Sony Xperia Z3 Tips and Tricks

From the Homescreen press Menu – Settings – My Device – Language and input. Then under Keyboards and input methods, press the little Gear icon.

From here you have various options including Haptic feedback, Vibration intensity and so on.

You can also adjust notifications for various functions.

To soft reset your phone press and hold the Power/Lock button for around 8 to 10 seconds. The phone will restart automatically.

If that doesn’t work, then remove the battery (if it has one). Wait 30 seconds and put the battery back in. Then press the Power/Lock button to turn the phone on.

To use your phone as a WiFi hotspot, tether it via USB or via Bluetooth, then go to Settings – Connections – More networks – Tethering And Portable Hotspot.

You can then choose from three options:

1) USB – connect your phone via a USB cable. The phone should automatically configure the correct settings.

2) WiFi Hotspot – To turn your phone into a WiFi hotspot, press Configure WiFi hotspot. You will then be asked to enter a Network SSID (this is your own name for the WiFi hotspot). Then choose Security and lastly, choose a password (this is password for your WiFi hotspot which you will enter on your computer).

3) Bluetooth – With this option, you will need to pair a Bluetooth device with your phone. On the other device, ensure you search for Bluetooth devices and your phone should show up.

If you want to remove the Google Search bar, then go to Settings – More – Application manager.

Then swipe from right to left so you are on the All screen. Scroll to Google search and press Disable.

The brightness of the browser is set separately to the phone’s main brightness. If you find the screen dims or brightens when you go into your browser, then you can change this by opening the browser, pressing the Menu key and scrolling down until you see Brightness. You can adjust it from here.

To adjust the phone’s main brightness, go to the Settings – My device – Display – Brightness.

An alternative is to use a third party browser like Dolphin, Firefox, Opera and so on. These all use the phone’s main brightness setting.

Lastly, sometimes Power Saving Mode affects the screen brightness. Go to Settings – My device – Power Saving Mode and change the Background Colour Only mode in there. Power Saving Mode can also be found by in the Notifications bar by swiping down from the top of the screen.

To store a phone number that you have received in an email, hold down on the number and you will be given the option to call, send an SMS or add the number to your contacts

Android now comes with a sound Equaliser so you can adjust your bass and treble.

Simply open a music file using the Music Player App. Then go to Settings – SoundAlive and select Custom.

Then simply drag the sliders up and down to adjust the bass and treble.

It can be very useful to see your battery life in percentage terms instead of just the icon.

To enable this, go to Settings – My device – Display and tick Display battery percentage.

Sometimes while typing long text or SMS messages you will get a message saying Converting to multimedia message. This won’t normally cause a problem, however some users do not want to send a MMS message.

There are a number of different settings to deal with this, however there isn’t really a way to prevent the phone from converting to an MMS. The reason for this is that any message over 480 characters cannot be sent as an SMS message. They must be sent as an MMS. The is a restriction of SMS messages in general, similar to the original limit of 160 characters.

What you can do however is ensure you get alerted when you have reached 480 characters. Then you can decide to send the message as an SMS and continue your conversation on a second message.

To check this setting is on, open your Message App and press your phone’s Menu button. Then select Settings and scroll to Multimedia message (MMS) settings area. Ensure you tick MMS alert. You will now be told when your message is being converted to MMS.

You can also change the settings for Creation mode which lets you restrict messages that go over a certain size. If you select Warning or Guided, you should get further warnings when your message is really large and may not be handled by the network.

To share or upload a video to services like Facebook or YouTube, simply go to your Video App and long press on a video.

Then select Share via. From here you will be given options to share the video with various services.