14 more tips, tricks & secrets of Windows Phone 8

Last week we served up a number of ways to get the most from your Lumia. You returned with your own surfeit of covert secrets. Here they are. Readers, we salute you…

Summing it up

@Michael Bailey

With the calculator, it goes hex calc when you tilt it to the right landscape mode, and a scientific calc if you tilt it to the left landscape mode

 

Screen if you wanna go faster

@Brian J. Umholtz

Take a screenshot.. quickly tap-hold the Windows key while simultaneously pressing the power button. Click! Look for the Screenshots folder in your Photos album list to find them.

 

Capture the moment

@Jay Patel

If you notice some quotes or lines that are worth noting down…tap your search button on phone & just scan that paragraph or lines, now click …(options) & press copy all. Now go to your note application (Onenote) and just paste it.

 

Speak up!

@Vishal Raj

You can enable “speech for phone accessibility” under the “ease of access” menu that will announce your caller ID aloud.

(NB: This isn’t available for all Lumia variants. It can also be found within ‘Speech’ settings)

 

Shane the Supertipster

@Shane Wilson

Here Drive+ – Pin your commute to your homescreen to display the average time it will take for you to get home, it will also highlight how busy the roads are.

Nokia Pro Camera – To bring up the changeable settings, hold and swipe the shutter to the side

Set a limit on DataSense to warn you when you are near your limit. A toast notification also appears.

Instead of “Kid’s Corner” why don’t you make it “Games Corner?” You can put all your games in Kids Corner for easy access. The same applies for music or photography apps, whichever takes your fancy really.

@sikku adds:

The advantage of putting games into Kid’s Corner is, while in the excitement of playing the game, you might sometimes hit the search button. In Kid’s Corner this button won’t work, so you won’t be directed to the search while playing the game… 🙂

Night watchman

@Richard Thomas

If you prefer to have one of the “night-time” Glance font colours on your standby screen, all the time, just activate night-time mode and set the time to (for example) 5:01am – 5:00am. You’ll then be in night mode for 23 hours 59 mins.

Music break

@Jade Bryan V. Jardinico

When calling someone while playing a song, you don’t need to pause the song. It will just automatically pause and then play (after the call). Hope this helps. 😛

Blue is the colour

@fluxx

IMO, the best hidden feature is the “Connect in a different way” option in the Advanced Bluetooth settings. Since activated, my Nokia Lumia automatically opens a voice connection to my Volvo and reads SMS, offers answering and so on… well done!

Digital dictionary

@Hethler De Chavez

While browsing the web/article and you’ve come across with a very unfamiliar word, you can simply highlight the text and press the “Search” from the capacitive button and it will take you directly to “Bing” search.

Clock watching

@Richard Thomas

If you get frustrated because you can’t see the clock in Internet Explorer (or other apps that hide the clock), just hold down the Back capacitive key to activate the Task Switcher. You’ll see the time too 🙂

More tips for our tips

NC: “To type in the question mark or exclamation mark, press and hold the full stop button and slide to the desired button to type it in.”

@sikku

In fact you don’t need to slide your finger you can just press and hold and then lift your finger and then press the button you need.

 

And finally…

Well done to @Kenny, @Shane Wilson, @Hethler De Chavez and @Dr Prince for correctly identifying that the A-Z app picker ‘globe-button’ is used for non-alpha app names and characters.