Rooting an Android device has many advantages, including the ability to remove some of the pre-installed bloatware, add new features, and do much more. Samsung has been pretty liberal about the whole root thing, which makes its devices some of the easiest to root — after the Nexus series from Google.

Here is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to root the international Galaxy S III (I9300) from using a Windows-based PC.

On my Mac and Windows PCs, where I have access to a speedy connection, I have mounted my Box and Dropbox account to act as a local virtual storage. This allows me to seamlessly transfer files between them and my local storage drives with a simple copy & paste, and it makes my cloud storage services much more useful.

On Android, I need to ‘share’ files to the official Dropbox or Box app to save files on either of these cloud storage services, but there is a way to mount these services as if they’re SD cards. Here’s how.

Google removed the ability to view only your purchased applications in Google Play sometime after Ice Cream Sandwich was released. Instead of just displaying your purchased apps, the “My Apps” section started listing all the apps that you may have ever installed on your Android device.

Google did roll out a new version of Google Play sometime last year, which allowed you to manually remove the free apps from the My Apps section. But even then, if you have multiple Android devices and more than a few hundred apps installed, it can be quite cumbersome to find all the apps you’ve paid for. To make your life easier, a new app called My Purchases only lists those apps that you have paid for.

Here’s how to set it up.

With the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note II, Samsung introduced a ton of gimmicky features in an effort to impress us. Some of them just don’t work all that well, but others, such as Multi-Window, are pretty useful.

Another feature that’s become quite popular is called SmartStay, which uses the front facing camera to detect when a user is looking at the display. This allows it to keep the display on when their eyes are on the screen, and then turn it off when they look away, conserving previous battery life.

Unfortunately, Smart Stay is exclusive to Galaxy devices, but there are third-party alternatives you can use on your devices. Here’s how to set up one of them called SmartStay Ex.

Have a blazing fast net connection but find it still takes ages to load a website? Blame the slow DNS servers of your ISP. Alternative and free DNS services like Open DNS and Google Local DNS are much faster, more reliable, and safer compared to the DNS servers used by your ISP. They’re also handy if your operator’s DNS server is down.

While none of the Android devices come with an option to change the DNS server used by your device when on a 3G or 4G network, an application in the Play Store  — SetDNS (free) — is capable of doing so, provided you have root access. Here’s what to do.