By Tomi, Mozillion Team
You’ve just picked up the new Samsung Galaxy S23 and you’re wondering, how can I make this mine? How can I get the most out of my new phone? Here are some of the things that you need to do first…
Lock screen
Let’s start with the lock screen which you can set up exactly how you like. If you press and hold the screen, it flicks up to let you know it’s ready to be customised.
Here you can change the wallpaper, change the layout, change the clock to analog, change the colour and totally make it your own. You can even change the fonts.
A hot tip is to also add your contact information here. Then if you ever lose your smartphone, people will be able to call you so you can come and collect it.
Some of these changes will require you to unlock the phone first to actually be able to use it – like the Chrome app for example. You’ll be able to open it but you’d have to unlock your phone first. When you are finished just click ‘done’ and wait for it to save your settings and that’s that. You now have your customised lock screen.
Home screen
If you swipe to unlock, you can customise your home screen. If you ‘pinch to zoom’ you can change features like your widgets, your theme and your wallpaper sizes.
What’s cool here too is that you can also stack your widgets. You just create a stack of widgets e.g. New York Times, Chrome…and you can change and adjust the size of them accordingly. You can also edit the stack when you have created it or remove it altogether, it is a totally moveable feast of app goodness.
One thing you can also do on the screen here is change the grid size. If you go to ‘settings’, you have different grid options. There is ‘home screen grid’ which is currently set to 4×5 but you can go to 5×6 which allows you to have more apps on that screen space. If you go into ‘screen settings’ you can also change ‘apps grid size’ as well so again you can change it to 5×6 so you can have more apps on that particular screen. In the same place, you can change your ‘folder grid’ as well so again you can have more apps stored or saved in your folder grid.
3 dots
There’s a faster way to drag the ‘quick app’ toggle down too using the middle of the screen to give you quicker access. So for example, with screen brightness, you can tap the 3 dots and go to ‘quick panel layout’ and move the ‘screen brightness’ so it is more accessible.
You just press ‘show always’ and click ‘done’ so it is always showing and you don’t have to drag down to change it. You can also ‘edit the buttons’ using the 3 dots to have your favourite tools available at all times.
Power button
The ‘power button’ is also moveable. You simply go into ‘settings’, use the search to find ‘side key settings’ and change the side key button to another function. The standard use of it is to ‘wake Bixby’ but you can change it to ‘power off’ or ‘restart’ or whatever makes your life easier. Then you can change it all back again if you prefer.
Modes and routines
Still in ‘settings’ there are also some interesting options including ‘modes and routines’. If you go to ‘modes and routines’, you can set different modes and routines depending on your daily routines. For example there is ‘sleep mode’ which turns off certain notifications so when you’re trying to sleep, you’re not disturbed.
Dolby Atmos
Next, we have ‘sound settings’ which means we can improve the sound quality and sound settings when listening to music, playing games and so on.
Simply go to ‘sound’ and ‘settings’ then access ‘sound and vibration’. Go all the way down to ‘sound quality and effects’ and in there you can flick on ‘Dolby Atmos’ and ‘Dolby Atmos for gaming’. This way you will get improved sound quality for your gaming and for listening to music etc. Y
You can also adjust your equaliser here if you know what you’re doing and want to totally customise the audio experience.
Brightness
Back to ‘settings’; when you go into ‘display settings’ you can change things around here as well. There is ‘light mode’, ‘dark mode’ and ‘adaptive brightness’ which will adapt the brightness to the environment that you’re in. This helps with battery life.
There is also ‘extra brightness’ which is very useful when you’re in a situation when it’s super sunny outside.
Motion smoothness
Next there is ‘motion smoothness’ which you can also have as ‘adaptive’ which gives you that 120 Hertz refresh. Or you can set it as ‘standard’ which gives you a 60 Hertz refresh rate.
If you have it on ‘adaptive’, this means that when you are gaming, you automatically switch to the maximum frame rate that is achievable for the best gaming experience.
Edge panels
Scrolling down you have something called ‘edge panels’. If you turn this on, there’s a little tab that appears on the right side.
You can change the location so you can move it to the right or left side depending on if you’re right-handed or left-handed.
The ‘edge panels’ allow you to change the apps that are there as well for quick access. You can also have your recent applications on there or you can move things around.
If you look at all the apps that are available or go back to ‘settings’ using the little pencil icon – here you can drag and drop the apps you want to use. So, for example, if you don’t use Google Meet that often, you can change it to something like Instagram instead. So if you don’t have enough space there, you can use this as extra space to add those apps that you access often.
Side by side applications
Another cool thing you can also do is to run applications side by side. So if you look at apps that are running in the background e.g. YouTube, you can tap the app and then ‘open in split screen’ so YouTube is at the top.
You can then open ‘internet browser’ at the bottom and browse the internet whilst YouTube is playing up top!
You can move them, change the sizes and so on. If you tap the little button in the middle, you can also then swap their positions around. You can even ‘favourite’ the combination which means you can open it up at a touch of a button. This combination can then be added to the home screen or the app’s edge panel.
If you add it to the edge panel, this means that every time you swipe from the side, you can tap that quick function and open those applications side by side every time.
Adaptive battery
Another useful tip is something that can save your battery in the long run.
Go to ‘settings’ and ‘search’ (which is the easiest way to find what you want on the phone), search for ‘battery’ and find ‘more battery settings’.
Here there is ‘adaptive battery’ which allows you to protect your battery.
You can actually limit the maximum charge to 85%. So just like an electric vehicle where you can limit the charge so it doesn’t go all the way to 100%, this just means you extend the battery life over time and your battery health is much better by just turning that little toggle on.
Camera
One last thing to mention involves the camera. If you are a keen photographer and like to shoot in RAW format, you can go into ‘camera’ and switch on ‘RAW mode’.
You do this in ‘settings’ – look for ‘advanced picture settings’ then ‘pro mode’ and then just make sure you toggle on RAW format. Otherwise you could be shooting amazing photos which haven’t been saved in RAW which means when you’re trying to edit them later, you don’t have as much information to play with.
You have the option to toggle on RAW and JPEG or just purely RAW format. This depends on your phone memory size of course but if you have a large memory size, you can take more detailed photos.
There are also options such as ‘expert RAW’ and ‘Pro mode’ and you can place those right at the bottom for quick access. If you shoot lots of food photos for example, you can drag ‘food’ to the bottom too so you have ‘food mode’ ready to go at the tip of your finger.