HTC Desire 500 Tips and Tricks

Instead of the simple swipe gesture to unlock your phone, you can set a custom one which can be extremely difficult for a thief to guess.

From your homescreen, go to Menu – Settings – Security. Then select Screen lock. Then chose Pattern to set one up.

It is also a good idea to untick Use visible pattern. Then if someone is watching over your shoulder while you entering your pattern, it will be harder for them to remember the pattern.

If you have forgotten your unlock pattern, then after 5 unsuccessful tries a button will appear saying ‘Forgot pattern’. Press this and you will be asked to enter your Gmail username/password. The phone will then ask for a new unlock pattern. If you don’t have a Gmail account, then you will have to either call your carrier or factory reset your phone.

There are a number of ways, as below. The first two of these may be disabled on some networks/carriers or Android versions however.

1) Go to Settings – Applications – Manage Applications. Then chose All at the top. Then scroll down to Contacts Storage – Clear Data.

2) Go to Contacts. Then press Menu – Delete. Then press Select all (at the top) and then Delete again.

3) Go to Settings – Accounts and sync. Then untick Background data and Auto-sync. Then go to Gmail (or an account that your phone syncs with) and delete all of your Contacts from there. Then re-sync your phone.

4) Download an App called ‘Delete All Contacts’ and use that as a last resort.

These methods above will delete contacts from the phone only, not the SIM card.

With Android Jelly Bean you can now take photos while recording video by simply pressing the screen.

This will save that particular frame to the gallery while continuing to record video.

If you want to browse in full screen mode, without the URL bar at the top of the browser, then you can enable this..

Open the standard browser and press Menu – Settings – Labs. Then put a check mark under Full Screen .

To get access to the browser options (that are now invisible), there is now a neat hidden menu. Slide your finger in from the left or right of the screen. A circular menu will appear with various options.

To add an email or phone number to your contacts from a text message, you can long-press on the email / phone number. Then select Add to contacts

To copy files between your phone and PC, go to the Android Play Market and download an app called AirDroid.

This is an extremely useful App that connects your phone to your PC wirelessly, allowing you to move files and many, many other things.

To speed up your phone, you can turn off screen animations. Go to Settings – Developer options.

Then scroll down to Window animation scale and select that. From here you can choose to turn Animations Off. This will make screen transitions faster.

Type a word that is not in the dictionary. The word will show up in the suggestion box to the left. Long press on the word and it will save to the dictionary.

To view your notifications, simply slide your finger down from the top of your device.

Then, from here, you can use two fingers to expand certain items. For example, this might show you the headers of your emails.

Moving your two fingers inwards contracts that item.

In the Calendar App there is no Year view along the top of the App. You can however use pinch to zoom gestures to zoom in and out of Month and Year view however.

This is useful if you want to quickly jump backwards or forwards through a few months at a time.