Microsoft Lumia 540 Tips and Tricks

A handy feature is to automatically backup your photos to Skydrive. To enable this feature, go to Settings – Pictures & camera. Change Auto Upload to On

To disable the mobile version of websites, go to Settings – Applications – Internet Explorer and change it there.

This is useful if you get annoyed by websites automatically serving you mobile versions of their site. By following the steps above, you can tell the phone browser to act as a standard browser for each website that you browse.

To clear your browsing history so that no one can see which websites you have been browsing, go to Settings – Applications – Search.

Then select Delete History

To turn off roaming while abroad, go to Settings – Mobile network – Roaming.

This can save you from getting stung on high call charges while overseas.

When browsing on your phone you may notice images can be quite blurry or distorted. This is because your network provider is compressing the images before they are downloaded on to your device.

Unfortunately there is no way to override this, but if you have a Wi-Fi connection nearby, then you can turn that on. This will mean that all image downloads come through the Wi-Fi connection, rather than your carrier, and the images should appear normally.

Windows Phone 7 comes with a handy service whereby you can remotely lock or erase your phone should it be stolen. You can also use it to call your phone if you have misplaced it around the house. You can also find your phone on a map. Go to windowsphone.live.com to set this service up

To disable caller ID, go to Settings – Applications – Phone.

Then change Show my Caller ID to either Everyone, No one or My contacts.

This is useful if you don’t want people to see your phone number when you call them.

You can use your smartphone as an Xbox controller.

First, download and install the Xbox SmartGlass App (formerly known as My Xbox Live). Once this is installed go to Xbox hub and make sure your Xbox is turned on and connected to your Wi-Fi router. Then make sure the phone is connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

If that is all setup, then the App will sign you in and you can start controlling your Xbox with the phone.

Sometimes, especially if you’re going abroad, you will want to save maps to view when your phone is offline.

This isn’t an obvious feature to find, but you should go to Settings – Applications – Maps – Download Maps.

From here you can download whole regions, countries or continents to your phone for viewing when you don’t have a data connection. Be warned that this can take up a lot of storage space however. For example the whole of the UK might take around 500Mb of storage space.

Because of the touch screen sensitivity, it can be hard to position the cursor within a certain word. To get around this, Press and Hold on a word. While dragging the cursor along the letters, pull your finger down. The cursor will move along, but you will be able to see it as your finger will be out of the way