By Tomi, Mozillion Team
Whether you’re looking to buy a new Pixel 7 Pro or you already own one, we’ve pulled together some amazing tips and tricks that you’ll hopefully find useful.
We’ve also included a video featuring all of these tips.
How to personalise the Pixel 7 Pro display
Let’s start by making the device yours.
To begin, you need to familiarise yourself with the ‘settings’ menu. To do this:
- Pull down the ‘quick settings’ draw at the top of the screen
- Go into ‘settings’ right at the bottom corner where you will see lots of options
- In ‘display settings’ you can adjust your brightness level, you can turn on ‘adaptive brightness’
- Toggle on or off the ‘dark theme’ and it may be able to help your screen experience or some people just prefer it as it’s easier on the eyes
How to change the Pixel 7 Pro screen resolution
Next, we want to change the screen resolution because by default, Google doesn’t give you the full screen resolution to reduce power consumption. This is not to say when you crank it up you’re going to be losing loads of battery life. It just means you’re going to be maximising the display performance and have it looking at its very best.
- Scroll down on ‘display settings’
- Go into ‘screen resolution’ and bump this up all the way to full resolution which is 1440p Quad HD Plus display. This way, things look sharper when you take photos, when you look at videos and when you play games.
- Swipe to go back to the ‘display settings’
- Look for ‘smooth display’ which allows the display to go from 60 Hertz all the way to 120 Hertz refresh. This makes a significant difference when you are gaming and scrolling through web pages.
How to change the Pixel 7 Pro app grid size
Next, we want to change the ‘app grid size’. When you look at the home screen, you may see that some of the icons look very big. Reducing the size, means you can fit more in on the screen and saves you time browsing around trying to find the app you need.
- Go into the ‘settings’ option and then back to ‘display’.
- Scroll down to ‘display size and text’ and underneath here we can change the text size
- Go back out and tap ‘wallpaper and style’ where you will find several options
- Here you can change things like your wallpaper and theme, colour theme and app grid
- Go down to ‘app grid’ and you can change it to make it as small as you want it to be, e.g. 5×5
- If you then tap ‘apply’ to apply settings, you can fit more on the home screen and smaller icons
- It also unlocks your recently used apps as well so now when you look at the bottom right of the screen you’re able to see the latest apps or the last app that you opened.
Another cool modification is the ‘quick settings’ draw.
- The first time you drag it down from the top of the screen, it gives you four important settings that you’ve set. Drag it down a little bit more and it gives you another four
- What you can actually do is rearrange these and change what’s been displayed
- If, for example, you don’t use things like ‘do not disturb’, you can remove that or change it to something else more useful
- Tap on the little pencil to get into more settings
- You can then move up and down and see what else is available and move things around
- you just press and hold icons, for example – ‘camera access’
- press and hold it, drag it all the way to the top where you want it, just underneath ‘internet’ for example?
- when you go back to the main screen ‘camera access’ will always be there to quickly access.
How to manage the Pixel 7 Pro storage
Next we have ‘smart storage’. We’ve all been there when we’ve run out of memory or storage space on our phones.
What Google have done with the Pixel 7 Pro is allow you to move things that you haven’t used in the last 60 days for example. They’ll move it to a cloud storage, that way you save space on your local storage on your smartphone.
- Swipe up on the home screen and go to the file menu
- Look for the ‘file’ app’
- You then have the option for ‘smart storage’
- Toggle that on so things can get moved over and media automatically deleted will be available in your Google photos in your chosen quality
- Click ‘OK’
- It is also worth checking out the ‘safe folder’
- Anything in there is completely secure and no one can access it so you can put your documents in there for example.
How to edit Pixel 7 Pro gestures
Next, let’s talk about gestures. Using gestures means you can access functions and features faster than you normally would.
- Go into ‘settings’ and here is another tip for you – instead of trying to find ‘gesture settings’ which is normally in the ‘system settings’ – what you can do is actually search from the top. It will then flash to let you know that it’s in the history and will remember it for next time.
- When you find ‘gestures’, you’ve got lots of options available. You can go all the way down to the bottom where there are tools such ‘flip to shhh’
- ‘Flip to shhh’ means that when your phone’s ringing or making any noise, you can just flip it and it will go quiet.
- There is also an option for ‘quick tap to start actions’. This is essentially an extra button by tapping the back of your phone
- If you go into that, you can flip it on and allow it to do different things like ‘take screenshot’, ‘access to digital assistant’ ‘play or pause media’ ‘show recent apps’ and so on.
- Another good feature here is ‘require stronger taps’ so you don’t accidentally tap when you don’t mean to
- You also have an option for ‘selfie camera’ – if you toggle it on, it just means when you quickly flip your phone, you’ll be able to access your selfie camera quickly.
- One more thing in gestures – you can change the position of the power button. Originally, you have to press drag down the settings draw and click power off.
- In gestures go into ‘press and hold power button settings’ and you can toggle off ‘hold for assistant’. Now when you press the power button on the side, you can just power it off and it’s much quicker.
Now playing
Another cool feature on the Pixel 7 Pro is ‘now playing’ which is a feature that tells you what music is playing around you. Your phone will tell you what the song is, who the artist is – so a bit like Shazam – but it’s always on, constantly listening without burning too much battery.
- To turn this on, go into ‘settings’, search for ‘now playing’, tap that and toggle it on
- It will then show what’s playing via notifications
- It will show you the search button on lock-screen as well
- So toggle that on and you can also see the music that’s played and you can check the history.
Pixel 7 Pro battery share
Battery share is more of a ‘feature’ rather than a ‘tip and a trick’ but if you have a pair of airpods that you want to charge wirelessly for example, or you want to charge another smartphone – you can use battery share meaning you can use your Pixel 7 Pro to charge other devices wirelessly.
- To do this go to ‘battery settings’, then ‘battery share’ and just toggle it on
- This will remain on for a little bit to make sure that there’s a phone or device charging and if there isn’t it will just turn it off automatically
- What is also cool about this is, whilst you have it plugged directly into power it will automatically switch it on so you don’t have to go to that settings every time.
Pixel 7 Pro camera tips
Now let’s look at some tips and tricks with the camera.
- First thing to look at is ‘blur’
- When you have taken a photo, you can go into ‘edit’ where you can find lots of different options to do with that particular photo
- If we go to ‘unblur’, the phone will analyse the photo and you can adjust the background blur on the photo
- Another great tool is ‘magic eraser’. With this you’ll be able to remove objects or people from photos
- Load up the picture, go to ‘edit’, wait for the phone to analyse the picture, scroll across the bottom to ‘tools’ and you have the options for ‘portrait blur’, ‘magic eraser, and ‘unblur’
- if you click ‘magic eraser’ you will find suggestions for your photo
Pixel 7 Pro sleep and bedtime mode
Another bonus feature that you should know about is ‘digital well-being and parental controls’ and ‘bedtime mode’. With this, the phone can actually monitor your sleep throughout the night so it’ll be able to tell you how well you slept, how many times you snored, how many times you coughed.
You don’t have to wear any extra devices, you just have to have your smartphone on charge next to you and it will use motions and sensor a microphone to monitor things and record them.
There you have it, some amazing tips and tricks and features on the Pixel 7 Pro – I hope you found them useful.
There are so many other things that we could go through but those are our top suggestions and features you should definitely check out.
If you want some amazing deals on the Pixel 7 Pro or the Pixel series then check out the links below.