Samsung Tab Pro 8.4 (tablet) Tips and Tricks

The Speech to Text feature is a great tool for dictating speech on to your phone, but has normally only been possible when your phone is connected to the internet.

Now this is possible in Offline mode too. Simply go to Settings – My device – Language & input – Voice Search. Then choose Download offline speech recognition.

You can now use this feature without needing an internet connection.

If you tend to run out of battery power quickly, then you can turn on Power saving mode.

Pull down the notification screen by swiping your finger from the top of the phone. Then select Power Saving. You may need to scroll along the available icons.

To change the settings, then pull down the notification screen again, press the Gear icon at the top. Then My device – Power saving mode to change the options.

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.

If you are running low on phone memory, you can look for your largest applications to uninstall.

Go to Settings – More – Application manager. Then swipe from right to left and select Running.

From here you can see which applications are taking up the most memory and close them.

While typing emails or notes, you can simply tap the space key twice and the phone will insert a full stop / period

Android now comes with a sound Equaliser so you can adjust your bass and treble.

Simply open a music file using the Music Player App. Then go to Settings – SoundAlive and select Custom.

Then simply drag the sliders up and down to adjust the bass and treble.

While viewing your list of Contacts you can swipe from Right to Left to send a text message to the selected contact.

This might not work on all models.

Android cleverly uses Picasa to sync photos between your account and your phone. Sometimes however, this means that you will get duplicates appearing in your Gallery when they’re not actually on your phone.

To stop this from happening, and so you only see photos on the Phone or SD card, then follow these steps:

Drag down your notification menu from the top and click on the Gear icon to bring up your Settings. Then select Accounts and Google. Then select your Gmail account.

You should see a list of options that are ticked. Scroll down to the one that refers to Picasa and untick that.

Now that’s done we want to remove the thumbnails from your Gallery, so we need to refresh the Gallery. To do that, swipe down and go to Settings again. Then select More – Application Manager. Swipe across to show ALL Apps. Then find the Gallery App and press Clear Data.

This will erase the thumbnails in your Gallery, so don’t panic that your photos have disappeared. Just wait for the Gallery to re-build its index which could take awhile.

But the good news is that your Picasa Albums shouldn’t be there anymore.

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

Sometimes while typing long text or SMS messages you will get a message saying Converting to multimedia message. This won’t normally cause a problem, however some users do not want to send a MMS message.

There are a number of different settings to deal with this, however there isn’t really a way to prevent the phone from converting to an MMS. The reason for this is that any message over 480 characters cannot be sent as an SMS message. They must be sent as an MMS. The is a restriction of SMS messages in general, similar to the original limit of 160 characters.

What you can do however is ensure you get alerted when you have reached 480 characters. Then you can decide to send the message as an SMS and continue your conversation on a second message.

To check this setting is on, open your Message App and press your phone’s Menu button. Then select Settings and scroll to Multimedia message (MMS) settings area. Ensure you tick MMS alert. You will now be told when your message is being converted to MMS.

You can also change the settings for Creation mode which lets you restrict messages that go over a certain size. If you select Warning or Guided, you should get further warnings when your message is really large and may not be handled by the network.