Motorola Moto E Tips and Tricks

Android 4.4 (Kit Kat)
Phone: Motorola Moto E
Factory OS: Android 4.4 (Kit Kat)

Have you updated your Operating System?
Then view tips for the most recent OS version(s): Android 9 (Pie) & Android 8 (Oreo)
Or view tips for all Android versions

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 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

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.

You can speed up the page load speed on your browser by disabling JavaScript.

To do this, open your Browser, then Menu – Settings – Content Settings. Scroll down and untick Enable JavaScript

Please note that this may affect the functionality of some sites.

If you find the vibration of your phone a little too much, this can easily be reduced.

From the homescreen press Menu – Settings – My Device – Language and input. Then under Keyboards and input methods, press the little Gear icon.

You can also turn off Haptic feedback if you really don’t want any feedback.

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 – My Device – 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.

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.

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

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.

To speed up your phone, you can turn off screen animations. Go to Settings – Developer options.

Then scroll down to Window animation scale and select that. From here you can choose to turn Animations Off. This will make screen transitions faster.

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