Android 7 (Nougat) Tips and Tricks

Here’s how to pair your device with another Bluetooth device.

First you will need to turn Bluetooth on. To do this, drag your finger from the top of the screen down, to show your notifications menu. Then press Bluetooth so the icon is green.

Then press the Scan button and your device will start to scan for pairable devices.

Choose the desired device and press Accept. You may be asked to enter a PIN or Password.

When using your Calendar App, you will normally be in Month view. To quickly switch to Year view, you can pinch the screen to zoom out.

This is useful if you want to quickly jump backwards or forwards through a few months at a time.

To go from Year to Month, you can do a reverse pinch.

Sometimes while typing long text or SMS messages you will get a message saying Converting to multimedia message. This won’t normally cause a problem, however some users do not want to send a MMS message.

There are a number of different settings to deal with this, however there isn’t really a way to prevent the phone from converting to an MMS. The reason for this is that any message over 480 characters cannot be sent as an SMS message. They must be sent as an MMS. The is a restriction of SMS messages in general, similar to the original limit of 160 characters.

What you can do however is ensure you get alerted when you have reached 480 characters. Then you can decide to send the message as an SMS and continue your conversation on a second message.

To check this setting is on, open your Message App and press Settings in the top right, then settings again, then More settings.

Then select Multimedia messages – Set restrictions and choose Warning. You will now be told when your message is being converted to MMS.

You can also change the settings for Creation mode which lets you restrict messages that go over a certain size. If you select Warning or Restricted, you should get further warnings when your message is really large and may not be handled by the network.

Sometimes you may need your screen to stay on when plugged in via USB.

To do this, Drag down your notifications screen and press Settings. Then select Developer Options. Then check Stay Awake.

If you can’t see Developer options then you need to enable it. To do that, follow these instructions:

Go to Settings – System – About device – Software info and press on Build number 7 times. Developer options will now appear in the System section of your settings.

If you have forgotten your custom unlock pattern or PIN, then don’t panic.

After 5 unsuccessful tries a button should appear saying Forgot pattern or PIN. Press this and you will be asked to enter your Gmail username/password.

The phone will then ask for a new unlock pattern or PIN.

If it isn’t accepting your Google ID or password, then try the following options:

1) First, go to the following URL: https://myaccount.google.com/u/1/device-activity

Then when you see your device, select Revoke Access.

Then at the bottom of the page, you should see Generate New Application-Specific Password.

Enter a name and click on Generate Password.

A 16-digit pass code should be generated.

Enter this new password in your Android device, along with the correct Google ID.

2) If that doesn’t work, then go to: https://accounts.google.com/signin/recovery

Choose one of the recovery options. Then enter the email you used when you set up your device.

Follow the options depending on your situation and you should be guided through an option to get back into your phone.

If none of the above works, then you may have to hard reset / factory reset your device.

Before you do this, it’s recommended that you plug it in to a computer and copy across any files (particularly your photos in the DCIM folder). However it may not be possible to do this on some devices as it will be locked.

When entering text into Apps such as your Messaging App, Facebook App and so on, you can tap on the words to start selecting text.

Normally, you would then drag the left and right sliders to select the word, or words you want to highlight.

If you double tap on a word however, it will quickly select that word.

Very handy for quickly copying and one words, name or place.

To store a phone number that you have received in an email, hold down on the number and you will be given the option to call, send an SMS or add the number to your contacts

Android manages your applications so if the phone is running low on memory, it will close the oldest running App.

If you do need to manually close an application go to Settings – Apps.

Then select the application you want to stop and select Force Stop.

To enable or disable the vibrate function when you receive text messages, go to the Messaging App and press the Settings icon in the top right.

Then select Notifications – Vibrate when sound plays.

To enable or disable vibration for incoming phone calls, then go to your main Settings, then Sounds and vibrations, then Vibrate when ringing.

Android has a useful feature called Talkback or Voice Assistant which is designed for blind and vision impaired users.

The feature provides voice feedback as you navigate your phone and will also tell you what you can interact with as you tap areas of the interface.

To enable this, go Settings – Accessibility – Vision – Voice Assistant. Change the setting to On.

Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.