Samsung Galaxy J1 Mini Tips and Tricks

To adjust your screen brightness, there are two options:

1) Simply drag your finger from the top of the phone down to pull down your quick settings screen. Then at the top there will be a brightness bar. Drag this left or right or press Auto.

2) Drag your notifications screen down and select Settings. Then under Device, select Display – Brightness. Then choose the desired brightness setting.

You can also select Automatic brightness to let the phone decide for you.

There are a couple of ways to add new home screens to your device.

The simplest is to go to one of your existing Homescreens and simply pinch the screen. This will show all of your Homescreens in thumbnail view. Then just press the Plus symbol to add another. You can also press and hold, then drag a Homescreen to a different position. Or press the little Home icon to make one of them your default Homescreen.

Another option is to download a Launcher App. 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.

Simply go the Play Store and search for GoLauncher EX or another launcher.

To change the backlight screen timeout, drag down your notifications screen and press Settings. Then under System select Display. Then under Screen timeout you can set 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 – System – Developer Options. Then check Stay Awake.

Note: Developer Options is not always enabled by default. To enable, go to Settings – System – About Device. Then tap on Build number 7 times to enable this secret option.

Android now comes with some great battery management built into the OS.

Pull down your notifications screen and select Settings. Then go to Battery and you will see some useful stats such as the time remaining. There are also two other options: Power saving mode and Ultra power saving mode. Select one of these to really make your phone last the distance.

Be warned that these can limit your device quite considerably.

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 More – Settings and More Settings – Multimedia messages. Then select 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.

An almost essential setting is the ability to lock your screen by pressing the power key once. It will save plenty of time in the long run.

If this isn’t enabled, then go to Settings – Personal – Accessibility – Answering and ending calls. Then select Pressing the power key.

When browsing on your phone you may notice images are quite blurry. This is because your telecom provider is compressing the images before they are downloaded on to your phone.

There is no way to prevent this, but if you have a WiFi connection nearby, then you can turn that on. This will mean that all browser downloads come through the WiFi connection, rather than the carrier, and your images will appear normally.

Android now has a way to display your name, phone or email on your lock screen. Perfect if you have lost or misplaced your device.

To enable this go to Settings – Personal – Lock screen and security – Show information – Owner information.

Here you can enter any information you want, such as your name or email address.

A useful feature of Android Lollipop is what’s called Screen Pinning. This allows you to lock your phone to one App. Perfect if you have a young child that you don’t want messing with your phone. Or if you want to lend your phone to someone to make a call, but make the call only.

To enable this go to Settings – Security – Screen pinning. Then go to the App you want to Pin and press the Multitask key. Then look at the most recent app and press the blue thumb tack icon in the bottom right corner.

To un-pin an App just press the Multitask key and the back key together.

To see which firmware version of Android you are using, use the pull-down menu by dragging your finger from the top of the phone. Select Settings and under System, choose About Device.

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