Samsung Note Pro 12.2 (tablet) Tips and Tricks

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.

If you would prefer not to be told every time an Application has been updated, open the Play Store and press the Menu icon in the top right.

Then select Settings and untick the Notifications option.

To change the backlight screen timeout, go to your Home Screen and press the menu key (bottom right). Choose Settings – My Device – Display – Screen timeout. Then choose 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 – More – Developer Options. Then check Stay Awake.

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

The phone has the ability to send quick response text messages if your phone is ringing but you can’t answer it.

To change these, go to your Dialler App and press the menu button. Then select Call Settings – Set up call reject messages. You can then add or edit your reject messages.

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

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.

Here are the top 5 tips to make your phone run faster:

1) Use only essential widgets on your homescreen – each widget consumes memory and processing power which can slow your down your phone.

2) Uninstall apps that you don’t use – after awhile your phone can get cluttered as some Apps are designed to always run in the background. If you rarely use an App, then uninstall it to free up memory and CPU resource.

3) Install Apps to your phone memory – if you have an SDCard, always install Apps to the phone memory, which can be accessed faster. If you have Apps on the SDCard, then move them back to the phone memory with an App called Move2SD available from the Play Market.

4) Use Static rather than Live wallpapers – Live wallpapers consume processing power and memory. Unless you really must have them, uninstall them.

5) Kill tasks occasionally – Some Apps will run in the background indefinitely unless you kill them. Most of them won’t cause a problem, but it pays to check your running tasks from time to time. Hold down your Home key and check the Task Manager.

One last thing: Don’t use Task Killers. Android manages tasks very well and Task Killers just make your phone unstable and can slow it down further.

To change keyboards (if you have additional keyboards installed), you can switch between them by pressing the small keyboard symbol in the top left of your screen. You will need to be in keyboard input mode (i.e. typing something) for this to work.

Note: you need to have more than one keyboard installed for this to work.

First open your Contacts App and select a contact. Then press the phone’s Menu button and select Edit.

Then you should see a silhouette of a person. Press this, or a little + sign next to it and you will be given a number of options to create a photo or image for that contact.

If you prefer a different voice when listening to the Google Maps voice navigation, you can select another language or accent.

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – My Device – Language and input – Text-to-speech options. Then under the Preferred TTS engine, press the gear icon.

From there, select Language and you will be able to choose from different languages or language variations.