Sony Xperia J Tips and Tricks

Most Android phones only come with a fixed amount of homescreens. There is a way to add more however.

Go to Android Play Market and search for ‘launcher’. These are third-party user interfaces that allow you to customize your phone in many ways. Most of them allow multiple homescreens.

A very popular launcher which supports multiple homescreens is GoLauncher EX.

There is an Easter egg hidden in the Android operating system. To see it, go to your Homescreen, then press Menu – Settings – About phone.

Then tap on the Android version option 5 times and you will get a surprise.

Sometimes it doesn’t work, so try a couple of times. By the way don’t expect to see an actual Easter Egg. That is just the name given to things hidden inside software or operating systems.

To change the backlight screen timeout, go to Settings – Display – Sleep. 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 – Developer Options. Then check Stay Awake.

After entering text a quick way to hide the keyboard is to press the Back key at the bottom of your screen. This saves having to hunt for the hide keyboard icon.

To save an image in an email or in the browser, long press on the image and a menu will appear allowing you to save it.

For images inside text messages, you might have to press and hold on the message itself, rather than the image.

When browsing on your phone you may notice images are quite blurry. This is because your telecom provider is compressing the images before they are downloaded on to your phone.

There is no way to prevent this, but if you have a WiFi connection nearby, then you can turn that on. This will mean that all browser downloads come through the WiFi connection, rather than the carrier, and your images will appear normally.

If you have word prediction enabled while you are typing, you can long press the middle word that is suggested. This will bring up a menu allowing you to select various other suggested words.

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.

From the Contact list or the Messaging list, swipe from Left to Right to call a Contact.

This might not work on all models.

To lock your screen while you are watching videos, simply press the power button.

This will disable the touchscreen buttons while the video is playing, but it won’t turn the screen off like the lock key normally does.

Note, this will only work on video files that you are playing that are stored on your phone. It won’t work for videos played within websites, such as Youtube videos.