Android 4.1.1 (Jellybean) Tips and Tricks

While the AMOLED screen is lovely and bright, sometimes you want to tone these down a bit.

To do this, go to Settings – Display Settings. Then select the colour vividness. Standard or Movie are good options.

To create a shortcut to websites on your homescreen, you need to open your browser and open your list of bookmarks.

Then long press on a bookmark and select Add shortcut to Home.

From the Contact list or the Messaging list, swipe from Left to Right to call a Contact.

A great feature is the ability to write text on the back of photos like you would with regular photos.

Simply, go to a photo and click the Menu button. Select Draw on Image. The image will then flip around showing you a blank surface. With your S Pen, draw or write whatever you want and press Done when finished.

Images with notes on them will have a Note icon on the top right corner.

To stop the Photo app or the Music player from indexing your files, place a blank text file called .nomedia in the folder

Most Android phones only come with a fixed amount of homescreens. There is a way around this however.

Go to Android Market and search for ‘launcher’. These are third-party user interfaces that allow you to customize your phone in many ways. Most of them allow multiple homescreens.

A very popular launcher which supports multiple homescreens is GoLauncher EX.

It is important to regularly check for firmware updates to your operating system software. This will mean your phone is protected against bugs and security flaws, and may mean you will see extra features.

To manually check for the latest firmware update for your phone, go to Menu – Settings – About phone – Software update.

From here you can press Update to check for updates. Or you can turn on Auto update whereby the phone will tell you when a firmware update is available to download.

To disable the screen lock, go into Settings – Location and security.

Then under Screen unlock settings press Change screen lock. Then chose None.

When browsing the notifications bar will be hidden. Press Menu and the Browser menu and Notifications menu will appear

While viewing your list of Contacts you can swipe from Right to Left to send a text message to the selected contact.