so if you've decided to buy a new Galaxy Note 9 and put $1,000 bill in your
pocket you're gonna want to get your money's worth and that means one thing
mastering the s-pen the s-pen has gotten a major upgrade on the galaxy note 9 for
one it now comes in two colors lavender purple that matches the phone of the
same color and bright yellow to complement the deep ocean blue model but
the new look isn't the only thing that's different
the s-pen is also finely powered by bluetooth for the first time giving the
stylus some new capabilities so let's take a look at some of the new features
and some of the cool things it can do so when the phone is unlocked you when you
eject the s-pen you'll get the Air Command menu automatically if you if you
select that and you'll have six options that are all customizable you click the
little edit button here and you can go into your settings and customize all
that stuff what we'll get into that a little bit later first thing I want to
show you is the remote part of the s-pen which is the new part and it's by far
the coolest thing about it so when you go into the settings you'll see a new
option at the top called s-pen remote tap that and you'll get a whole bunch of
new options first thing you see on the top is an on/off switch turn it off and
it just works just like the s-pen from the note 8 you can use it to draw and
tap and the phone recognizes it but you lose the remote capabilities of the
Bluetooth so if you do turn the Bluetooth functionality off on your
phone and you want to turn it back on you're going to need to put the phone
back into the holster it'll still say disconnected and it'll give you a little
warning that it needs to repair with the phone so you plug it back in it takes
about maybe three seconds it says connecting and it says available take it
out and you're ready to go another thing you'll see right below that is the
battery percentage in this case it says 100% and it usually will say 100% when
you take it out since it takes about 40 seconds for it to charge fully however
it drains very fast if you're using it as a remote to play music to do
presentations and slides and things you'll you can actually see the battery
drain I tested it you know a pretty extreme situation and
I got to about 420 clicks until it died so you know that's probably more than
you gonna need but it does have you know it's about a half hour depending on how
you're clicking and depending on how you're using it for when the pen will
die but you just plug it back in 40 seconds later you take it out and as you
know it's full it's fully charged so it shouldn't be too much of an issue for
many people so below that you'll see app actions and those are the things that
you can control with your button on the s-pen you'll see camera you'll see
gallery you'll see shutter and media things like this there's only a few for
now Samsung has an SDK and developers will get involved in this and they'll
start integrating into their apps and you know there's actually a bunch of
Samsung ones that aren't even available so I say within six months to a year
it'll be much more robust but right now it's pretty limited the default option
and then one people are gonna use the most is the camera so you can customize
the button in three different ways so when you tap on the setting it says hold
down pen to tap on that and you will get a list of all of the apps on your phone
as well as a couple of s-pen features and they can launch when you press and
hold the button for about a second or two and you can also use the button for
single clicking and double clicking which do separate actions so we'll use
the camera for an example so you can set a long press of the button to launch the
camera and you can set a single press of the button to either take a picture
switch between the front and the back camera or record video and the same
thing with a double press so you can you're actually adding two separate
actions to the pen so it works with Bluetooth so you could be up to 30 feet
away you click that button and you'll snap a picture so if your phones at a
tripod and you're trying to get a bunch of people or your you know you're doing
one of these funky selfies you don't have to worry about you know reaching
over to click the screen you can just click your pen so you know it will come
in handy and hints in some instances so there's no speaker in the S Pen so if
you leave it behind it's not gonna make a noise or it's not gonna let you know
but you can turn on an alarm on your note 9 and it will make a sound if you
get out of range of your S Pen the phone will make a sound it would be cool if
the pen had a speaker itself so if you walked away
or if you just lost it you can just ping it from your phone but I guess we'll
just have to wait for the note 10 to get that feature so one last little s-pen
tip is because it's now Bluetooth powered you can reset it so if you're
clicking and nothing's happening you can go to the s-pen remote settings screen
click on the little menu in the top right corner and click reset s-pen it'll
ask you to insert your pen into the phone and it'll take a little bit of
time you know like about 45 seconds and it'll let you know when it's ready to be
used again and off you go so there you have it that's the Galaxy Note nines new
s-pen it'll make your thousand dollar note feel well like a thousand dollars