Motorola Moto Z2 Force Tips and Tricks

Android 7 (Nougat)
Phone: Motorola Moto Z2 Force
Factory OS: Android 7 (Nougat)

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Soft resetting is just the process of rebooting your phone. In contrast, a hard rest is when you remove everything from the phone to restore it to the factory state.

Normally you can simply restart the phone in the normal way via the power button, but if it has crashed, that may not be possible.

To soft reset your phone press and hold the Power/Lock button for around 8 to 10 seconds. The phone will restart automatically.

If that doesn’t work, then remove the battery (if it has one). Wait 30 seconds and put the battery back in. Then press the Power/Lock button to turn the phone on.

If you want to move a widget from one home screen to another, simply press and hold on the widget.

Then drag it to the edge of the screen.

The next home screen will appear.

Then, just drag the item to where you would like.

There is no need to be stuck with the standard Android keyboard, which isn’t always great for typing quickly.

Go to the Play Store and search for ‘Keyboard’ to see some great alternatives, many of which are more accurate and make typing much easier.

One of the very best is SwiftKey. They provide a free trial, but once the trial is over it is well worth the small amount of money they charge. It can increase your typing rates massively.

Another good one is GoKeyboard.

If you see a warning saying the keyboard will collect all information (including credit cards) just ignore this. This is just a security feature that Android shows for every third-party keyboard that you install.

While in your email App, a handy trick is to pinch and zoom out to see a ‘day view’ of your emails. This is handy if you have a lot of emails and want to quickly sort them by recency.

If you don’t want to hear the shutter sound when you take photos, then there are a few things you can try.

Firstly, some countries have laws to force the phone to play these sounds. Assuming you’re not in one of these countries, then the first thing you can try is to go to the Camera App – Settings – Shutter Sound – Off.

If that doesn’t work, then you can try turning the volume of the phone down or put it in silent mode when taking photos.

The last option is to Root your phone. If you don’t know what that means, then it’s best not to attempt it unless you have thoroughly read about the process. Once Rooted, go to this folder on your phone: /system/media/audio/ui and rename the camerashutter and/or cameraclick OGG files to something else.

Alternatively, on a rooted phone you can use a Root Browser, to edit /system/csc/feature.xml and set the option to TRUE. Then you should be able to go to Camera App – Settings – Shutter Sound – Off.

If you want to resize your home screen 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.

A handy feature of Android is to quickly clear your notifications.

Simply pull down your notifications bar by swiping your finger from the top of your phone downwards.

Then when you see each individual notification, swipe your finger left or right to clear each one. You can do this with your Apps too – press and hold the multitasking button. Then swipe left or right to close Apps.

Type a word that is not in the dictionary. The word will show up in the suggestion box to the left. Long press on the word and it will save to the dictionary.

Having notifications come through on the lock screen can be handy because you don’t have to unlock your phone to see what the notification is about.

The problem with this is that someone may see the content of a notification (a text message for example) which you would like to keep private.

To change this setting to only display that the notification has arrived (rather than the actual content), then go to Settings – Lock screen and security.

Then select Notifications

From here you can enable or disable which apps you can show notifications from or at the top, select to Show or Hide notifications.

If you see the following error:
Unfortunately, the process android.process.acore has stopped

Then follow these steps:
1.First, go to your phone’s main Settings and select Apps.

2. Then, tap on the menu button usually at the top right left.

3. Select Reset App Preferences.

Alternatively, you can also disable all apps and enable them again one by one until you find the app that has been causing the error.

If none of the above works, you can do a Factory Reset or reboot, instead. Be warned you may lose all of your data when performing a Factory reset!