How to Set the Orientation on Your Android's Display

Android Smartphones For Dummies

Many apps on your Android, and perhaps the Home screen itself, can change their presentation as you switch the Android between portrait and horizontal orientations. You can lock that presentation, if you like. Heed the directions:

Open the Settings app.
Choose Display.
Choose Device Rotation. If necessary, tap the chevron by the Advanced item to locate the Device Rotation item.
Select an option.

The options might include two or more of the following:

Rotate the contents of the screen. The device orients the screen to match whichever direction is “up.”

Stay in Portrait view. The device stays in Portrait view, the standard presentation on an Android phone.

Stay in Landscape view. The device holds to landscape presentation, which is standard for an Android tablet.

Stay in current orientation. The device remains in its current orientation.

If you don’t see any of these options, look to the Quick Settings drawer. A Rotation icon is found there, which lets you switch between freely rotating the touchscreen and locking it into one position or the other.

The Play Books app offers its own screen orientation controls, which make it easier (and more predictable) to read an eBook.

About This Article

About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.