7 Lesser-Known Features You Need to Try On Your Samsung Galaxy Phone

Samsung phones are packed to the brim with features in both software and hardware. Given the myriad of features a typical Samsung phone has, you will likely not know about all of them or might have just not gotten around to using them.

Whatever the case might be, if you own a Samsung phone, you must try out the features mentioned below to get the most out of your device. They’re available on almost all major modern Samsung phones, including the Galaxy S21/S22 ranges, the A52 and A53, the A72, the Note lineup, and many more.

1. Take More Natural Selfies

Samsung phones tend to automatically apply a beauty filter-like effect on all selfies. Due to this, your face will look brighter as the photos are usually over-processed and over-sharpened. All blemishes are also wiped away to give your face a smoother look.

In case you are not a fan of this, though, you can set your Samsung phone to capture more natural-looking selfies.

1. Open the Camera app and tap the Settings icon in the top-left corner.
2. Scroll down to Selfie color tone and select Natural.

A preview will be shown, so you can decide if you like the natural processing more or the one with the beauty filter applied.

2. Set up Bixby Routines

Bixby Routines is among Bixby’s best time-saving features and one of the most underrated features of Samsung phones. You can use it to automate daily tasks, like automatically putting your phone on silent when you enter your workplace, resuming music playback when you get into your car, and more.

Bixby Routines is tucked away under Settings > Advanced features > Bixby Routines. Samsung offers some pre-made routines, but you can also create one as per your requirements.

When a particular event happens, Routines allows you to trigger a specific action like playing music, putting the phone in low power mode, and many other things. These events can vary from the time of the day to the battery level, to you receiving a new message.

3. Tweak the Flashlight’s Intensity

Whenever required, you can use the LED on the back of your Samsung Galaxy phone as a flashlight. For this, you just need to use the Torch toggle from the Quick Settings panel. What you probably don’t know is that you can also tweak the flashlight’s intensity. Here’s how.

1. Open the Quick Settings panel by swiping down twice from the notification shade.
2. Tap the “Torch” text below the Torch tile in the panel.
3. You can now select between five different levels of flashlight intensity and toggle it on as well if you wish to.

You can adjust the intensity even when the flashlight is enabled.

4. Reduce Space Taken by Photos and Videos

If you take a lot of photos and videos from your Samsung phone, you can save them in the HEIF and HEVC formats to reduce how much space they take up.

This change is unlikely to have any impact on regular use, but the space savings will be substantial. You can only run into some compatibility issues when you try to open the media files on some older PCs or phones, but that’s about it.

Follow the steps below to save photos in HEIF format on your Samsung phone:

1. Open the Camera app and tap the Settings icon in the top-left corner.
2. Under Pictures, select Picture formats.
3. From the menu that opens, toggle the High efficiency pictures option.

You can continue to record videos using the H.264 codec if you wish to. If not, follow the below steps:

1. Open the Camera app and tap the Settings icon in the top-left corner.
2. Scroll down to Videos and select Advanced recording options.
3. Enable the Reduce file size option to record videos using HEVC codec.

5. Quickly Access the Notification Panel

Accessing the notification panel on your Samsung Galaxy phone can involve quite a bit of finger theatrics, especially if it has a large display. Thankfully, there’s an option in Samsung’s One UI launcher that will let you quickly access the notification panel with a simple swipe down anywhere on the home screen.

For this, head over to Settings > Home screen, scroll to the very bottom and enable the Swipe down for notification panel option.

6. Change the System Color Palette

If your Samsung Galaxy phone is running One UI 4 or One UI 4.1, you can tweak the system color palette. By default, the system pulls the color accents from the wallpaper you are using, but you can select a different color palette if you wish to.

1. Navigate to Settings > Wallpaper and style > Color palette on your Samsung phone.
2. Various color palettes extracted from the wallpaper’s hue will be listed and a preview will be shown above it.
3. Select the palette you like. Enable the Apply palette to app icons if you wish to apply the hue to the shortcuts too.

Do check out the best new features in One UI 4.1 to find more cool things to do in that version of Samsung’s skin.

7. Customize the Side Key Function

You can use the side key—the power button—on your Samsung phone to quickly launch an app of your choice. By default, long-pressing the button is set to trigger Bixby, which many users find annoying. Thankfully, you can set it to bring up the power menu. Here’s how.

1. Navigate to Settings > Advanced features > Side key on your Samsung phone.
2. You’ll find the option to customize the double press and the long-press functionality of the side key here.
3. To open an app of your choice when the side key is double pressed, tap the cog icon, and make your pick. You can also choose to quickly launch the camera app here as well.

Make the Most of Your Samsung Galaxy Phone

With so many features in a Samsung phone, you are bound to feel overwhelmed at times. However, the features we’ve outlined above will help increase your productivity level, solve some pain points of the UI, or just improve the overall experience of using the device.

And if using Bixby Routines has inspired you to take a closer look at the things you can do with Bixby, we’ve got a guide that will help you.