Our 2013 smartphone guide has already covered the best hardware to buy and our favorite games for each platform. For the final edition, we'll be looking at a few cool tweaks and apps to help manage your smartphone and make it more useful. After all, smartphones are high-tech Swiss army knives. There are a million apps, functions, and settings, and it can all get a little overwhelming. But fear not—we at Ars spend most of our waking hours attached to our smart devices, and we've accumulated quite the pile of time-saving shortcuts and applications to make our lives easier. We want to share with you!

We've got all three major smartphone ecosystems covered in this guide, but don't just pay attention to the items for your platform of choice. While learning about neat things your phone can do is cool, it's interesting to see what's possible on the other side of the fence. And you just might want to switch some day.

Speed up animations (iOS and Android)

All the swoopy, sliding animations present in a modern smartphone OS are really nice the first three or 400 times you see them. The fact that current-generation smartphones are stuffed with fast SoCs means the effects at least look cool. Plus, many are communicative and often teach new users something about the layout of the OS or show them where something is going. For people who are familiar with the OS, though, animations often just slow them down or get in the way. Luckily, two out of our three platforms have a way to fix this. On iOS 7, just go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and flick the little switch to "on." One of the common criticisms of iOS 7 is that it has slower transitions than iOS 6, which makes the whole OS feel slow. "Reduce Motion" will make transitions feel slightly faster by disabling many of the zoomy animations.

Android has a much harder solution to get to, but it's much more comprehensive. First, you'll need to access the Developer Options, which means going to Settings > About Phone and mashing on "Build Number" seven times. This will unlock Developer Options in the main Settings page. Open it, scroll down a bit, and you should see three "Animation scale" settings: "Windows animation scale," "Transition animation scale," and "Animator duration scale." Open each one and crank it to ".5x," and suddenly you've kicked Android into turbo mode. This will affect all animations and transitions for the OS and apps, causing everything to operate at an almost reckless speed. I would really prefer something like ".75x," but the settings only come in "hyper" or "regular" speed. Some apps, like the home screen, will need to be restarted in order for the new animation speeds to apply. A reboot is the safest way to ensure it gets applied to everything. (For some real fun, try setting them to "10x," also known as "slow as molasses mode." It's interesting for about two minutes.)

Sadly, Windows Phone has no way to boost animation speed. That's a real shame, because Windows Phone is easily the biggest offender of way-too-slow animation speeds.

Manage contacts on a real computer

Managing contacts on a phone is always a nightmare. Even though each ecosystem tries its hardest to be friendly, it's still far too easy to wind up with duplicate or missing contacts—especially when you're using your phone for both home and work, and you've got multiple accounts syncing contacts to and from the device. Thankfully, all three platforms have ways to manage contacts from a real computer using a real keyboard.

Your best bet on Android and iOS is to use Google Contacts. Android, of course, natively syncs with Google Contacts. For iOS, just install the Gmail app, and it will ask if you'd like to sync contacts when you first set it up. Once you're syncing to Google, just head to google.com/contacts. There, you'll be able to easily add and edit contacts and organize everything into groups. While there is no app for Windows Phone, Microsoft's mobile OS can natively pull down contacts. Just set up a Gmail account and you're good to go.

Apple has an in-house contacts management solution on iCloud, but it lacks the power of Google Contacts. Google offers the ability to find and merge duplicates. It has many more import and export options and an amazing "restore contacts" function, which will revert your contacts to any point they were at in the last 30 days down to the minute. The UI is also much easier to use than iCloud, with multi-select checkboxes, a unified view/edit mode, and buttons in a single strip instead of like iCloud's crazy layout, which scatters buttons all over the screen.

Microsoft's contact site, live.com, lives in a utopian world of contact interoperability. It can import from just about anywhere you'd want to import contacts from. Most importantly, it will pull in contact pictures from Facebook and Twitter. The linked social media contacts are read-only, though—you can add details to a linked contact, but it's not a two-way sync. The interface is logically laid out, and it mostly has feature parity with Google Contacts (for example, you can search for possible duplicates and manually link contacts). The only thing it's missing over Google Contacts is the minute-by-minute backup and restore feature.