Your smartphone is, after all, a phone for making and answering calls. But it also has a keyboard for sending texts and emails and a camera for taking photos and videos.

The status bar on your home screen displays the time and icons that tell you about your phone's battery and network connections.

Your smartphone comes with many fun and useful apps, but you can really unlock its power by installing apps that suit your lifestyle. Go to Play Store to explore free and paid apps that help you be more productive, organized, informed, in touch, and entertained.

Play Store also offers music, movies, TV shows, and books.

You carry your phone around with you, and accidents happen; phones get lost sometimes. So set up some security and prevent heartache if you and your phone become separated.

Set up a screen lock. This is your first line of defense in keeping your sensitive information safe. Prefer numbers, shapes, words? Set up a PIN, pattern, or password required to unlock your phone.

A screen lock doesn't prevent you from immediately answering a call or accessing your camera.

Display your owner info. On your lock screen, you can discreetly display a “please return” message with some of your contact info so that, if your phone is lost, someone can to return it to you.

Enable lost phone features. For peace of mind, check out Find My Device, in case you ever need to remotely locate and lock or erase your phone.

While changing your wallpaper is probably your first customization, don't stop there. Be sure to explore your Settings to set ringtones, font sizes, data usage preferences, keyboard preferences, and much more. It's a great way to learn many of your phone's capabilities while customizing it to suit your needs.

In most apps you can touch or for app-specific settings. Be sure to see what options are available to you there, too.

Understand your data usage. Keep an eye on your data usage and learn how to make the most of it. See which apps use large amounts of data and adjust their settings if you want. You can stop auto-syncing over your carrier's network from quick settings by toggling the data connection off.

Use Wi-Fi to conserve cellular data. When you connect to a Wi-Fi network, your data will auto-sync over its connection instead of your carrier's network, saving cellular data for when you need it. From quick settings, toggle the Wi-Fi connection on.

Tell your phone what to do. Use your phone hands-free with voice commands. Tell it to navigate you, and listen to it speak the directions to you as you drive--it'll even reroute you if you've gone off course. Tell it to set alarms, find information on the web, make calls. Dictate instead of typing text.

Never miss a photo opportunity. Automatically open the camera right from your lock screen. Just twist your phone twice. Or, swipe left. You can automatically back up your photos and videos with your Google account or with other photo sharing apps available from Play Store.

Store your stuff. Save your internal storage for apps by using an SD card to store photos, videos, and music. You can open stored items in associated apps, like Gallery to see your photos and videos. It's simple to move items stored on your phone to a computer using the USB cable packaged with your phone.

For even more storage space, plus the ability to access your media and files from any internet connected device (phone, computer, tablet), your new phone gives you access to cloud storage. Your Google account provides you free cloud storage on Drive, which has its own app and is also available from the menu throughout other apps.

When you know you'll have a weak connection or no connection, many of your apps let you pin cloud items, temporarily storing them on your phone. You can unpin when you're done to keep phone memory free.

Wi-Fi hotspot. You can share your phone's data connection as a Wi-Fi hotspot or directly tether your phone to a computer for internet access. If you have other devices that need an internet connection (for example, a laptop, tablet, or other phone), you can use your phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

Reboot phone. In the unlikely event that your phone becomes unresponsive, frozen, shows blank or black screen, or does not respond to the Power button, you can reboot it. Press and hold the Power button for 7 - 10 seconds. The phone will restart normally.