Sony Xperia XZ Premium Tips and Tricks

Android 7 (Nougat)
Phone: Sony Xperia XZ Premium
Factory OS: Android 7 (Nougat)

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If you find that a particular App is sending you too many notifications, there is a quick way to disable these.

When you receive the notification, pull down the notification screen. Then long press on the notification. You should see a small ‘i’. Press this and you should see the notifications specific to that App.

Simply select Block notifications to disable them for that App only.

To save an image in an email or in the browser, long press on the image and a menu will appear allowing you to save it.

For images inside text messages, you might have to press and hold on the message itself, rather than the image.

Android now has privacy or incognito mode built into the stock browser.

Open your Browser App and press the Tabs icon at the bottom. Then press the Menu or More button at the top. Then select New secret tab or New incognito tab or Secret mode security.

Another option is to use the popular Dolphin browser whenever you want to browse privately. Then each time you exit, Dolphin asks you whether you want to delete your Cache or History. You may need to enable this if it isn’t set up by default.

If you select yes, then your activity will be untraceable. You may need to check this is enabled in the Dolphin settings.

Normally you can simply insert a SIM card and you will be able to browse the internet using 3G or 4G. Sometimes, this must be setup manually however.

Before you start, you will need to ask your carrier or Telco for your APN settings.

Once you have those, go to Settings – Connections – Mobile networks – Access Point Names.

From here press Add or the Plus sign at the top right and select New APN.

Then fill in the details your carrier gave you. Then press the menu button and press Save.

While in the Camera App, there are two ways to zoom in or out.

First, you can use Volume Up and Down keys.

Secondly, you can pinch your fingers on the screen to zoom in and out.

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.

The best way to do this is to connect your device to a PC and then navigate to the relevant folder via your PC.

Android has a useful feature called Talkback or Voice Assistant which is designed for blind and vision impaired users.

The feature provides voice feedback as you navigate your phone and will also tell you what you can interact with as you tap areas of the interface.

To enable this, go Settings – Accessibility – Vision – Voice Assistant. Change the setting to On.

Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

When using your Calendar App, you will normally be in Month view. To quickly switch to Year view, you can pinch the screen to zoom out.

This is useful if you want to quickly jump backwards or forwards through a few months at a time.

To go from Year to Month, you can do a reverse pinch.

To change keyboards (if you have additional keyboards installed), you can switch between them by pressing the small keyboard symbol in the top left of your screen. You will need to be in keyboard input mode (i.e. typing something) for this to work.

Note: you need to have more than one keyboard installed for this to work.

There are a number of solutions to this error. Go through the following steps:

Go to Settings – Applications – Application manager.

Then find the App called Media Storage.

If you can’t see it listed, then select More at the top and then select Show system apps.

Once found, click Media Storage and then Force Close. Then select Clear Data. (warning: this will delete the cache for your media player so you may lose things such as recently played, most played etc. But you will not lose your music).

Next, go back to list of Apps and find Music Player. Again, press Force Close and then Clear Data.

Once that’s done, go to the Play Store and download an App called Re Scan Media and run it. Wait 5 minutes for the device to re-scan your media.

If you still cannot play your music, then try turning your phone off and removing your SDCard / memory card (if you have one). Then turn the phone on without the card. Then turn it off again and reinsert the card. Finally turn it on again with the card back in.

If you still can’t play music, then some users have said that there may be a conflict with the Twitter App. Try uninstalling this and see if the error persists.