Samsung Galaxy J5 Tips and Tricks

Android has a feature allowing you to update Applications automatically. This is turned off by default, but you can turn it on.

Open the Play Store App and press the Hamburger / Menu icon in the top left of the App, on the search bar.

Then select Settings and Auto-update apps.

From here you can chose to do this over WiFi only or using your Data connection.

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.

If you regularly visit a website you can add a shortcut to your home screen which can be quite useful, rather than entering the web address each time you want to visit the site.

You can either do this to an existing Bookmark, or simply a page you’re visiting:

1) Open your Browser App. Enter the website you want to bookmark. You may need to wait for the whole page to load first. Then press the phone’s Menu button or More at the top and select Add shortcut to home screen.

2) Open your Browser App. Find an existing Bookmark by pressing the Bookmarks icon at the bottom of the App. Select the Bookmark and repeat the above steps.

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

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 on the search bar at the top, press the Hamburger / Menu icon and select Offline areas.

Next, select Custom area. Then zoom and pan around the required map area. The size of the offline map will be shown beneath the map area. When done, press the Download button.

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 should 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 don’t want to hear the shutter sound when you take photos, then there are a few things you can try.

Firstly, some countries have laws to force the phone to play these sounds. Assuming you’re not in one of these countries, then the first thing you can try is to go to the Camera App – Settings – Shutter Sound – Off.

If that doesn’t work, then you can try turning the volume of the phone down or put it in silent mode when taking photos.

The last option is to Root your phone. If you don’t know what that means, then it’s best not to attempt it unless you have thoroughly read about the process. Once Rooted, go to this folder on your phone: /system/media/audio/ui and rename the camerashutter and/or cameraclick OGG files to something else.

Alternatively, on a rooted phone you can use a Root Browser, to edit /system/csc/feature.xml and set the option to TRUE. Then you should be able to go to Camera App – Settings – Shutter Sound – Off.

There are a number of ways to get your IMEI number.

First, you can go to Settings – System – About device – Status. Scroll down and you should see IMEI listed on the screen.

Secondly, often the box that your device came in will have the IMEI printed on the label of the box or on the invoice.

Thirdly, if your device has a removable battery then open the cover and remove the battery. Your IMEI should be on a serial number plate and your IMEI number should be shown there.

Lastly, from the Dialler, enter *#06# and it should be displayed on the screen. This won’t work on all phones and all networks however.

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

The best way to do this is to connect your device to a PC and then navigate to the relevant folder via your PC.

No one likes nuisance phone calls, so here’s how to deal with these on your phone.

The first option is to block all anonymous calls, although this may block some calls from people or companies that you do want to allow, so use this carefully.

To enable this, go to your Dial App press More in the top right.

Then choose Settings. Under Call settings, choose Call blocking and then Block list. Then select Block anonymous calls.

Secondly, if you’d like to block calls on a case-by-case basis, then follow these instructions:

First, wait until you’ve been called by a nusiance number. You can either answer and verify who they are, or when the phone is ringing, do a quick Google search for the number (ideally on a PC, otherwise you may need to switch between apps on your phone).

Often the number will come up on Page 1 of Google and be reported as a nusiance call number. You can often tell pretty quickly because the number will have many negative review.

Then once the phone has stopped ringing, go to your Dial App and then select Log to find the number on your recent call list.

Find the number that called you and press on it. Then in the top right, select More and select Block/unblock number.

To manage this list, then go back to the first screen of your Dial App and press More in the top right.

Then choose Settings. Under Call settings, choose Call blocking and then Block list. From here you can see which ones to block or unblock.

From now on you will see that you received a missed call, however the phone will not ring and you won’t be bothered by the caller.

By default, Android will should send you a message when a new version of the firmware is available, however this option may be turned off in the settings.

To manually check and update the firmware at any point, then follow these steps:

Pull down your notifications screen and go to Settings.

Scroll down to About device.

Then click on Download updates manually.

From this screen you can also switch between Download updates automatically or manually.

You can also schedule updates to so that they occur at a certain time of the day (say, overnight). This saves you having to confirm every update yourself.