Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) Tips and Tricks

To delete or remove homescreen widgets, simply press and hold. Then drag the widget to the top-right corner of the screen and into the Trash icon.

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

Go to Menu – Settings – Display – Screen Time Out.

Then chose the screen time out duration.

From your Homescreen press Menu – Settings – About Tablet.

This should list your Android version, Build number and Model Number

Your tablet 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 Program monitor widget and drag it on to your homescreen. Once that is done, press the widget and it will show you all currently running Apps. Press End all to close all running Apps.

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.

By default, the tablet will recognise swear words, but insert x’s instead of the word. To change this, go to Settings – Voice input & output – Voice recognition settings. Then untick Block offensive words.

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

If you regularly visit a website you can add a shortcut to your homescreen. To do this, go into your browser and find the bookmark of the page you want to create a shortcut for. Long press on the bookmark and select Add Shortcut to Home

There are a number of ways, as below. The first two of these may be disabled on some networks/carriers or Android versions however.

1) Go to Settings – Applications – Manage Applications. Then chose All at the top. Then scroll down to Contacts Storage – Clear Data.

2) Go to Contacts. Then press Menu – Delete. Then press Select all (at the top) and then Delete again.

3) Go to Settings – Accounts and sync. Then untick Background data and Auto-sync. Then go to Gmail (or an account that your tablet syncs with) and delete all of your Contacts from there. Then re-sync your tablet.

4) Download an App called ‘Delete All Contacts’ and use that as a last resort.

These methods above will delete contacts from the tablet only, not the SIM card.