Sony Xperia Z1 Compact Tips and Tricks

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.

Most Android phones only come with a fixed amount of homescreens. There is a way to add more however.

Go to Android Play Market and search for ‘launcher’. These are third-party user interfaces that allow you to customize your phone in many ways. Most of them allow multiple homescreens.

A very popular launcher which supports multiple homescreens is GoLauncher EX.

If you find yourself woken up by notifications, text messages or incoming calls, then there is a handy feature called Blocking mode.

To enable this go to Settings – Blocking mode. From here you can set a From and To time in which to block these notifications.

You can also allow notifications through from certain contacts that you don’t mind bothering you.

The phone has the ability to send quick response text messages if your phone is ringing but you can’t answer it.

To change these, go to your Dialler App – Call Settings – Set up call reject messages. You can then add or edit your reject messages.

if you would prefer to correct your own mistakes, then go to Settings – Language and input. Then select the keyboard you are using and press the Settings icon again.

You should be able to find a predictive text option on this screen.

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

Go to Settings – Applications. Then swipe right to left to go to All (along the top). Then find the App called Media Storage. Click on that and select 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.

While the stock standard keyboard is fine, there are much better keyboards available. First, you need to go to the Android Market and download one. Try searching for the word ‘keyboard’ and you will see a number of options.

One of the best keyboards is a keyboard called Swiftkey, which is a top-rate App.

Download your chosen keyboard and go through any install steps that you are presented with.

Then, go to the App you want to type in. You should now see a little Keyboard icon on the row at the bottom of your screen, towards the bottom-right corner. Press that icon and you can switch between all of the keyboards you have installed.

If you want to resize your homescreen widgets, then press and hold on a widget for 2 seconds. If the widget is resizable, then an outline will appear around the widget. Simply drag the sides to resize the widget.

If the outline doesn’t appear or you can’t drag the lines, then the widget is a fixed sized widget.

The standard Android keyboard is good, but not great. There are many third party keyboards available which will improve your typing speed and accuracy.

Go to the Android Market and search for ‘Keyboard’ to see some great alternatives, many of which are more accurate and make typing much easier.
A good one is GoKeyboard.

If you see a warning saying the keyboard will collect all information (including credit cards) just ignore this. This is just a security feature that Android shows for every third-party keyboard that you install.

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