Sony Xperia M Tips and Tricks

Jelly Bean has an interesting new feature called Talkback which is designed for blind and low vision users.

The feature is an interesting way to navigate your phone however.

Simply go to Settings – Accessibility – Talkback to activate it. Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

To remove numbers from the call log that you don’t want anyone seeing, then open your Call Log.

This will normally be found on your Apps list or you can also go to your Dialler and find Logs or Call Logs.

Then press and hold on the contact you want to remove. When the Menu appears, press Delete.

If you would to see a preview of text messages appear on your homescreen or lock screen as they come in, then to into the standard Messaging App. Then go to Settings – Notification settings – Preview message

By default, the phone will recognise swear words, but insert x’s instead of the word. To change this, go to Settings – Voice input & output – Voice recognition settings. Then untick Block offensive words.

Android manages your applications so if the phone is running low on memory, it will close the oldest running App.

If you do need to manually close an application go to Settings – Applications – Manage Applications – Running. Choose the application you want to stop and select Force Stop.

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.

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 go to settings, then normally you would go to your home screen, then press the Menu key and select Settings.

There is however a quicker way of getting to your Settings. Simply drag your notification bar down from the top of the screen and press the Gear icon. It should be the second right icon in the top right corner.

If you’re worried about your sensitive data falling into the wrong hands then Jelly Bean has a great new encryption feature that scrambles every pieces of content on your device.

Go to Settings – Security settings – Encrypt device or Encrypt external SD card.

If you are browsing YouTube videos on your phone and they appear blurry, then this is usually because of your connection speed.

If you are using 3G / 4G and you’re in an area of low signal strength, then YouTube will sometimes automatically reduce the quality of the video. Unfortunately this can make the video very pixelated and of poor quality.

If you are using the standard Android browser, then when the video is in full screen, press the back button. Then press HQ and start playing it again.

If you are using another browser, then press the Settings icon on the bottom right of the YouTube video. Then change the quality.

This may improve the quality, but it may also lead to buffering issues.

Another solution is to use a WiFi connection, if one is available.