Sony Xperia Go Tips and Tricks

To add an email or phone number to your contacts from a text message, you can long-press on the email / phone number. Then select Add to contacts

Instead of the simple swipe gesture to unlock your phone, you can set a custom one which can be extremely difficult for a thief to guess.

From your homescreen, go to Menu – Settings – Security. Then select Screen lock. Then chose Pattern to set one up.

It is also a good idea to untick Use visible pattern. Then if someone is watching over your shoulder while you entering your pattern, it will be harder for them to remember the pattern.

If you have forgotten your unlock pattern, then after 5 unsuccessful tries a button will 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 will have to either call your carrier or factory reset your phone.

To change the screen brightness, start from the Homescreen and 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 auto-brightness enabled, you can also press, hold and slide the top notification bar left and right. The brightness will increase and decrease accordingly.

When your phone is ringing you have three options: Press the Answer, Hang up or Send a text message.

To send a text message, press and hold inside the round circle you see on the screen. Then drag your finger to the message icon at the top. You will then be presented with a few default responses that you can send via text message.

To stop the Photo App or the Music player from indexing your files, place a blank text file called .nomedia in the folder containing your photos or music

It is best to avoid task killers such as Advanced Task Killer. Android is designed to automatically pre-load certain applications, even if you don’t load them yourself. If it starts to run low on memory, it will smartly unload the oldest running apps automatically.

Manually killing tasks will only mean they get loaded in memory again. Task killers can make the phone slow, laggy, or drain battery life more quickly.

To quickly close Apps, press the multi-task button (on the bottom right). This will display your currently running Apps. From here you can simply swipe the Apps off the screen by dragging your finger left or right. This is a very quick way to free up some memory.

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.

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

This will show your browser History and Bookmarks.

Warning: This will remove ALL data on the phone (but not the MicroSD card).

To perform a hard reset, or factory reset, then there are a number of methods to try:

1) From the home screen, press Menu – Backup and reset – Factory data reset – Reset phone. It may ask for a password. Then select Erase everything

If the phone is totally unresponsive, even after a reboot, then try the following methods.

2) While the phone is turned off, press and hold the Volume Up and Volume Down buttons together. Then, while holding these, press and release the Power button (keep holding the volume buttons). The phone should turn on and a menu will appear. Press the Volume down button to navigate to the Recovery option. Press the Volume Up to select (if that doesn’t work, use the Power button to select). A yellow triangle and an Android logo will appear. Press the Volume Down and Volume Up button together and a recovery menu should appear. Use the Volume buttons to move to the Wipe data/Factory reset option and then press Power to select. Again, use the Volume Down key to choose Yes and press the Power button again to select.

3) While the phone is turned off, press and hold the Volume Down button. Then, while holding, press and release the Power button. A menu should appear. Use the Volume down key to go to Clear Storage. Use the Power button to select the option. Then when asked to confirm, press Volume Up for Yes.

4) While the phone is off, press and hold down Volume Up + Home + Power buttons at the same time. Then release the buttons when you see the Logo. Use the Volume Down button to go down and the Home or Power key to select. Choose the Wipe data/Factory reset option. Then Select Yes to delete all user data. Then choose to reboot the phone.

5) A final method is to enter the code into your phone’s dialer: *2767*3855# This method will not give you an option to reverse the process, so be careful! This method will only work if you can boot into your phone.