How to make your HTC One M7 awesome again

The reign of flagship devices seems to have a shelf life of just over a year with manufacturers pumping out newer and newer devices each year like clock work. The HTC One M7 is barely a year old and already the M8 has replaced it and HTC is moving upward and onward, but what about you, oh loyal consumer? You most likely don’t upgrade your device each and every year, but rather keep the device for the life of a contract or until something comes along that absolutely blows you away. Here’s a few tips and tricks to breathe some life back into your HTC One M7 and make it go the distance.

 © AndroidPIT

Stop losing your Phone

Sure, you can easily set up Android Device Manager and get an update on the location of your phone whether it be stolen, or more likely, just misplaced within the confines on your home. If you’re like me, 99% of the searches are used to make the device ring when I just can’t for the life of me remember where I put it down inside the house, or room, I’m.

With the HTC Fetch, you can easily find your phone with a click of a button. / © HTC

If you’re like me, then the process of firing up the Android Device Manage website might be a little bit overkill. Enter the HTC Fetch. This little dongle attaches to your keychain or whatever and with a push of a button, will cause your phone to send out a warning beep. It connects via Bluetooth, so as long as you’re within the 15 meter range, you’re golden. Say good bye to losing your phone on your coffee table and hello to triumphantly making your phone beep every other hour!

Rekindle your love for a home phone

Remember the days of when you sued to have a home phone? If you’re old enough, you might remember hanging around the phone in anticipation of “that” call. Spending a ridiculously long time on them phone, just twirling the cord as you talked. And then, the miraculous introduction of a cordless phone! But even this vestige of popular technology has seen its way out the door with the emerging trend of people “cutting the cord” and going entirely wireless with their smartphones.

Bring back your love for the home phone with the HTC Mini+./ © HTC

Well, you can get all that back with the HTC Mini+. This accessory to the HTC One is a palm sized “companion” for the smartphone. In the essence, it can act as a phone, camera and media extender, being able to control your TV and use for presentations with its built in laser-pointer. Great for having around the house in a central location so that you, or anybody, can quickly and easily answer the phone even if your HTC One is hanging around your desk charging.

Remove Blink Feed from Home Screen

HTC’s own user interface, Sense, comes stacked with a bunch of features including BlinkFeed. Some people love it, some people absolutely loathe it. If you’re not the type to want to be constantly bombarded by a constant stream of updates and notifications each time they pick up their phone, you’re in luck. You can easily disable this feature and get a little relief for yourself.

• In order to turn off BlinkFeed, check out the following instructions:
• On your home screen, swipe until you get to a blank page
• Tap and hold on the empty area and a window with widgets will pop up
• At the top of window, there will be three thumbnails of your primary screens. Tap and hold on the screen that you want to set as your new home screen.
• After holding for a few seconds, you’ll see a new option displayed that will say Set as Home. Drag and drop the screen that you want onto that option to set it.

Now, your main home page won’t be BlinkFeed, but you’ll still have access to it with just a swipe.

Make your HTC One a tad bit faster

A default option on your HTC One is that when you switch apps on your device, the screen will either fade in or out. While this can be a pretty nifty visual trick, this does suck a bit of processor power from your device and can make it lag as time goes by. Thankfully, this effect can either be scaled up, down, disabled completely.

By changing the scale of this animation, you can make the animation either super quick or make it so that it seems like you’re changing apps in a slow motion. However, if you disable it completely, you’ll notice a little bit of boost in efficiency when you’re switching between apps. First, you’ll need to enable Developer Options (go into About Phone and tap on Build Number about 6-7 times).

• Go to Settings -> Developer Options -> Advanced.
• Scroll down to Animation and uncheck the Animation box.

© AndroidPIT

Those are some of the ways we think you can revamp your HTC One M7. Do you have any other tips, tricks, or accessories that you’d like to share with us that can help make this device awesome again? Let us know in the comments.