Motorola Droid Mini Tips and Tricks

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – Display – Brightness. Then choose the desired brightness setting. You can also select Automatic brightness to let the phone decide for you.

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.

On more recent versions of Android, the developer options have been hidden. To enable these, go to Settings – About Phone. Then go to the bottom and you should see Build Number. This needs to be pressed a total of seven times. You should get a message at the fourth press. On the seventh, you’ll get another message saying that Developer Options are unlocked.

To find them, go back to Settings and they should be on the list of options.

To find out information about Signal Strength, Network Information, Remaining Battery Time and Battery Usage (by Application), go to your Homescreen – Menu – Settings – About Device – Status.

If you use the Face Unlock feature but you’re in a dark room or wearing a hat and scarf, you can bypass the unlock just once.

Simply press the Lock icon on your screen and you can then enter your PIN instead.

To bookmark a contact on your homescreen, long press on the home screen background and select Shortcuts. Then select Direct dial.

If you call someone regularly this can be useful as you will have a shortcut to them handily placed on your homescreen.

Jelly Bean has improved the facial unlock feature by creating a setting whereby you must blink when unlocking your phone. This prevents fraudsters using a photo of yourself and holding it up to the phone.

To activate this feature go to Settings – Lock screen – Screen lock – Face unlock. Then setup your facial unlocking.

Then once that is done, go to Face unlock again and tick Presence check.

To enable / disable your notification light, go to Settings – LED indicator.

From here you can choose various options.

This may not be available on all models. An alternative however is to download NoLED from the Play Store, which has many options for incoming notifications.

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.

In the Calendar App there is no Year view along the top of the App. You can however use pinch to zoom gestures to zoom in and out of Month and Year view however.

This is useful if you want to quickly jump backwards or forwards through a few months at a time.