Asus Zenfone 4 Tips and Tricks

Android now has privacy or incognito mode built into the stock browser.

Open your Browser App and press the Tabs icon at the bottom. Then press the Menu or More button at the top. Then select New secret tab or New incognito tab or Secret mode security.

Another option is to use the popular Dolphin browser whenever you want to browse privately. Then each time you exit, Dolphin asks you whether you want to delete your Cache or History. You may need to enable this if it isn’t set up by default.

If you select yes, then your activity will be untraceable. You may need to check this is enabled in the Dolphin settings.

Normally you can simply insert a SIM card and you will be able to browse the internet using 3G or 4G. Sometimes, this must be setup manually however.

Before you start, you will need to ask your carrier or Telco for your APN settings.

Once you have those, go to Settings – Connections – Mobile networks – Access Point Names.

From here press Add or the Plus sign at the top right and select New APN.

Then fill in the details your carrier gave you. Then press the menu button and press Save.

To remove numbers from the call log that you don’t want anyone seeing, then open your Call Log.

This will normally be found in your Phone App.

Press and hold on the contact you want to remove.

When the Menu appears, press Delete.

While using the standard Android Video App, you can lock the your screen while watching videos by pressing the power button.

This will disable the touchscreen buttons while the video is playing, but it won’t turn the screen off like the lock key normally does.

Note, this will only work on video files that you are playing that are stored on your phone and using the native Video App. It won’t work for videos played within websites, such as YouTube videos or other Apps such as MX Player, which have their own lock screen settings.

To delete or remove home screen widgets, simply press and hold. Then drag the widget to the top-right corner of the screen and into the Trash icon.

Android manages your applications so if the phone is running low on memory, it will close the oldest running App.

If you do need to manually close an application go to Settings – Apps.

Then select the application you want to stop and select Force Stop.

If you are abroad and don’t want to pay high data roaming charges, then you can save Google Maps for offline viewing later. Here are two ways to do this:

The first method will depend whether your phone supports it.

First, open Google Maps and navigate to a section of the map that you want available offline.

Then on the search bar at the top, press the Hamburger / Menu icon and select Offline maps.

Next, choose Select your own map.

Then zoom and pan around the required map area. The size of the offline map will be shown beneath the map area. When done, press the Download button.

Alternatively, open Google Maps and zoom down to street level. Then scroll around area you’ll be travelling too. If you’re visiting a city for example, do this at street level and cover as much area as you think you’ve be visiting. If you’re travelling outside a city, then street level view might be too detailed, so zoom out and just cover the main roads, towns etc.

This will load all the segments into your phone’s cache. Then when have arrived at your destination and you have data turned off, you should see the areas you’ve stored on the phone’s memory.

Note: this won’t give you your GPS location because that normally needs a data connection to pinpoint your position.

A great new feature is dual shot which lets you take a picture of someone else with the rear camera, while simultaneously taking a picture of yourself with the front facing camera. The problem is this feature isn’t obvious to find as it isn’t included in the list of camera Modes.

To find it open your Camera App and you will see three icons in the top right corner. Dual shot is the middle icon of these. Press that and you both cameras will activate allowing you to shoot away.

To stop the Photo App or the Music player from indexing your files, place a blank text file called .nomedia in the folder containing your photos or music.

The best way to do this is to connect your device to a PC and then navigate to the relevant folder via your PC.

If you want to install Apps outside of the Play Store (called sideloading), then go to Settings – Lock screen and security and select Unknown sources.

This setting will allow you to download Apps onto your device that would normally be blocked in the Play store.

Note: use at your own risk.