Samsung One UI offers several useful features and customization options
Samsung, the leading South Korean tech giant, has always been at the forefront of innovation when it comes to its flagship smartphones. With the launch of the new Galaxy S23, Samsung has introduced its latest user interface – the One UI 5.1. This revamped interface offers a fresh and intuitive user experience packed with exciting new features and enhancements.
The rollout of One UI 5.1 has already begun, and Samsung is slowly making its way to the entire lineup of Galaxy S, Note, Z, A, M, and F series devices and Galaxy Tablets. With this new update, Samsung users can expect a seamless and streamlined experience and improved performance and functionality. Let’s delve into the details of what One UI 5.1 offers and how it will enhance the user experience on Samsung devices.
One UI features for your Galaxy devices
One UI Home
One UI home is basically a launcher that provides a user-friendly interface to do different tasks such as managing notifications, edge panel, and using any app easily; it allows you to make several changes in the devices like changing wallpaper, changing themes, adding widgets and many more, which helps you to fully customize your device.
Here’s how to customize your phone with One UI
There are several functions available that provide the functionality to customize your device; lets us know about them.
Change the location of the screenshot & screen recording
Now you can change the path of the location of the screenshot easily in your desired folder. To change the location, follow these steps:
- First, go to the system settings;
- Scroll down and select Advance features;
- Now click on the screenshot and screen recorder option;
- Tap on the “Save screenshots in” option or Screen recording
- Here you can select any folder or you can create a new folder as well by clicking on the plus icon on the top right corner after doing it click on the done button.
Change wallpaper
The very first thing you see on your phone is wallpaper. It can be of the home screen or lock screen; you can easily change your wallpaper by following these steps:
- Unlock your smartphone
- Press and hold anywhere on the home screen.
- Tap on the background & style button left.
- Now click on My wallpapers, here choose the wallpaper for your lock screen and home screen, or click on the gallery option to set wallpaper from downloaded images or photos that were taken, it will be set.
- Here you can use some different options like Dynamic lock screen, which provides different wallpaper every time you wake up your lock screen.
Walking monitor
Now you will get a new feature in Digital wellbeing as a walking monitor, which will show you the usage of the phone while walking. You can access this feature by following these steps
- Go to the system settings;
- Now scroll down and click on the digital wellbeing menu;
- Here, you will find the walking monitor.
Change colour palette
With the help of this option, you can easily change the colour of different apps, and notifications, to do this, follow the given steps
- With the above process, go inside the wallpaper &style option
- Tap on the colour palette button
- Here you will see various colours of the quick settings and some system apps
- If you want to apply colours to icons as well, just activate the corresponding button
- Touch apply.
Enhanced Eye comfort shield
now the eye comfort shield function has received a new option as enhanced comfort; this option will give you an extra dim color so you can easily read anything on your phone longterm.
- Go into Settings app;
- Tap on Display;
- Now go into Eye comfort shield and turn it on;
- Below you can find Enhanced comfort, tab to enable, and it adjust color tones and contrast of the display more comfortable viewing.
Change themes
Samsung One UI also supports the themes function, which has several; let’s know how to apply different themes let’s understand how to change these theme
- Touch and hold anywhere on the lock screen
- Now click on the themes icon
- It will take you to the themes page
- Here you will find several themes which are available in two categories Paid and free
- Choose any of them, then click on Download
- It will directly install and then change the look of the UI from wallpaper to app icons
Add widgets
Samsung offers several widgets that help users to get info and run certain features of apps directly from the home screen; there are many such apps like calendar, weather, Clock and many more. Here’s how to use them
- First long press anywhere on the home
- Now tap on the widget button from the bottom of the screen
- Here you will get several widget options, such as Google Photos, Clock Calender, Netflix Contacts and more
- Select any of them, and once selected, press and hold it, then drag it to the home screen,
- Now with the new One UI 5.0, you can also add several widgets in one place, so it will save space on your home screen
New Battery widget: Now, with the new One UI 5.1, its easy to watch all the connected devices’ battery levels in one place; for this, you have an option of a battery widget. To use this widget, you should follow the given steps:
- First, Tap and hold on to the home screen and then select the widget;
- Now Tap on the down arrow next to the battery widget to expand it;
- It will show you two different battery widget styles, including Battery status (circles) 4×1 and Battery status (list) 4×2;
- Choose any of them and then long-press on it and drag it to the home screen.
One UI Home settings
As the other functions have other settings that make the usage accordingly, so One UI home also has the same
- Same Touch and hold anywhere on the home screen
- Tap on the gear icon, which will appear at the bottom right of the screen
- Here you will see different options which provide you with the facility to change accordingly, home screen layout,
- You can also customize the app layout and choose anyone as a screen and more options to customize the home screen.
You can manage the lock screen notification
Now you can easily manage the notification from the settings you want to display on your lock screen and which are not, let know about the steps to manage the notification:
- First, Go to the system settings;
- Click on the notification option;
- Now click on the “Lock screen notifications”;
- Tapping on the settings icon on the “show content” option, here you will get the list of the apps, here you can easily choose the apps which can be able to display notifications by turning on the toggle adjacent to the app.
Modes and Routines
This is an exclusive feature of Samsung that allows you to choose a mode based on what you’re doing and perform certain actions, change audio profiles, display settings, notifications, etc.
For example, the sleep Routine profile can be set to activate Do Not Disturb mode and set the alarm as well; you can also trigger certain routines with actions of changing some options like turning on hotspot or aeroplane mode, or opening a pair of apps, Quick share, adjust touch intensity, and more. Let’s know how to access it
- First, go to the settings
- Now tap on modes and Routines
- Tap on mode
- Touch a preset mode ( Sleep, Driving, Exercise, Relax and work)
- You can also add a new mode by tapping on the Plus icon at the last button
- Tap on the start button
- Here you will get several settings dedicatedly to preset changing it
- Now click done
Text Extraction
Text extraction is also available for Galaxy devices with One UI 5.0, and this feature helps to save text from images; it automatically recognizes text and will show a yellow T icon in a box at the bottom right. Touching it, you will see the text highlighted, and you can choose whether to translate it, copy it or search for it on Google. The software can recognize certain text formats and suggest certain actions depending on whether it’s an email, a phone number or anything that has data in the form of text.
Image clipper
The image clipper is a very new option that is exclusively available for the Galaxy S23 devices; there are several rumors resent on the internet claiming that Samsung will expand the image clipper feature for some other Galaxy devices as well, but Samsung hasn’t revealed it officially yet, let know about this feature.
With the image clipper feature, you can easily take a separate image of any object from the original picture, you can easily do this by tapping and holding on the subject which you want to separate, and within seconds it will show you different options containing “Copy”, “Share” and “Save the image”, the same thing you can easily do with the video, just first pause it and then it will give you the same option as the still photo.
Samsung Keyboard
Samsung has introduced its own keyboard app, which comes inbuilt with every Galaxsxy smartphone/tablet; with the latest One UI updates, the Keyboard app has grabbed many new features like new emojis, stickers and more.
AR Zone
The AR Zone is a particular space dedicatedly made for grabbing the AR related things here, and you can make your own AR Emoji, and stickers; you can also take funny photos and videos with up to 3 friends in the mask mode and replace your faces with various funny characters by taping emojis. Here’s how you can use it
There are two ways you can use the AR Zone
- Launch the AR Zone app.
- Launch the Camera app → MORE → AR Zone.
Samsung Dex
Samsung Dex is a screen projection tool that helps to mirror the smartphone screen on the monitor. With the One UI 5.1, it has greatly improved now it has grabbed several new features that enhanced it and made the user experience more smooth.
Galaxy Store
To make the ecosystem enclosed, Samsung has also introduced its own app market, which is named Galaxy Store; with the help of this, users can download and update their apps; the main cause of introducing this app is that, so the company can easily available its own app updates easily and give some extra discount deals if the user installs app from there.
Good Lock for more customization
One of the most anticipated features of One UI is Good Lock; Samsung has introduced it as a pack of customization. It offers several modules which are dedicatedly based on different UI functions like notification panel, wallpaper, Lock screen, app drawer, navigation, and much more. All these functions can be customized through different modules, including Wonderland, HomeUp, Themepark, Quick Star, Clock face, and more let’s discuss them briefly.
Download Good Lock latest plugins and modules for your Samsung Galaxy devices
- KeysCafe: It has many useful features that extend the Samsung keyboard customization, allowing you to create custom styles and more
- MultiStar: It allows you to enable multi-window on all apps and launch it quickly by setting shortcuts
- One Hand Operation+: it allows you to easily control your phone with just one hand, with gestures and actions tailored to your needs, including pulling down the notification shade, accessing the overview menu and much more.
- NotiStar: It won’t let you miss notifications, showing you all notifications received within 24 hours, and you can set an archive window so you can go back and see when you’ve received a notification
- Camera Assistant: This module offers advanced camera settings, such as increasing shutter speed, selecting automatic lens switching to let the camera automatically choose the best lens for a particular photo, setting a timeout for the camera, and much more.
- NiceShot: It offers some useful features for screenshots and screen recording
- Edge Touch: It makes using curved screens less irritating by allowing you to set edge zones where palm touches won’t register, and you can extend the zone as needed
- Nice Catch: logs every event on your phone and lets you see apps that consume too much battery, wake up the screen and even which ones have activated the vibration motor in the last seven days
- Lock Star: It allows you to customize the lock screen so you can move anything you want; apart from a top area, you can set a lock-screen timeout, add stickers and also change always on display settings.
- Quick Star: with this module, you can change the effects of the notification area, and it also allows you to choose a custom colour scheme and status bar icons to display.
- Clock Face: This module lets you add unique styles to your lock screen, with 39 styles available, even for Always On
- RegiStar: With the help of this module, you can easily customize the gesture; you can customize the back tap gesture for several tasks like opening the notification panel, taking a shared screenshot and much more.
How to update One UI
As we discussed earlier Samsung brings a new One UI update every year with each new Android update; the update is available through OTA, so you will get a notification for new updates, and tapping on the notification will redirect to the software update menu here you have to tap on install button, and it gets to start to download and installed after some time. But in case you missed the notification, you can do it manually by following these steps:
- Go to Settings
- Touch Software Update.
- If any updates are found, tap Download and install.