Sony Xperia L1 Tips and Tricks

Android 7 (Nougat)
Phone: Sony Xperia L1
Factory OS: Android 7 (Nougat)

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If you want to go to settings, then you can go to your list of Apps and open the Settings App.

There is however a quicker way. Simply position your finger right at the top of the screen and drag it down. You may need to do this twice on some phones.

Your notification bar will appear and you can then press the small Gear icon at the top of the screen to go to the Settings.

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 Settings in the top right, then settings again, then More settings.

Then select Multimedia messages – Set restrictions and choose Warning. 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 Restricted, you should get further warnings when your message is really large and may not be handled by the network.

If you see the following errors:
Resting robot
Exclamation point (for rooted phones)
No command

This indicates that your phone is in Android Recovery mode and often appear when you try to recover or reboot.

To fix this, follow these steps:

1. Once any of the three appears, press and hold your phone’s volume up button for 10-15 seconds.

2. Next, without letting go of the volume up button, press and release the power button once. It will display a menu.

3. Navigate around the menu using the volume button.

4. Select Reboot System Now and your phone should be rebooting

Alternatively, you can do the following:

1. When any of the three appears, press and hold the power button for 2-3 seconds.

2. Then, without letting go of the power button, press and release the volume up button, once. It will display the same menu.

3. Select Reboot System Now and your phone should reboot.

If Reboot System Now doesn’t work try updating first.

While in your email App, a handy trick is to pinch and zoom out to see a ‘day view’ of your emails. This is handy if you have a lot of emails and want to quickly sort them by recency.

To share or upload a video to services like Facebook or YouTube, simply go to your Video App and long press on a video.

Then select Share via. From here you will be given options to share the video with various services.

Depending on how your device is setup, sometimes when Apps are installed, a shortcut icon is automatically placed on your home screens.

This can be annoying for users who want to keep their home screens clutter-free.

To stop then, go to the Play Store and press the Hamburger / menu icon in the top left.

Then choose Settings and untick Add icon to Home Screen

If you want to setup new email accounts, like Yahoo or Hotmail, go to the Play Store and download your favourite email service.

Almost all of them have an App now, so the setup is much easier than in the past.

Install the App and follow the instructions to set it up correctly.

Then if you want to modify or view your accounts, go to Settings – Cloud and accounts.

There are a couple of ways to bring up one of your contacts.

First, while in your Contacts App, simply start typing in the search bar at the top of the screen.

Or else a quicker method is to use the Google Search widget (installed by long pressing on a vacant part of your home screen and installing the widget) and start typing the name of the contact you want to dial. This will quickly filter the correct contact.

If you have used up all of your Quick Launch spaces, then there is a trick to provide you more.

First, press and drag an App from the home screen and move it over the top of an App in the Quick Launch area. Then release your finger.

This will create a folder containing the original App plus the new one.

This is a great way to have access to regularly used Apps.

If you see the following error:
com.system.patch error

Then pull down your notification menu and choose Settings.

Then, select Lock screen and security – Other security settings – Device Administrator.

On the next screen, uncheck com.system.patch

Now, go to your App Manager and you should be able to uninstall it.