Motorola Moto E5 Plus Tips and Tricks

Android 8 (Oreo)
Phone: Motorola Moto E5 Plus
Factory OS: Android 8 (Oreo)

Have you updated your Operating System?
Then view tips for the most recent OS version(s): Android 9 (Pie)
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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 conserve battery life, you can turn off the WiFi while the phone is asleep.

Pull down the notifications screen. Then long press on the WiFi icon. Then press the Menu or More button and select Keep WiFi on during sleep.

If you get tired of receiving sales calls or want to block a particular number, then you can set up auto call rejects on your device.

Often you will get calls from unknown numbers. Depending on how cautious or curious you are, then normally it’s good practice to ignore such calls. If you don’t want to answer, but you’d still like to know who the call is from, then you can simply Google the number and there are a number of websites which lists phone numbers with details about the company of the caller. From these sites you can easily see if the call you received is from a dodgy company or not.

Once you have established that you want to block or reject the call in future, then open your normal Dialler App. Then go to Logs and find the number you want to block. Long press on the number and select Add to reject list.

From now on you will see that you received a missed call, however the phone will not ring and you won’t be bothered by the caller.

To manage or manually enter numbers on your reject list, then again open your Dialler App. Press your Menu key and select Call settings. Then Call rejection. Then select Auto reject list to see your reject number list. You can also manually add numbers from here

If you want to clear your website browser history, cache or cookies on the Motorola Moto E5 Plus because you don’t want other people to snoop around (or you just want to clean up your list), then that is actually very easy to do. Just follow these steps:

  1. First, open the browser you use and look for the Menu or “More” button/icon.
  2. Then go to History → Clear Browsing Data.
  3. At the top, you will see that you can choose to delete data from a week or several months ago. You may also choose to delete everything by tapping “All Time.”
  4. You will see a list of data that you can tap to clear. You can clear cache, cookies, passwords, browser history and more.
  5. Be aware that if you delete cookies you will have to login to your online accounts again.
  6. Then, select browser history, then tap “Clear Data.”

This method generally works if you use Chrome on your phone. If you have multiple devices that use your Google Chrome account, you might notice that your browser history, cache and cookies are also reflected on other devices. These may get deleted too if you delete them from your phone.

If you don’t want this to happen, you can turn off sync on your device. This means that the browser history, cache, cookies, and other private data will just be removed from your phone alone.

To turn off sync on your Chrome, just follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have already logged in your Google Account on Chrome.
  2. On Chrome, click on your Profile / Account icon (located at the top right portion).
  3. Look for Sync is On → Turn Off
  4. After this, you can delete your browser history, cache, and cookies on your phone without removing it on your other devices.

For Samsung phone users who are using the default Samsung Internet browser, you can clear your browser history, cache and cookies in a similar way to that of Chrome users. Just follow these steps:

  1. Open the Samsung Internet browser.
  2. Tap on the Menu icon.
  3. Go to Settings → Privacy and Security
  4. Scroll down to Personal Data then tap “Delete Browsing Data.”
  5. A list will open up and you can tap to delete other data such as cache, cookies, passwords, location data, among others.
  6. Select “Browsing History” then tap “Delete.”

If you are using a different browser, the steps are almost the same. The key is to look for your browser’s settings and look for the “Privacy” or “Data” section.

How to clear the cache on your Motorola Moto E5 Plus

To clear your phone’s cache, the steps are similar with that of clearing your browser history. All you have to do is click on your browser and open its Menu. For Google Chrome users, just follow these steps:

  1. Open Chrome and go to Menu or tap on the More (three-dotted) icon.
  2. Then go to History → Clear Browsing Data.
  3. At the top, you will see that you can choose to delete data from a week or months ago. You may also choose to delete everything by tapping “All Time.”
  4. You will see a list of data that you can tap to clear. You can clear cache, cookies, passwords, browser history and more.
  5. Just select Cache, then tap “Clear Data.”

For those who are using the default browser on Samsung phones, the steps are also similar with that of clearing your browser history:

  1. Open the Samsung Internet browser.
  2. Tap on the Menu icon.
  3. Go to Settings → Privacy and Security
  4. Scroll down to Personal Data then tap “Delete Browsing Data.”
  5. A list will open up and you can tap to delete other data such as cache, cookies, passwords, location data, among others.
  6. Select “Cache” then tap “Delete.”

If you are using a different type of browser, the steps are still quite similar. What you really have to look for is the Privacy, Data, or Security settings of your browser. Just open your browser and look for its Settings or “More” option.

How to Clear Cookies on the Motorola Moto E5 Plus

Clearing cookies from your phone is done similarly with clearing your browser history and cache. For Google Chrome users, just use these steps:

  1. Open Chrome and go to Menu or tap on the More (three-dotted) icon.
  2. Then go to History → Clear Browsing Data.
  3. At the top, you will see that you can choose to delete data from a week or months ago. You may also choose to delete everything by tapping “All Time.”
  4. You will see a list of data that you can tap to clear. You can clear cache, cookies, passwords, browser history and more.
  5. Just select Cookies, then tap “Clear Data.”

For those who are using the default Samsung browser, you can follow these steps:

  1. Open the Samsung Internet browser.
  2. Tap on the Menu icon.
  3. Go to Settings → Privacy and Security
  4. Scroll down to Personal Data then tap “Delete Browsing Data.”
  5. A list will open up and you can tap to delete other data such as cache, cookies, passwords, location data, among others.
  6. Select “Cookies” then tap “Delete.”

For those who are using other types of mobile browsers, the steps would be similar. Just look for the Menu then look for your browser’s Privacy, Data, or Security options.

By default, your phone will recognise swear words, but insert x’s instead of the word. To change this, go to Settings – System – Language and input – Virtual Keyboard- Google Voice Typing

Then you may need to select your voice input system. Then toggle the Block offensive words option.

Depending on how your phone is set up, sometimes you will see lag when swiping between homescreens. There are a number of things you can try to fix this, as follows:

First, try restarting your phone. This will fix many problems.

If that doesn’t work, then remove any Widgets that pull data to the phone, such as Twitter, Weather widgets etc.

If you have Live wallpapers turned on, then try turning them off by going to Settings – Wallpaper, then changing to a different Wallpaper.

Go to Settings – System – Developer options – Window Animation Scale and Transition Animation Scale. Try changing these to 0.5x (or even 0).
(you will need to unlock Developer options if you can’t find this. Use the search form on this site).

Sometimes the problem can be with the phone or operators skin or launcher, so try going to the Play Store and downloading a third party launcher such as Nova launcher or Go LauncherEx. Note: you will need to re-create your homescreen shortcuts, but they are both great launchers.

Another tip is to always press the Back key instead of the Home key when leaving Apps. The Back key will often close the App properly, while the Home key can leave it running in the background.

Android now has privacy or incognito mode built into the stock browser.

Open your Browser App and press the Tabs icon at the bottom or top depending on your bowser. Then press the Menu or More button at the top. Then select New secret tab or select Open 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. You may need to check this is enabled in the Dolphin settings.

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.

Follow this guide if you want to check the data and WiFi usage on your Motorola Moto E5 Plus.

In this day and age, staying connected is essential. However, whether we like it or not, most mobile data plans put a limit on our data usage each month.

Browsing through Social Media may be fine, but downloading and streaming content can easily eat up on your monthly data allocation.

Reaching your data cap means that you cannot stay online for the rest of the month. Worse, you may be allowed to go online but it also means a huge bill by month’s end.

  1. Go to Settings → Connections → Data Usage
  2. From there, you can set a limit or data cap for a certain time period or billing cycle (a week, month, etc).
  3. You may also press the Menu option and tap “Restrict Background Data Usage.” This option will help you manage your data usage, especially for apps that run in the background (such as Instagram and Messenger). However, this also means that the apps may stop working properly.

To check WiFi usage on the Motorola Moto E5 Plus, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Settings → Connections → Data Usage
  2. From there, tap on the Menu button (3 vertical dots on the upper-right corner of the screen).
  3. Tap on “Show WiFi” then “Wi-Fi data usage.”

Alternatively, some Android handsets may need to follow these steps below:

  1. Go to Settings → WiFi & Internet → Data Usage
  2. Tap WiFi Data Usage to view WiFi stats.
  3. From this menu, you can also view data/WiFi usage per app.

The methods above generally work for most Android phone devices. Some handsets may have slight variations, you should just look for something similar Connections, Networks, or Data Usage menus.

Huawei users however have to follow a different process. Below is a short guide to check data and WiFi usage for Huawei phone users:

  1. Go to Optimizer → Data Usage
  2. From there, you can view your data usage for the month.
  3. You also have a Smart Data Saver feature. You may turn that on if you want to.
  4. You can also tap on the apps which are shown to be big data consumers and adjust their usage/consumption accordingly.
  5. You may also set a limit by tapping “More Data Settings” then “Monthly Data Limit.”

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.