Samsung Galaxy S5 Active Tips and Tricks

While in your email App, a handy trick is to pinch and zoom out to see a ‘day view’ of your emails. This is handy if you have a lot of emails and want to quickly sort them by recency.

If you want to install Apps outside of the Play Store (called sideloading), then go to Settings – More – Security and select Unknown sources.

This setting will allow you to download Apps onto your device that would normally be blocked in the Play store.

Note: use at your own risk.

To copy files between your phone and PC, go to the Android Play Market and download an app called Air Droid.

This is an extremely useful App that connects your phone to your PC wirelessly, allowing you to move files and many, many other things.

If you want to remove the Google Search bar, then go to Settings – More – Application manager.

Then swipe from right to left so you are on the All screen. Scroll to Google search and press Disable.

It can be very useful to see your battery life in percentage terms instead of just the icon.

To enable this, go to Settings – My device – Display and tick Display battery percentage.

Jelly Bean has improved the facial unlock feature by creating a setting whereby you must blink when unlocking your phone. This prevents fraudsters using a photo of yourself and holding it up to the phone.

To activate this feature go to Settings – Lock screen – Screen lock – Face unlock. Then setup your facial unlocking.

Then once that is done, go to Face unlock again and tick Presence check.

This tip is relatively obvious, but some users overlook it.

Once you go into your Apps screen you should see a row of 5 dots. This indicates which of the 5 App screens you are on. Rather than flick between each screen, you can simply press one of the dots and you will jump to that homescreen.

Or alternatively, slide your finger across the dots to move between screens.

If you would like to unmount your SD card for whatever reason, then drag down your notificatons menu from the top of the screen and press the Settings icon.

Then go to the More tab – Storage – SD card – Unmount SD card

A handy feature of Android is to quickly clear your notifications.

Simply pull down your notifications bar by swiping your finger from the top of your phone downwards.

Then when you see each individual notification, swipe your finger left or right to clear each one. You can do this with your Apps too – press and hold the home button. Then swipe left or right to close Apps.

Android manages Apps very well and some Apps do not have the option to close them specifically. Normally the App will stay running in the background and only close when many other Apps have been opened.

If you do want to close or terminate an App, then press and hold the Home key on your phone. Then you can swipe the Apps off the screen to close them.