Sony Xperia 1 Tips and Tricks

If you call someone regularly this can be useful as you will have a shortcut to them handily placed on your homescreen.

To bookmark a Contact on your Home Screen, then first go into your Contacts App.

Find the Contact you want to add to the Home Screen and press on them.

Then press More or the Menu key and select Add shortcut to home.

Then go to your Home Screens, find the Contact you’ve just added. Press, hold and drag to another position.

If you want to find your phone’s WiFi MAC address (for improved WiFi security), then go to Settings – System – About device .

Then scroll down until you see WiFi MAC Address. The address should be a series of Hex numbers and letters.

The Play store contains thousands of great Apps, but there are time that you want to restrict access to these Apps for whatever reasons. This can easily be done.

First, open the Play Store App and swipe from left to right to see the settings. Then press Settings and scroll for Parental controls.

From here you can chose settings for Low/Medium/High maturity levels. Great for preventing access for young people.

If you don’t want to have to unlock your screen every time you take your device out of standby then go to Settings – Security & location.

Then select Screen lock type and select None.

When using your Calendar App, you will normally be in Month view. To quickly switch to Year view, you can pinch the screen to zoom out.

This is useful if you want to quickly jump backwards or forwards through a few months at a time.

To go from Year to Month, you can do a reverse pinch.

Android 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 – Personal – Lock screen and security – Screen lock type – Face unlock. Then setup your facial unlocking.

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

This may not be available on all devices.

The following is a list of commands that can be used for the Google Now service. This can be accessed by using the Google Search widget on your homescreen. Simply press the little microphone icon and say the commands below:

General
Search for
Who invented
Show me the stocks for
Author of
How old is
How tall is

Time & Date
What time is it in
When is the ?in
When is the sunset in
What is the time zone of
Time at home

Weather
Show me the weather
Is it going to rain tomorrow?
Do I need an umbrella?
Do I need a jacket
What is the weather in
How is the weather on ?going to be?

Maps / Location
Map of
Show me the nearby ?on map
Where is ?situated?
in
Navigate to ?in car
I am hungry (shows all nearby food points on map)
How far is ?from

Calculations / Conversions
How much is ?times
What is ?percent of
Square root of
?… ?equals
What is the numerical value of Pi
Convert ?into
Temperature of the sun

Sports
points table
Who won the last match between ?and
scorecard
Schedule of ?games

Websites
Go to
Open
Show me
Browse to

Entertainment
Listen to
Play
YouTube
When was the first episode of
movies
Who acted in
Who is the producer of
When was ?released
Runtime of

Notes / Reminders
Remind me to ?at
Wake me up in
at
Self note to
Set alarm for

Contacts / Communication
Call
Send ?to ?via text
(shows the contact card)
Call ?in
Send a text to ?
Email to , B C C , Subject , message

Flights
Flight Status of
Has ?landed/departed
When will ?land

Other
Do a barrel roll

To find out information about Signal Strength, Network Information, Remaining Battery Time and Battery Usage (by Application), drag down your notifications screen and select Settings.

Then under System, select About device and choose Status.?

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.

You can backup your phone contacts either through your Google account or by exporting it as a vCard file. Here’s how:

GOOGLE ACCOUNT

Method 1:
1) Go to your Android phone settings.
2) Click account, and make sure your Google account is already logged in your device.
3) Doing this automatically syncs all your data to Google, including contact numbers.

Method 2:
1) Open the Android Contacts app.
2) Go to Settings.
3) Choose Move device contacts to Google.

To efficiently backup all your contacts, you have to make sure that these are actually saved on your device, and not just on your SIM card.

To check if your contacts are already successfully synced or backed up on your Google account, just go to contacts.google.com, and log-in to your Google account to see if your contacts are already there.

EXPORT CONTACTS AS A VCARD / VCF FILE

1) Go to your phone’s Contacts.
2) Go to Settings and export contacts as a vCard file.
3) Alternaively, in Contacts, go to Settings and select Share. Then select which contacts you want to export. Then choose a method to export to.
4) This will collate all your contacts in one .vcf file which can be saved on your SD card or uploaded into a file storage service like Dropbox.