides on digital workflows and online productivity. That experience now shapes his journalism, blending analytical depth with practical, real-world advice.Â
When he’s not writing or testing software, Dibakar is usually watching movies or playing video games. He’s a huge Christopher Nolan fan and a strong proponent of the theater experience. In gaming, he has sunk hundreds of hours into Insomniac’s Spider-Man series, Returnal, Prototype, Darksiders, and Final Fantasy titles.
Google Pixel phones come loaded with genuinely useful features, but not all of them are enabled out of the box. In fact, it's a bit backwards sometimes—some of the most useful features are disabled by default, while features I don't care for are turned on from day one. That's why going through the settings and tweaking them to your liking is worth the few minutes it takes. Here are the five features I always change on every Pixel phone I set up.
The feature names and their exact locations described here are based on Android 17, which is available on all supported Pixel devices at the time of writing.
The first feature is called Screen Attention, and you'll find it by heading to Settings > Display & Touch > Screen timeout and then scrolling toward the bottom. Once enabled, it keeps your screen from turning off as long as you're looking at it, even if you're not actively touching it.
You probably already know that the screen has a big impact on your phone's battery life, so one of the smartest things you can do is reduce the screen timeout. However, the problem with doing that is that the screen can turn off in the middle of reading a message or an article unless you’re constantly touching the display.
Screen Attention fixes that. It uses the front-facing camera to check whether you're looking at the screen, and if you are, it prevents the timeout from kicking in. It's a layer of convenience that works best when paired with a short timeout, like 15–30 seconds. This way, most of the time, the screen turns off quickly and saves battery, but when I'm actually reading something, it stays on.
That said, while you're in there, it's also worth enabling Adaptive Timeout. It works in the opposite direction by turning off the screen quickly, even before the set timeout, if you're not using it.
You probably already know how auto-rotate works—you turn your phone sideways to watch something full-width, and the screen rotates accordingly. It's handy, but I've always kept it disabled for one reason: when I'm lying down and scrolling through my social feeds or YouTube, the phone thinks I've rotated it and flips the entire screen sideways.
Face detection solves this. Instead of relying solely on the phone's orientation sensors, it also uses the front-facing camera to check the orientation of your face relative to the screen. If I'm lying on my side with the phone held sideways, my face and the screen are aligned the same way, so the content stays put—no flipping. To make it flip, I'd actually have to turn my phone upright while still lying down, which makes my face perpendicular to the screen and causes the content to rotate.
This one lives in Settings > Display > Other display controls > Auto-rotate screen. From here, enable Use Auto-Rotate, followed by Face Detection underneath it.
Google Pixel users have been waiting for this one for way too long. Up until Android 16, if you used the default launcher, the top of your home screen was permanently occupied by the At a Glance widget. It shows the date, day, and weather, and surfaces things like upcoming calendar events, live sports scores, and traffic information when you're heading somewhere.
The idea is cool, but the fact that you couldn't turn it off made it a bit intrusive, in my opinion. In fact, I know plenty of folks—myself included—who would rather use that extra screen real estate for apps or another widget.
Thankfully, with Android 16, you can finally remove the widget. Just long-press an empty area of the home screen to bring up the launcher settings, tap Home settings, and you'll see the At a Glance option sitting at the top. Tap it, toggle it off, and you've just made your home screen a lot cleaner.
The right widget can make all the difference in how you actually use your apps.
On Pixels and most modern Android smartphones, long-pressing the power button triggers Gemini. I understand the rationale behind having this as the default behavior—I mean, how often do we actually turn off our phones these days? A tap to lock and a long press for a more commonly used function does make sense on paper.
