Do you lay in bed and read email or twitter on your phone in portrait mode? Doesn’t it drive you crazy when the screen rotates into landscape mode? Here’s the quick way to solve that problem.
There’s actually a couple of ways to solve the problem, but we’ll show you two ways to solve the problem—one that makes sense, and the other that will only really work for people with a hardware keyboard.
Create a Shortcut to Toggle Auto-Rotate
This is by far the best option, since it will work regardless of the type of phone you have—just hit the AutoRotate Switch icon anytime you want the phone to stop rotating on you, and then hit the icon again when you want to enable the feature.
Head into the Market and search for “AutoRotate Switch”, install it, and then drag it from your applications folder onto the desktop somewhere. This application runs as a shortcut and not a widget in order to save memory.
Now whenever you hit the shortcut, it’ll show a little dialog that says “Switching OFF Auto-rotate”, and when you use the shortcut again, it’ll switch it back on. Awesome!
Note: as of the time of this writing, this little application is free. If at some point it should become non-free, you can always search for one of the other similar applications out there. I chose this one because it’s a shortcut and doesn’t waste memory running in the background as a widget.
The Built-in Way to Disable Auto-Rotate
If you’ve got a Droid, G1, or a Droid 2, you can make the phone stay in portrait mode all the time unless you’ve got the hardware keyboard extended. Before I found the shortcut method, this is what I used—it’s not as convenient, but it does work.
Head into Settings –> Display and uncheck Auto-rotate screen. That’s all there is to it.
So there you are—hit snooze on your alarm, and get comfortable in bed with your email, twitter, and whatever else.
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