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Nokia Lumia 710 in cyan

GLOBAL – Live Tiles are what makes the homescreen of your Nokia Lumia 710 or Nokia Lumia 800 a dynamic, constantly evolving place. We’ve written about smart tricks with Live Tiles before in a previous post, but we’re back again with some more that we’ve found useful over the past couple of months that we think will make your experience better.

If you’re into your social networks and love to be informed of your very closest friends updates as they happen, the best way to get them will be to use a group Live Tile from your People hub.

To get started you’ll need to create a group and add some people to it. This is done through the People hub, by selecting the plus sign at the bottom of the screen. It’s here you assign the group with a name, add some people and then pin it to your homescreen. With a total of 20 people added per group, this should be plenty enough for groups, rather than an entire company.

Having these groups pinned to your homescreen means that you don’t miss any of their moments amongst the many other people you follow of Twitter or Facebook. This Live Tile brings only the important updates right to the forefront.

Creating a group

Groups as Live Tiles

4th & Mayor Live Tile

In my opinion, the best Foursquare client for Nokia Lumia phones is 4th & Mayor. For people who like to useFoursquare and declare (virtual) mayorship over the local café or office, the Live Tile for this app makes checking-in a real doddle.

From within the app, and under the notifications & tiles section, you can select to add the check-in now button to the homescreen. If you regularly check into a particular venue, you can pin that exact location to the homescreen, too – leaving you two clicks away from a check-in.

Exploring with 4th & Mayor

As smartphone ownership continues to rise, we’ve seen the demise of the bedside clock and alarm. It’s now just easier to set up an alarm on your phone. To make sure you wake up on time in the morning, the Nokia Lumia range has an alarm function that can be pinned as a Live Tile.

Rather than scrolling to the application list, and selecting the alarm that way, the Live Tile makes it one press away. Also, when an alarm is active the Live Tile tells you that it is. Very handy to tell at a glance whether or not you’e forgotten to set your alarm.

Alarms Live Tile

By default, connecting to a local WiFi hotspot, or pairing a Bluetooth headset to your phone involves navigating through the settings menu to turn them on, and to search. This can be a bit time consuming and tedious if you do it on a regular basis.

ConnectivityShortcuts Live Tile

The free ConnectivityShortcuts app creates separate Live Tiles for your WiFi, Bluetooth, Airplane and Cellular settings. This means there’s no need to delve into the settings to turn things on or off, just press the relevant Live Tile.

With the option to make these Live Tiles animated, you’ll always know what you’ve got enabled or disabled.

Have you found any other useful Live Tile tricks? Drop us a comment to let us know.