So, you’ve just bought your Huawei P40 lite. The first of Huawei’s new flagship range to arrive in South Africa, the P40 lite strikes the perfect balance between price and value.
Excited to set it up?
No ad to show here.
In this piece, we detail how to get the most from your new phone right off the bat.
Initial setup
The basics
Setting up the phone is extremely simple as Huawei’s setup wizard will guide you through the entire process.
Now’s the time you insert your SIM card(s), connect to a WiFi network, and enrol your fingerprint.
The P40 lite’s side-mounted fingerprint sensor is incredibly responsive, but we found the best finger to use for this is the right thumb or right pointer finger.
Additionally, the P40 lite also has Face Recognition, so be sure to activate this as well during the setup process.
Set up enhanced services
Some enhanced services you may find useful. While you might not need to activate WiFi+, you may find the Weather service particularly useful.
Each service and its purpose is listed below. You can enable all or only those you’ll require:
- WiFi+ – switches between mobile data or WiFi depending on the signal strength of each.
- Weather Service – Huawei’s weather app that’ll enable a weather widget on the home screen.
- Location services – a service that allows Huawei to use your location data.
- HiSearch – provides online and local content searching across your P40 lite.
- HiCare – the P40 lite’s smart diagnostics, support and troubleshooting app.
Phone Clone data to your new phone
If you own an older Huawei, you’ll be prompted tto open the Phone Clone app and scan a QR code from the P40 lite. This will connect the two devices via a WiFi Direct network.
Phone Clone can also be installed from the Google Play Store to your original device on Android or iOS. This makes it much easier to copy your apps, settings, contacts, messages and more from your old device to your P40 lite.
Activate navigation gestures
Huawei’s gesture navigation on EMUI 10 are an excellent way to move between apps and windows. Simply swiping from the edge of the display will allow you to go back, forward, bring up recent apps, or switch between them. It’ll also give you more screen real estate by removing the bottom navigation bar.
If you don’t know how to use them, no sweat. The P40 lite’s tutorial is an excellent learning tool. And if you’re feeling uncomfortable, you can also revert to the traditional bottom-bar navigation system if need be.
You’re in, now what?
Adjust text and display size
The P40 lite’s text and display size is set to the middle value, but you may want larger text for greater legibility or smaller text for more content.
To change this:
- Head to Settings
- Scroll down to Display & brightness, and tap it.
- Select Text and display size.
- Adjust the sliders to your liking.
Switch on Dark Mode
While you’re in Display & brightness, you may want to switch on Dark mode. The setting will darken the user interface making text pop and easier to read.
The setting is easy to find too, below Screen timeout. A simple tap of this toggle will switch on the setting.
Switch on Huawei Share
The most underrated feature on Huawei devices, Huawei Share lets you seamlessly share files to and from other Huawei phones, but also with computers.
To enable Huawei Share:
- Open Settings
- Tap “More connections”.
- Tap “Huawei Share”.
- Toggle it on.
- Select “Computer Share”.
This will effectively turn your P40 lite into a network folder within Windows and MacOS, allowing you to transfer files wirelessly to and from both devices.
Install the apps you need from AppGallery
If there are apps you still require after using Phone Clone, the Huawei AppGallery is where you’ll find them. Open it from your homescreen.
The AppGallery has some nifty features too, including a more detailed app installation manager that displays the exact download speeds, an option to cleanup junk files, and the ability to install apps from outside the AppGallery.
This article is sponsored by Huawei.
Feature image: Huawei
