Huawei Honor Play Tips and Tricks

Android 8 (Oreo)
Phone: Huawei Honor Play
Factory OS: Android 8 (Oreo)

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If you are abroad and don’t want to pay high data roaming charges or travelling to an area with no network coverage, 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 press on the search bar and scroll right to the bottom and select Make this map area available offline. You may need to repeat this with multiple areas.

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 will 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.

To change the backlight screen timeout, drag down your notifications screen and press Settings. Then under System select Display. Then under Screen timeout you can set the screen time out duration.

You can also tell the phone screen to always stay lit when it is plugged in via USB. Go to Settings – System – Developer Options. Then check Stay Awake.

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

If you want to move a widget from one homescreen to another, simply press and hold on the widget. Then drag it to the edge of the screen. The next homescreen will appear. Then, just drag the item to where you would like.

To adjust your screen brightness, there are two options:

1) Simply drag your finger from the top of the phone down to pull down your quick settings screen. Then at the top there will be a brightness bar. Drag this left or right or press Auto.

2) Drag your notifications screen down and select Settings. Then under Device, select Display – Brightness. Then choose the desired brightness setting.

You can also select Automatic brightness to let the phone decide for you.

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.

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 are browsing and have zoomed in or out and the column you’re reading doesn’t fit the screen properly, you can pinch to zoom in. Then double tap on the column. The column will then be reformatted to fit the screen width.

To access the scientific calculator, simply open the calculator App and rotate the phone to landscape mode.

The calculator will automatically change to a scientific one.

There are a couple of ways to bring up one of your contacts.

First, while in your Contacts App, simply start typing in the search bar at the top of the screen.

Or else a quicker method is to use the Google Search widget (installed by long pressing on a vacant part of your homescreen and installing the widget) and start typing the name of the contact you want to dial. This will quickly filter the correct contact.

If you like to use vibration mode but you don’t want to disrupt a whole room due to the Huawei Honor Play vibration intensity, you can adjust or reduce that accordingly. Just follow the steps below on your phone:

  1. From your home screen, swipe down to open the notifications menu.
  2. Tap on the Settings icon (usually a gear-shaped one at the top-right portion).
  3. Scroll to Device then tap “Sound” or “Sounds and notifications” or “Sound & Vibration.”
  4. Under Sound, tap “Vibrations” or “Vibration Intensity.”
  5. A bar will appear where you can slide left or right to adjust the intensity of your phone’s vibration. On some phones, users can select from either Light, Medium, or Strong.
  6. Tap “OK.” This will automatically save your preference.

This generally works for the Huawei Honor Play and most Android phones.

For Huawei users, you may need to follow a slightly different method. If you use a Huawei unit, follow the instructions below instead:

  1. From the home screen, tap up to locate Settings.
  2. Then tap Settings → Strength
  3. Swipe up or down to adjust the vibration intensity. That’s from Strong, Soft, or None.
  4. Tap “OK.”
  5. You will be automatically reverted to the home screen. Don’t worry, your preferred vibration intensity is saved at this point.