LG G Pad 8.3 V500 (tablet) Tips and Tricks

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 and colour. You can adjust it from here.

To adjust the phone’s main brightness, go to the Homescreen, press Menu – Settings – 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 – Power Saving Mode and change the Background Colour Only mode in there. Power Saving Mode can be found by in the Notifications bar by swiping down from the top of the screen too.

If you want to resize your homescreen widgets, then press and hold on a widget for 2 seconds. If the widget is resizable, then an outline will appear around the widget. Simply drag the sides to resize the widget.

If the outline doesn’t appear or you can’t drag the lines, then the widget is a fixed sized widget.

If you want to install Apps outside of the Android Market (called sideloading), then go to Settings – Security – Unknown sources.

Note: use at your own risk.

From your Homescreen press Menu – Settings – About device.

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

Jelly Bean has an interesting new feature called Talkback which is designed for blind and low vision users.

The feature is an interesting way to navigate your phone however.

Simply go to Settings – Accessibility – Talkback to activate it. Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

If you would prefer not to be told every time an Application has been updated, open the Play Market – Menu – My Apps. Then Menu again. Then Settings.

Under General settings, untick the Notifications option.

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 – Blocking mode. 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.

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

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

If you don’t want to have to unlock your screen every time you take your device out of standby then go to Settings – Lock screen – Screen lock and change the settings there.

To access the scientific calculator, rotate the phone to landscape mode.

The calculator will change to a scientific one.