Samsung Galaxy Xcover 2 Tips and Tricks

Depending on how your phone is set up, sometimes you will see lag when swiping between homescreens. There are a number of things you can try to fix this, as follows:

First, try restarting your phone. This will fix many problems.

If that doesn’t work, then remove any Widgets that pull data to the phone, such as Twitter, Weather widgets etc

If you have Live wallpapers turned on, then try turning them off by going to Settings – Wallpapers, then changing to a different Wallpaper.

Go to Settings – Developer Options – Window Animation Scale and Transition Animation Scale. Try changing these to 0.5x (or even 0).

Sometimes the problem can be with the phone or operators skin or launcher, so try going to the Play Store and downloading a third party launcher such as Nova launcher or Go LauncherEx. Note: you will need to re-create your homescreen shortcuts, but they are both great launchers.

Another tip is to always press the Back key instead of the Home key when leaving Apps. The Back key will often close the App properly, while the Home key will leave it running in the background.

While in your Browser App, press and hold the Back button.

This will show your browser History and Bookmarks.

If you’re worried about your sensitive data falling into the wrong hands then Jelly Bean has a great new encryption feature that scrambles every pieces of content on your device.

Go to Settings – Security settings – Encryption to enable it.

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – Display – Brightness. Then choose the desired brightness setting. You can also select Automatic brightness to let the phone decide for you.

If you have forgotten your custom unlock pattern, then don’t panic.

After 5 unsuccessful tries a button should appear saying ‘Forgot pattern’. Press this and you will be asked to enter your Gmail username/password.

The phone will then ask for a new unlock pattern. If you don’t have a Gmail account, then you might have to either call your carrier or factory reset your phone.

To quickly hide the on-screen keyboard, press the Back button

Jelly Bean has improved the facial unlcock 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 – Security – Screen Security and tick Liveness check

If you want to remove an entire text message conversation (or thread), go into Messages and look for the thread. Then long press on it and select the Trash icon.

You can also select multiple threads. Before you press the Trash, you can highlight the threads you want deleted. Then press Trash.

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

To find out information about Signal Strength, Network Information, Remaining Battery Time and Battery Usage (by Application), go to your Homescreen – Menu – Settings – About Phone.