Motorola Droid Mini 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 – Lock screen. Then chose Screen lock and choose Pattern.

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.

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

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – Language and input – Text-to-speech options. Then under the Preferred TTS engine, press the gear icon.

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

If you want to remove an entire text message thread, go into Messages and look for the thread. Then long press on it and select Delete thread

Android now has a way to display your name, phone or email on your lock screen. Perfect if you have lost or misplaced your device.

To enable this go to Settings – Lock screen – Lock screen widgets. Then at the bottom press Owner information. Here you can enter any information you want, such as your name or email address.

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 Goole 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.

When taking photos or videos, tap the screen where you want to focus on. The phone will automatically adjust the settings to improve the image or video

To change keyboards (if you have additional keyboards installed), you can switch between them by pressing the small keyboard symbol in the top left of your screen. You will need to be in keyboard input mode (i.e. typing something) for this to work.

Note: you need to have more than one keyboard installed for this to work.

To change your default font, go to Settings – Display – Font style. You can also change the font size here also.

Another option is to install the popular Go Launcher EX App. Then once this is installed, download their GoLauncher Fonts App.

The stock Android browser does not have a privacy or incognito mode, so the best solution is to download Google’s Chrome browser for Android from the Play store. Then open Chrome and go to Settings – New incognito tab.

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.

Rather than having to locate the hang up icon on the screen after each call, you can quickly end a call by pressing the Power button.

To enable this, go to Settings – Accessibility – Answering/ending calls. Then tick The power button ends calls.