I’ve never really used Caps Lock or Num Lock feature on my Motorola Droid because I never learned how. After owning the phone for 4 months, you’d think I would’ve learned how to enable it by now. I’ve accidentally stumbled on it a few times, so I was curious as to how it’s done. I was blown away when I learned how simple it was.

• Caps Lock: From the physical keyboard, quickly press the Shift key (the key with the arrow pointing up toward the line) two times and it will be enabled. From the on-screen keyboard, double-tap the ABC key.
• Num Lock: Using the physical keyboard, you can quickly press the ALT key twice on. The on-screen keyboard is easier since the ?123 is used to enable it.

When you’re done typing in all caps or numbers, simply press the key once again and the feature is disabled.

That’s all there is to enabling Caps Lock or Num Lock! Now I can shout at people on Twitter or annoy people who dislike emails written in all caps. You can also use this tip with any other Android phone such as the Droid Eris, G1 or Nexus One. Of course the portion about the physical keyboard won’t work on phones without a physical keyboard. Duh!

You have a contact listed in your contacts on your Motorola Droid or Droid Eris. Now you’re trying to send a text message to the contact from the Messaging app, but when you start typing the person’s name, it doesn’t appear like it is supposed to.

This problem usually happens when the contact’s phone number is marked as Home instead of Mobile. You can fix this using the following steps:

1. Open the Contacts app.

2. Tap and hold the contact you wish to edit.

3. Tap Edit contact.

4. Tap the button next to the phone number. It will probably say Home.

5. Tap Mobile.

If the contact was imported from Facebook, the Contact will likely not be editable. You may have to create a new Contact for the person to get this feature to work.

Import your Outlook Contacts to your Motorola Droid or Droid Eris Android powered smartphone. The trick is to Export your contacts from Outlook to a CSV file, then import that file into your Gmail account. Here are the steps.

1. Open Outlook.

2. Click File > Import and Export…

3. Click Export to a file, then click Next.

Read more… »

Forward an email from the Email application on the Motorola Droid or Droid Eris.

1. Open the Email app.

2. Tap the email you wish to forward.

3. Press Menu.

4. Select Forward.

Alternately, you can tap and hold a message in the list and then tap Forward.

There are some instances where you may need to find what the Bluetooth address is on your Motorola Droid or Droid Eris smartphone. Here’s how to locate it.

Before performing these steps, Bluetooth must be enabled.

1. From the Home screen, press Menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Scroll down to the bottom and tap About Phone.

4. Scroll down to the bottom and tap Status.

5. Scroll down and the Bluetooth address will be shown in the list.

Have pictures on your computer that you want on your Motorola Droid or Droid Eris? Here are the steps to copy them over.

1. Attach the Droid to your computer with the USB cable.

2. Open the Notifications panel at the top of the phone’s screen by sliding it down.

3. Tap USB connected.

4. Tap Mount.

5. On the computer, open the drive that represents your device. It should be in My Computer/Computer for Windows users. The Finder for Mac users.

6. Make a folder named Pictures. (Optional. The Droid will locate any supported audio file on the SD card.)

7. Copy the supported files over to the Pictures folder.

8. Once you have copied all of the desired photos , slide the Notification panel down on the phone and tap Turn off USB storage > Turn Off.

Tired of your Motorola Droid calling you on misspelled words on words like LOLZ and OMFG? You can add words like these to the dictionary to prevent this from happening.

1. From the Home screen, press Menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Tap Language & keyboard.

4. Tap User dictionary.

5. Tap Add to add a word.

6. Type the word you wish to add, then tap OK when done.

Now you won’t be bothered by spell check when you spell the word.

Clear shortcuts to recently chosen search results on the Motorola Droid smartphone. This will delete the list that is automatically created that appears when you first tap the quick search option without typing anything.

1. From the Home screen, press Menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Tap Search.

4. Tap Clear search shortcuts.

5. Tap Yes on the dialog.

Check how much space you have for applications on your Motorola Droid or Droid Eris smartphone.

1. From the Home screen, press Menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Tap SD card & phone storage.

4. You will see Total space and Available space on the phone.

I downloaded a PDF file from the web on my Motorola Droid using the Browser app. Then I switched my attention to something else during the download. I couldn’t figure out how to go back to the file to open it. One would figure I could see the file in some type of file manager. The Droid doesn’t have that option by default though.

It turns out, you have to go right back to the Browser app to find it. The option is kind of hidden though, so I thought I’d write about how to get back to the Downloads section without downloading another file.

1. Open Browser.

2. Press Menu.

3. Tap More.

4. Tap Downloads.

5. The list of downloads is displayed. Now you can tap and hold the file to perform actions on it, such as Open or Clear from list.

I was excited to start using Google Voice on my Motorola Droid. I downloaded it from the Market and go to setting it up. Unfortunately I received an error when I tried to set it up on the phone.

Your phone number could not be verified. Please try again.

Currently as of this writing, this error is caused on most occasions because the person trying to use the service does not have an invite to Google Voice. That turned out to be the case for me. So many people talk about Google Voice, I thought it was available to everybody.

Solution? Jump on Twitter or Facebook and see if somebody can send you an invite.

The Motorola Droid commercial shows the person searching their music from the search widget. This didn’t work for me. It turns out, you must add Music to the list of searchable items. Here’s how to do it, as well as add other items to the searchable items list.

1. From the Home screen, press Menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Scroll down and tap Search.

4. Tap Searchable items.

5. Check the boxes of the items you wish the widget to search.

The Messaging app on the Motorola Droid doesn’t allow you to send somebody a ringtone via text message. There is a workaround for this problem though. It’s quite a few steps, but here’s how.

1. Download and install the Handcent app from the Market.

2. Open Handcent.

3. Start composing your message by tapping the icon in the upper left corner, or tap the contact you wish to send the ringtone to.

Read more… »

I installed Dolphin Browser on my Motorola Droid smartphone. One day I was in Twidroid and tapped an entry with a link. It prompted me to pick which browser I wanted to use to open the link.

Without thinking, I accidentally checked the Use by default for this action box, then tapped Browser. Oops! Now every link opens in the standard Browser app. I wanted to undo this. How the heck could I get this prompt back so I could continue to select which browser I want?

Read more… »

A guy on Twitter had a problem with Twidroid force closing itself whenever he tapped Retweet with comment. I have heard of people having a problem like this whenever they Refresh as well. Here are some steps to try to solve this problem.

1.. Open the Settings app.

2. Tap Applications.

3. Tap Manage applications.

4. Tap Twidroid.

5. Tap Clear Cache.

You should be able to retweet just fine without the program closing on its own.

The Messaging application on my Motorola Droid wouldn’t start all of a sudden. When I tried to open the application, it would give me an error message:

The application Messaging (process com.android.mms) has stopped unexpectedly. Please Try Again Later.

This problem usually occurs when there is a corrupt message within the application. If you can manage to somehow get to the message that’s causing the problem and delete it, the problem should be solved. To delete the message thread, you must tap and hold the message in the list view, and select Delete thread.

My issue wouldn’t even let me into the program. I needed to use these steps to clear out all of the messages.

1. Open the Settings app.

2. Go to Applications > Manage applications.

3. Select Menu > Filter > All.

4. Tap Messaging.

5. Tap Clear data.

6. Read the warning. If you are OK with what it says, tap OK.

Yet another problem with the mostly great, but sometimes clunky Android OS on my Motorola Droid. Whenever I opened the Email app, it would kick up a Fatal Error:

The application Email (process com.android.email) has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again.

So the application wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t get to my email. Reboots didn’t do a thing. Neither did reconfiguring email. Luckily I found a solution.

1. Open the Settings app.

2. Tap Applications.

3. Tap Manage Applications.

4. Press Menu.

5. Tap Filter.

6. Tap All.

7. Tap Email.

8. Tap Clear data. (Yep! It will wipe out all of your account data. You should be able to rebuild it fine though.)

9. Tap OK on the warning.

10. Go back into the Email app and setup your email account again. It should work just fine.

See also: E-Mail Fatal Error on DROID…A FIX!

For the past 2 weeks, my Motorola Droid has had a problem with Google Talk. Whenever somebody sends me a chat message, it shows up in the Notification Panel as it’s supposed to. However, when I flip it down and tap the notification, it doesn’t open Google Talk as expected. The screen just flashes and stares at me with attitude. Text messages and other notifications work just peachy.

I tried a restart of the system and a soft reset. Neither fixed the issue. But these steps did:

Note: This will close your chat sessions and clear out all of the chats. GTalk data will be lost. It warns you of that at the end of this procedure. Don’t come whining to me if you lose something you didn’t want to lose.

1. From the Home screen, press Menu.

2. Tap Settings.

3. Tap Applications.

4. Tap Manage Applications.

5. Unfilter the list by going to Menu > Filter > All.

6. Tap Google Talk Storage.

7. Tap Clear Data.

8. Tap OK, and Google Talk will now be able to open from the Notification Area just fine.

I would imagine these steps would work just fine on other Android devices such as the Nexus One and Samsung Moment.

If you’ve ever tried to send a file larger than 300kb using the Messenger app on the Motorola Droid, you will get an error message.

Message size limit reached. Sorry you cannot add this video to your message.

You could use email instead, but if you really want to use an MMS text message, you can use a third party messaging solution like ChompSMS. ChompSMS can be downloaded from the Market.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the app, open it and select Menu > Settings. You will see an option for MMS Size Limit.

Here you can increase the file size limit to 1MB or set it to have no limit at all.

Install the Power Control Widget on your Motorola Droid and take control of the things that can reduce your battery consumption.

1. Tap and hold a blank spot on the Home screen.

2. Select Widgets.

3. Select Power Control Widget.

Now you can easily control the networking, screen brightness and GPS functionality that slurps the battery down so much.