Samsung Galaxy Fame Tips and Tricks

Android 4.1.1 (Jellybean)
Phone: Samsung Galaxy Fame
Factory OS: Android 4.1.1 (Jellybean)

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Then view tips for the most recent OS version(s): Android 9 (Pie) & Android 8 (Oreo)
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To change the backlight screen timeout, go to Settings – Display – Sleep. Then choose the screen time out duration.

You can also tell the phone screen to always stay lit when it is plugged in via USB. Go to Settings – Developer Options. Then check Stay Awake.

You can speed up the page load speed on your browser by disabling JavaScript.

To do this, open your Browser, then Menu – More – Settings. Scroll down and untick JavaScript

Please note that this may affect the functionality of some sites.

In your browser go to Menu – More – Settings. Then select Clear Cache / Clear all cookie data / Clear history / Clear form data

When your phone is ringing you have three options: Press the Answer, Hang up or Send a text message.

To send a text message, press and hold inside the round circle you see on the screen. Then drag your finger to the message icon at the top. You will then be presented with a few default responses that you can send via text message.

Downloading loads of Apps is great, but sometimes they can cause havoc with your phone and a boot into safe mode is necessary.

To do this, long press your Power button. Then long press on the Power off option. You will then be asked to reboot into safe mode.

When your phone restarts it will not load any Apps allowing you to disable any troublesome ones.

If you are abroad and don’t want to pay high data roaming charges, then you can save Google Maps for offline viewing later. Here are two ways to do this:

The first method will depend whether your phone supports it. First, open Google Maps and navigate to a section of the map that you want available offline. Then press on the search bar and scroll right to the bottom and select Make this map area available offline. You may need to repeat this with multiple areas.

Alternatively, open Google Maps and zoom down to street level. Then scroll around area you’ll be travelling too. If you’re visiting a city for example, do this at street level and cover as much area as you think you’ve be visiting. If you’re travelling outside a city, then street level view might be too detailed, so zoom out and just cover the main roads, towns etc.

This will load all the segments into your phone’s cache. Then when have arrived at your destination and you have data turned off, you will see the areas you’ve stored on the phone’s memory.

Note: this won’t give you your GPS location because that normally needs a data connection to pinpoint your position.

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 orange outline will appear around the widget. Simply drag the sides to resize the widget.

If the orange outline doesn’t appear, then the widget is a fixed sized widget.

Most Android phones only come with a fixed amount of homescreens. There is a way to add more however.

Go to Android Play 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.

Most Android devices come with an alternative way of entering text called Swype. Many prefer this method and believe it is quicker.
When any text entry box appears, press and hold the box. Then select Input method: SWYPE. Once enabled, you simply drag your finger around the keyboard moving over the letters in the correct order to spell a word.

To quickly close Apps, press the multi-task button (on the bottom right). This will display your currently running Apps. From here you can simply swipe the Apps off the screen by dragging your finger left or right. This is a very quick way to free up some memory.