Galaxy S4 settings options and customization guide

Guide to the Galaxy S4 Settings and options as well as how to customize your Galaxy S4, we take a look at all the settings the Galaxy S4 offers and discuss where things have changed.

In past Galaxy models a lot of complaint has been leveled 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 Remote control, SIM change alerts there. 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.
Those are core Samsung Galaxy S4 settings.