Sony Xperia V Tips and Tricks

There is an Easter egg hidden in the Android operating system. To see it, go to your Homescreen, then press Menu – Settings – About phone.

Then tap on the Android version option 5 times and you will get a surprise.

Sometimes it doesn’t work, so try a couple of times. By the way don’t expect to see an actual Easter Egg. That is just the name given to things hidden inside software or operating systems.

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.

While viewing your list of Contacts you can swipe from Right to Left to send a text message to the selected contact.

This might not work on all models.

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.

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

If you are browsing and have zoomed in or out and the column you’re reading doesn’t fit the screen properly, you can pinch to zoom in. Then double tap on the column. The column will then be reformatted to fit the screen width.

If you want to remove the Google Search bar, then go to Settings – Apps – All – Google search bar – Disable.

To share or upload a video to services like Facebook or Youtube, start from your Gallery App and long press on a video.

From here you will be given options to share the video with various services.

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.

To create a shortcut to a website on your homescreen, go to your browser bookmarks.

Then long press on a site and select Add shortcut to Home.