Sony Xperia U Tips and Tricks

If your phone is lost and you’re lucky, the finder will want to return your phone to you. To make this easy for them, you can turn on Owner Info. This will display a scrolling custom message on the lock screen saying who the phone belongs to. You can also enter a phone number to call if your phone is found.

Go to Settings – Security – Owner info. Then enter the custom message there. It will then display the message on your lock screen.

Rather than having to locate the hang up icon on the screen after each call, you can quickly end a call by pressing the Power button.

To enable this, go to Settings – Accessibility – Power button ends call.

There are two ways to bring up Bookmarks while browsing:

1) The quickest way is to simple long press the Back key to bring up your bookmarks

2) Alternatively you can enable the Quick Control panel. Go to Settings – Labs. Then check the option for Full screen. Then when you are browsing slide your finger in from the left or right of the screen. A semi-circular Quick Control panel will appear. Slide your finger to the top icon to see your bookmarks. This also means your browser runs in full screen mode so you maximise your website viewing area.

If you want to browse in full screen mode, without the URL bar at the top of the browser, then you can enable this..

Open the standard browser and press Menu – Settings – Labs. Then put a check mark under Full Screen .

To get access to the browser options (that are now invisible), there is now a neat hidden menu. Slide your finger in from the left or right of the screen. A circular menu will appear with various options.

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.

Here are the top 5 tips to make your phone run faster:

1) Use only essential widgets on your homescreen – each widget consumes memory and processing power which can slow your down your phone.

2) Uninstall apps that you don’t use – after awhile your phone can get cluttered as some Apps are designed to always run in the background. If you rarely use an App, then uninstall it to free up memory and CPU resource.

3) Install Apps to your phone memory – if you have an SDCard, always install Apps to the phone memory, which can be accessed faster. If you have Apps on the SDCard, then move them back to the phone memory with an App called Move2SD available from the Play Market.

4) Use Static rather than Live wallpapers – Live wallpapers consume processing power and memory. Unless you really must have them, uninstall them.

5) Kill tasks occasionally – Some Apps will run in the background indefinitely unless you kill them. Most of them won’t cause a problem, but it pays to check your running tasks from time to time. Hold down your Home key and check the Task Manager.

One last thing: Don’t use Task Killers. Android manages tasks very well and Task Killers just make your phone unstable and can slow it down further.

If you have just purchased an Android device, then you may want to copy (or import) your contacts from your old phone. The easiest way to do this is to Export your old contacts to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file and save this to your PC. You may need to install the correct software for your phone first in order to do the export.

Then, if you don’t have a Gmail account, sign up for one.

Once that’s done, open Gmail. Go to Contacts, then press More – Import. Then import the CSV to your Gmail contacts.

Then on your phone, open the Contacts App. Press Menu and then Sync Contacts. This will pull the contacts from Gmail to your phone.

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 enable Face Unlock, go into Settings – Security.

Then select Screen lock.

If you want to check how much RAM you have available, go to Settings – Apps – Running.