Sony Xperia L Tips and Tricks

While in the Camera App you can view all current settings by pressing and holding the little Gear icon in the top right corner of the app.

While your notification bar can be handy to inform you of updates, downloads and other useful information, sometimes it can get cluttered.

There is now a way to turn this off for each application.

Go to Settings – Applications – Manage Applications. Then find Info and un-tick the box labelled Show Notifications.

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 put your phone into night mode, go to your Clock application and press the screen once which will dim the screen.

Then press and hold on the screen and the clock will turn blue. This is Night mode.

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

If you want to install Apps outside of the Android Market (called sideloading), then go to Settings – Security – Unknown sources.

Note: use at your own risk.

When taking photos or videos, tap the screen where you want to focus on. The phone will automatically adjust the settings to improve the image or video

The brightness of the browser is set separately to the phone’s main brightness. If you find the screen dims or brightens when you go into your browser, then you can change this by opening the browser, pressing the Menu key and scrolling down until you see Brightness and colour. You can adjust it from here.

To adjust the phone’s main brightness, go to the Homescreen, press Menu – Settings – Display – Brightness.

An alternative is to use a third party browser like Dolphin, Firefox, Opera and so on. These all use the phone’s main brightness setting.

Lastly, sometimes Power Saving Mode affects the screen brightness. Go to Settings – Power Saving Mode and change the Background Colour Only mode in there. Power Saving Mode can be found by in the Notifications bar by swiping down from the top of the screen too.

If you want to find your phone’s WiFi MAC address (for improved WiFi security), then from the Home screen, go to Menu – Settings – About Phone – Status.

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

While in the contacts screen, start typing the name of the contact you want to dial. This will quickly filter the correct contact