Hello everyone, so we're taking a look at the Samsung Galaxy S4
settings.
In past Galaxy models
a lot of complaint has been levelled at Samsung for
basically trying to shove every single setting possible into just a single page
and the problem with that is you just couldn't work out where settings were going to be.
You would find some things were in the security section which were lock screen related,
it was just a complete mess.
So with the Galaxy S4 they've obviously taken that criticism to heart and they've split things down
so you now have these tabs on the bottom
previously everything was just in one long scrolling list
which made life difficult so now
you have a connections tab
your my device, your accounts and a more option.
Connections
as the name suggests deals with anything connection related
so you'll find your wifi, your Bluetooth
your data usage
and your ability to change your 3G networks etcetera
available in there as well as things like your
roaming if you go into more networks.
So also flight mode
tethering and your VPN is available in there.
NFC
and S Beam which are one and the same thing really they both use the near field communication with the
S Beam it also uses the wifi and
you can quickly flick those on or off
as you need to, you can also access those through
the quick short cuts up at the top here as well if you need to but the option is there within the
primary settings. You also have a screen mirroring device nearby and Kies via wifi.
Again all of this is connection related, related to you connected to the
device, or having other devices connecting to it.
In my device it's very much about personalization
creating
your custom lock screen
tweaking your display settings if you'd like to
notification panels, multiple windows, brightness and your auto rotation, fonts and everything like
that.
That's not to say that Samsung haven't still crammed in an awful lot of settings but at
least things are now
a little bit better laid out
and a bit more logical.
Your LED indicator can be changed there or turned off completely
if you'd like to.
Home screen and sound mode
The home screen mode is if you want to switch it into easy mode.
Why would you want to do that?
And sound is where you can set up your ring tone, vibration patterns,
dial pads
and more importantly if it's annoying you, turn off that touch sound, so
you know, that weird
water droplets sound that you get every time you touch anything.
There is where you can turn it off.
If you want rid of that, that's where you get rid of it I would strongly urge
you to turn it off if you value your sanity!
You can also change your call settings as well, your call settings in
here including how you reject
whether you should automatically answer calls, your alarms and everything like that.
And the ringtones that will appear in there as well.
A lot of options here to look at but you know, it's what we expect from Samsung.
You've got the blocking mode which will allow you to simply block calls or notifications
and a new feature which I don't recall seeing on the previous Galaxy S models
is Safety Assistant.
Effectively in an emergency
the device can automatically do some stuff for you
So for instance it can display your emergency contacts, send an emergency
picture
send messages etcetera.
Very useful if you happen to be out and about if you're a walker or anything like that
you have an extra safety feature there that can keep you safe and alert people
should there be
a problem.
The power saving mode
is obviously very useful in any smartphone. It
allows you to drop down various settings on the phone to a lower power mode so
for instance restrict the amount of cpu you'd be using
put the screen into low power and turn off the Haptic feedback.
Which, you know, all of these things
drain the power. If you drop those into lower mode you may get a couple more hours worth of use
out of your device.
Accessibility and accessories
those are there, if you've got accessories
things like your dock
those options are available in there and for accessibility you have all of those
accessibility features
to make it easy if you have a particular problem using a device.
So things like magnification is available in there, adjusting the colours
everything you could possibly need if you need the accessibility features in that particular section.
Your keyboard controls are in language and input.
Now I've installed Swiftkey. I remember the announcement initially they were saying that Swiftkey or Swipe was
actually going to be coming with the Samsung phones. I can't find it anywhere so I've
installed
mine off the Play Store.
And in there you've also got your text to speech options as well, voice typing and everything like that.
Motion and gestures, this is where we get into more of Samsung's kind of added extra
features.
These allow you to
interact with the device without actually physically having to touch the screen necessarily.
You can make a gesture, for instance flicking the wrist, swiping across the screen with
your hand will allow the device to recognize those actions and do whatever it's been
designed to do. Normally
moving between panels
and things like that
and you can just flick those on
very very easily.
With the Air gestures you've then got even more options there for which Air gestures you would like
to use
bearing in mind that all of these features do
run your battery down because it's constantly having to use things like the camera
to judge whether your hand has moved across the screen or not.
You have your Voice control down at the bottom here.
This is very much the S Voice kind of stuff
I have mine turned off because it just annoys the heck out of me.
If you come into accounts
now at very least accounts aren't buried under another submenu
as such.
You can come into the accounts section and see all of your accounts listed, add a new account
or trigger back-up and reset. In here
is where your factory data reset is.
If you need to wipe everything on your device and start again
this is where you can do it.
And you can also set your back-ups as well in there if you need to.
The private options allow you to save
various features of the phone so your settings and so on and that
all goes straight up to Samsung's cloud
and then obviously restore them again later if you need to, say for instance if you've done a
wipe or a reset.
The accounts section is very much a muchness, there's nothing really new here as such other than
what a particular application might install for you
But you've got your Samsung account as standard, Chat On, Dropbox
and Google.
Email, LDAP if you're network orientated and the Microsoft Exchange and
custom serve is there as well. If you've installed
Facebook you'll also get the Facebook
accounts there.
In More,
finally in More we just get down to the stuff they couldn't think of anywhere else that it could kind of go.
So you've got your location services in here.
So do you want your gps or wifi location being reported,
and available for applications. In security
you've got encrypting your device, encrypting your external SD card, really
nice to see those encryption options there.
Remote control, SIM change alerts
you can SIM card lock in there as well
Verifying your apps. Now this is an interesting one. Google in Android 4.2
I think introduced a new feature which would analyse applications you were
installing and make sure that they weren't dodgy in any way, stealing data or anything
like that.
Turning that on and using the unknown sources allows you to sideload an application
but still check it against Google's good list as it were
to make sure there's nothing bad going on.
Very useful if you're like me and you take a lot of apps in from developers for
reviewing and so on
that aren't actually available through Play Store yet.
Just helps us keep our devices safe.
Trusted credentials
again that tends to come into play with things like exchange server if you're a business user
and have to talk to exchange.
The application manager is very similar to the application manager of old. Shows you
everything you've got installed on the device and
let's you uninstall it as long as it's not one of these stock applications or
preloaded applications as it were.
So if you want to uninstall something go into there, hit your uninstall button.
You can also clear down your data, clear your cache data, or force the application into a stop,
Those sort of things can come in handy as my wife discovered the other day with Facebook
playing up
clearing the cache on the Facebook app solved her problems.
You can also see what applications you currently have running
and using up processes, again this will list absolutely everything
that's available
including the stuff that is stock and running in the background that's required to
actually run
the phone itself.
So, you know, don't be surprised if you do see quite a lot of odd things in there
like filter, and store and factory mode
These are all part of the Android operating system.
Don't turn them off now.
And then if you go all the way to all you can see absolutely everything
for those people that love to scroll.
So if we come back out of there and go into battery again this battery app is very much as we've seen
many times previously.
It allows us to see what the current charge is, how long the device has currently been running on battery
and which
applications are currently drawing down on the battery.
So you can see I've been playing Carmageddon there, my screen has been burning through 70% and my maps has been flicking
on a little bit.
In storage we can see what is using what space and where
broken down by application types.
Pictures video audio downloads miscellaneous data
and then at the bottom what is available.
So here we can see applications are currently taking up 5gig of my storage space.
I can click on applications and I come into the application management just so.
Likewise I can come into pictures and video and I can make changes there as
well
all nice and easy.
It does also show you your SD card down at the bottom as well if you have that installed,
but it doesn't give you the breakdowns.
In date and time
surprise surprise it allows you to change the date and time as well as things like the automatic time zone
formatting
and when your daylight savings is likely to kick in as well.
Developer options is only available if you've done a
particular action on your handset which brings you into the developer mode.
To do that you come into about device
you come down to your build number
and you tap
many many times until you see a message pop up that says
type one more time, two more times, three more times or what have you
and the developer mode will be active.
Once you have your developer mode you've then got some things you can do.
Usually this is pretty much just for developers but there are a couple of interesting
things in here.
Checkout the windows animation scale and transition animation and animator.
If you drop these down to 0.5 or put them on off completely
you can actually
find your device runs a little bit quicker.
It's not actually running quicker but you've actually reduced the amount of animation time
for when you transition between various screens.
By reducing that transition time it makes things feel a little bit more fluid and snappy.
I've never encountered an Android device yet that doesn't work just as well when you put
it off or 0.5 as having it on 1.
It just adds to a little bit of snappiness of the device.
Which, you know, hey, we like snappiness don't we. But those are core Samsung Galaxy S4
settings.
Lots and lots of options there for you to play with.
Have a look and see what you can do with them.