Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini Tips and Tricks

Jelly Bean has improved the facial unlock feature by creating a setting whereby you must blink when unlocking your phone. This prevents fraudsters using a photo of yourself and holding it up to the phone.

To activate this feature go to Settings – Lock screen – Screen lock – Face unlock. Then setup your facial unlocking.

Then once that is done, go to Face unlock again and tick Presence check.

Your phone comes with a handy widget which lets you kill all running tasks. This is great if you want to quickly free up some memory.

To use the widget, press and hold for 2 seconds on a blank part of any homescreen. Then find the Active Apps Manager widget and install it.

Once that is done, press the widget and it will show you all currently running Apps. Press End all to close all running Apps.

Depending on how your phone is set up, sometimes you will see lag when swiping between homescreens. There are a number of things you can try to fix this, as follows:

First, try restarting your phone. This will fix many problems.

If that doesn’t work, then remove any Widgets that pull data to the phone, such as Twitter, Weather widgets etc

If you have Live wallpapers turned on, then try turning them off by going to Settings – Display – Wallpaper, then changing to a different Wallpaper.

Go to Settings – More – Developer options – Window Animation Scale and Transition Animation Scale. Try changing these to 0.5x (or even 0).

Sometimes the problem can be with the phone or operators skin or launcher, so try going to the Play Store and downloading a third party launcher such as Nova launcher or Go LauncherEx. Note: you will need to re-create your homescreen shortcuts, but they are both great launchers.

Another tip is to always press the Back key instead of the Home key when leaving Apps. The Back key will often close the App properly, while the Home key will leave it running in the background.

If you are not happy with your notification light, then you can change and tweak it. Go to the Play Store and download an App called Lightflow.

You might need to enable the notification light before the App works. Go to Settings – My device – LED Indicator and tick Notifications.

Most Android devices come with an alternative way of entering text called Swype. Many prefer this method and believe it is quicker.
When any text entry box appears, press and hold the box. Then select Input method: SWYPE. Once enabled, you simply drag your finger around the keyboard moving over the letters in the correct order to spell a word.

You can speed up the page load speed on your browser by disabling JavaScript.

To do this, open your Browser, then Menu – Settings – Content Settings. Scroll down and untick Enable JavaScript

Please note that this may affect the functionality of some sites.

To see which firmware version of Android you are using, use the pull-down menu by dragging your finger from the top of the phone. Select Settings – More – About Device.

This should list your Android version, Build number and Model Number.

There is a great app called Moves by a company called Protogeo that makes use of your devices accelerometer to record your movements, whether by walking, cycling or running.

Go to the Play Store and search for Moves.

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – My Device – Language and input. Then under Keyboards and input methods, press the little Gear icon.

From here you have various options including Haptic feedback, Vibration intensity and so on.

You can also adjust notifications for various functions.

While in the Camera App, there are two ways to zoom in or out.

First, you can use Volume Up and Down keys.

Secondly, you can pinch your fingers on the screen to zoom in and out.