Huawei Ascend Mate7 Tips and Tricks

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.

To enable Face Unlock, go into Settings – My device – Lock screen – Screen lock.

Then select Face unlock. From here you will be required to look at the phone via the front facing camera. It is usually better to do this during the day when the lighting is better, although the phone will guide you through the process.

If you get tired of receiving sales calls or want to block a particular number, then you can set up auto call rejects on your device.

Often you will get calls from unknown numbers. Depending on how cautious or curious you are, then normally it’s good practice to ignore such calls. If you don’t want to answer, but you’d still like to know who the call is from, then you can simply Google the number and there are a number of websites which lists phone numbers with details about the company of the caller. From these sites you can easily see if the call you received is from a dodgy company or not.

Once you have establed that you want to block or reject the call in future, then open your normal Dialler App. Then go to Logs and find the number you want to block. Long press on the number and select Add to reject list.

From now on you will see that you recieved a missed call, however the phone will not ring and you won’t be bothered by the caller.

To manage or manually enter numbers on your reject list, then again open your Dialler App. Press your Menu key and select Call settings. Then Call rejection. Then selet Auto reject list to see your reject number list. You can also manually add numbers from here

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.

The brightness of the browser is set separately to the phone’s main brightness. If you find the screen dims or brightens when you go into your browser, then you can change this by opening the browser, pressing the Menu key and scrolling down until you see Brightness. You can adjust it from here.

To adjust the phone’s main brightness, go to the Settings – My device – Display – Brightness.

An alternative is to use a third party browser like Dolphin, Firefox, Opera and so on. These all use the phone’s main brightness setting.

Lastly, sometimes Power Saving Mode affects the screen brightness. Go to Settings – My device – Power Saving Mode and change the Background Colour Only mode in there. Power Saving Mode can also be found by in the Notifications bar by swiping down from the top of the screen.

To store a phone number that you have received in an email, hold down on the number and you will be given the option to call, send an SMS or add the number to your contacts

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

Simply open your Browser App, press the menu key and select Incognito mode.

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. If you select yes, then your activity will be untraceable.

It can be very useful to see your battery life in percentage terms instead of just the icon.

To enable this, go to Settings – My device – Display and tick Display battery percentage.

If you have been browsing websites that you would prefer other people to not know about, then it’s relatively simply to clear your browsing history.

Open the browser and press the Menu button. Then Settings – Privacy – Delete personal data.

From here you can select whether to clear the cache, cookies, passwords and more.

If you’re worried about your sensitive data falling into the wrong hands then Android has a great new encryption feature that scrambles every pieces of content on your device.

Go to Settings – More – Security – Encrypt device or Encrypt external SD card.