Xiaomi Mi Max 3 Tips and Tricks

Locking your phone is a great security feature, but when you’re at home it’s normally not necessary.

A featured called Trusted Places enables you to bypass the lock screen when you’re at specific geographic places.

To set it up go to Settings – Lock screen and security – Smart lock – Trusted places. You can also set up the bypass to work when your phone is connected to specific Bluetooth devices such as Smart watches or Audio devices.

You can also override this (i.e. lock your screen when it is at the location). To override, just press and hold the padlock icon on the lock screen.

This may not work on all phones, models or networks.

To find out information about Signal Strength, Network Information, Remaining Battery Time and Battery Usage (by Application), drag down your notifications screen and select Settings.

Then under System, select About device and choose Status.?

The Play store contains thousands of great Apps, but there are time that you want to restrict access to these Apps for whatever reasons. This can easily be done.

First, open the Play Store App and swipe from left to right to see the settings. Then press Settings and Content Filtering.

From here you can chose settings for Low/Medium/High maturity levels. Great for preventing access for young people.

Sometimes you will want to prevent your device fro, displaying or indexing folders on your Phone storage or USB storage.

To do this, simply rename the folder and place a . (full top / period) before the file or folder name.

This can be done through the Files App or by plugging your device in to your computer and renaming it there.

If you are browsing a website and want to see the HTML source code behind the page, then Android doesn’t offer you the ability to do this by default.

There is however a handy App called View Web Source which can be installed. Whenever you want to view the HTML of a web page, you just press the Menu – Share – View Web Source.

You can then browse the code or copy the content into the clipboard.

At the bottom of each homescreen is your favourites tray, which consists of 5 icons. You can customise it by adding icons to the tray. If it’s full however, you will first need to remove some.

To remove an icon, simply press and hold an icon. Then drag it to your desktop.

Then to add a new one, simply drag an icon from your homescreen to the favourites tray.?

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.

There is a hidden Android Easter egg on the phone that Google has built into your device.

Go to Settings. Then scroll down to About device. Then tap on the Android version option 5 times.

Once you see something on the screen, you can then rub the screen with your finger to produce another surprise. If rubbing doesn’t work then try tapping with your finger. A combination of the above should work.

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.

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 – Device – Sounds and notifications – Do not disturb.

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.

There is no need to be stuck with the standard Android keyboard, which isn’t always great for typing quickly.

Go to the Play Store and search for ‘Keyboard’ to see some great alternatives, many of which are more accurate and make typing much easier.

One of the very best is SwiftKey. They provide a free trial, but once the trial is over it is well worth the small amount of money they charge. It can increase your typing rates massively.

Another 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.