Sony Xperia SP Tips and Tricks

If you have Android 4.0, then one neat feature is the ability to clear single notifications.

Simply pull down your notifications bar by swiping your finger from the top of your phone downwards. Then when you see each individual notification, swipe your finger left or right to clear each one.

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

To check your firmware version, start from the Homescreen and press Menu – Settings – About Phone.

This should list your Android version, Build number and Model Number.

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

Face Unlock allows you to unlock your phone by holding it up to your face. It is highly recommended to use the Improve Face Unlock feature to make the recognition faster and more accurate.

First, ensure you have Face Unlock enabled. Go to Settings – Security – Screen lock. Then choose Face Unlock.

Once that is done go to Settings – Security – Improve face matching. You might have to do this a few times to improve the speed of recognition. It is also a good idea to position the phone at different angles to your head to improve the accuracy.

Note: this may not work on all phones. Check for a software update if it doesn’t work on yours.

To speed up your phone, you can turn off screen animations. Go to Settings – Developer options.

Then scroll down to Window animation scale and select that. From here you can choose to turn Animations Off. This will make screen transitions faster.

Go to Settings – Display. Then tick the Display battery percentage checkbox. If your phone doesn’t have this option, then go to the Google Play store and download a useful App called Battery Percentage.

There are two different Apps under that name, but they are both good.

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.

If you find yourself with too many Apps on the homescreen, then you can create folders to organise them.

To start, simply press and hold on an App and drag it over the top of another App. The App should change colour/shape. Then release your finger and the two Apps will be combined into a folder.

You can then drag more Apps into this folder using the same process.

To give your folder a label, simply long press on the folder and you will be able to enter a name.

To enable / disable your notification light, go to Settings – Display.

Then check/uncheck Pulse notification.