Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini Tips and Tricks

Android 4.1.1 (Jellybean)
Phone: Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini
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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At the bottom of each homescreen is your favourites tray, which consists of 5 icons. You can customise it by adding icons to the tray. If it’s full however, you will first need to remove some.

To remove an icon, simply press and hold an icon. Then drag it to your desktop.

Then to add a new one, simply drag an icon from your homescreen to the favourites tray.

To put your phone into night mode, go to your Clock application and press the screen once which will dim the screen.

Then press and hold on the screen and the clock will turn blue. This is Night mode.

If you are running low on phone memory, you can look for your largest applications to uninstall. Go to Settings – Applications – Manage Applications and press Menu. This will then filter your apps by memory use

There are a number of ways, as below. The first two of these may be disabled on some networks/carriers or Android versions however.

1) Go to Settings – Applications – Manage Applications. Then chose All at the top. Then scroll down to Contacts Storage – Clear Data.

2) Go to Contacts. Then press Menu – Delete. Then press Select all (at the top) and then Delete again.

3) Go to Settings – Accounts and sync. Then untick Background data and Auto-sync. Then go to Gmail (or an account that your phone syncs with) and delete all of your Contacts from there. Then re-sync your phone.

4) Download an App called ‘Delete All Contacts’ and use that as a last resort.

These methods above will delete contacts from the phone only, not the SIM card.

if you would prefer to correct your own mistakes, then go to Settings – Language and input. Then select the keyboard you are using and press the Settings icon again.

You should be able to find a predictive text option on this screen.

If you want to receive calls during the night, but don’t want to be woken up by notifications like text messages, then you can turn notifications to silent.

Go to Settings – Sounds. Then change notifications to silent.

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

If you regularly visit a website you can add a shortcut to your homescreen. To do this, go into your browser and find the bookmark of the page you want to create a shortcut for. Long press on the bookmark and select Add Shortcut to Home

If you want to browse websites, but not leave sign of cookies, search history or cached items, then you can use Incognito mode. Open the Browser and press the + (Action Bar) icon in the top-right. Then press New Incognito Tab.

Removing Apps is very simple. From the homescreen press the Apps icon in the top-right of the screen. Then press and hold the App you want to remove and drag it to the Remove / Trash icon in the top-right of the screen.

You can also drag it to the i icon which will show you information about the App. You can press Uninstall from here.