HTC Desire 826 Tips and Tricks

If you find yourself woken up by notifications, text messages or incoming calls, then there is a handy feature called Blocking mode.

To enable this go to Settings – Device – Sounds and notifications – Do not disturb.

From here you can set a From and To time in which to block these notifications.

You can also allow notifications through from certain contacts that you don’t mind bothering you.

Android cleverly uses Picasa to sync photos between your account and your phone. Sometimes however, this means that you will get duplicates appearing in your Gallery when they’re not actually on your phone.

To stop this from happening, and so you only see photos on the Phone or SD card, then follow these steps:

Drag down your notification menu from the top and click on the Gear icon to bring up your Settings. Then select Accounts and Google. Then select your Gmail account.

You should see a list of options that are ticked. Scroll down to the one that refers to Picasa and untick that.

Now that’s done we want to remove the thumbnails from your Gallery, so we need to refresh the Gallery. To do that, swipe down and go to Settings again. Then select More – Application Manager. Swipe across to show ALL Apps. Then find the Gallery App and press Clear Data.

This will erase the thumbnails in your Gallery, so don’t panic that your photos have disappeared. Just wait for the Gallery to re-build its index which could take awhile.

But the good news is that your Picasa Albums shouldn’t be there anymore.

If you prefer a different voice when listening to the Google Maps voice navigation, you can select another language or accent.

To change this, go to Settings. Then select System – Language and input – Text-to-speech options. Then under the Preferred text-to-speech engine, press the gear icon.

From there, select Language and you will be able to choose from different languages or language variations.

If you regularly visit a website you can add a shortcut to your homescreen which can be quite useful, rather than entering the web address each time you want to visit the site.

You can either do this to an existing Bookmark, or simply a page you’re visiting:

1) Open your Browser App. Enter the website you want to bookmark. You may need to wait for the whole page to load first. Then press the phone’s Menu button or More at the top and select Add shortcut to home screen.

2) Open your Browser App. Find an existing Bookmark by pressing the Bookmarks icon at the bottom of the App. Select the Bookmark and repeat the above steps.

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 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.

Note: Developer Options is not enabled by default. To enable, go to Settings – About Device. Then tap on Build number 7 times.

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 – Applications – Application manager. Then swipe the screen from right to left until you are on the Running screen.

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

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.

While viewing your list of Contacts you can swipe from Right to Left to send a text message to the selected contact.

This might not work on all models.

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 and under System, choose About Device.

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