As we close out one week and head off into another, now is a great time to look back at the best tips and tricks from the past week (May 12 – May 18). Some of the tips you may have read, but some may be new to you, which is why they are back for a second another mention.

Dimple and Cliq: Two NFC button projects for your Android phones

NFC and NFC tags have been around for several years now, making transfers in short distance ranges a simple and fast task. However, despite their availability and usefulness, they kept their geek halo and never made it into mainstream usages. Enter Dimple and Cliq, two crowdfunded projects that aim to make NFC more accessible while also solving a problem of modern smartphones: the lack of physical buttons.

QuickClick uses your phone’s volume keys as shortcut buttons

Over the past years, there have been many applications that tried to create quick-launch shortcuts on our Android phones. Very few got it right however, and that’s why we saw entrepreneurs wanting to add an actual physical button to the phone — i.e. Pressy and its many rip-offs. Going back to software, QuickClick is one of the better solutions to the problem, and here’s what it does.

How to: Capture high quality stills from video footage on Samsung Galaxy smartphones

When you’re around action – whether it’s a local sporting event or, more usually, kids and pets, there’s a perennial tension between deciding whether to shoot stills or video on your camera phone. Stills will be of higher quality, but you’ll probably miss ‘the moment’, while video gets everything, but you can’t print it out and stick it on the fridge, or email it to Aunty Maud. Happily, if you have a fairly recent Samsung smartphone, there’s a ‘best of both worlds’ compromise.

Tips to make the most of the Samsung Galaxy S5 camera

The 16MP ISOCELL camera on the Galaxy S5 is definitely one of its highlights. It is, arguably, among the best cameras present in the current generation smartphones and can even rival the 41MP optically stabilised sensor on the Lumia 1020. While the camera works great right out of the box, there are always a few settings that you can tweak or use to click better pictures. Read below to find out about them, so that you can make the most of the S5′s camera.

How to record slow-motion videos on the Galaxy S5

Slow-motion video recording was a rare feature in Android phones until last year. However, ever since Apple released the iPhone 5s with slow-mo video recording at 720p@120FPS, all major OEMs have been included it in their flagship devices.