Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge Tips and Tricks

Android 6.0 (Marshmallow)
Phone: Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
Factory OS: Android 6.0 (Marshmallow)

Have you updated your Operating System?
Then view tips for the most recent OS version(s): Android 9 (Pie) & Android 8 (Oreo)
Or view tips for all Android versions

If you see the following errors:
Resting robot
Exclamation point (for rooted phones)
No command

This indicates that your phone is in Android Recovery mode and often appear when you try to recover or reboot.

To fix this, follow these steps:

1. Once any of the three appears, press and hold your phone’s volume up button for 10-15 seconds.

2. Next, without letting go of the volume up button, press and release the power button once. It will display a menu.

3. Navigate around the menu using the volume button.

4. Select Reboot System Now and your phone should be rebooting

Alternatively, you can do the following:

1. When any of the three appears, press and hold the power button for 2-3 seconds.

2. Then, without letting go of the power button, press and release the volume up button, once. It will display the same menu.

3. Select Reboot System Now and your phone should reboot.

If Reboot System Now doesn’t work try updating first.

Android has a feature allowing you to update Applications automatically. This is turned off by default, but you can turn it on.

Open the Play Store App and press the Hamburger / Menu icon in the top left of the App, on the search bar.

Then select Settings and Auto-update apps.

From here you can chose to do this over WiFi only or using your Data connection.

When using your Calendar App, you will normally be in Month view. To quickly switch to Year view, you can pinch the screen to zoom out.

This is useful if you want to quickly jump backwards or forwards through a few months at a time.

To go from Year to Month, you can do a reverse pinch.

By default, Android will should send you a message when a new version of the firmware is available, however this option may be turned off in the settings.

To manually check and update the firmware at any point, then follow these steps:

Pull down your notifications screen and go to Settings.

Scroll down to About device.

Then click on Download updates manually.

From this screen you can also switch between Download updates automatically or manually.

You can also schedule updates to so that they occur at a certain time of the day (say, overnight). This saves you having to confirm every update yourself.

From the Contact list or the Messaging list, swipe from Left to Right to call a Contact.

This might not work on all models.

If you call someone regularly this can be useful as you will have a shortcut to them usefully placed on your home screen.

To bookmark a Contact on your Home Screen, then first go into your Contacts App.

Find the Contact you want to add to the Home Screen and press on them.

Then press More or the Menu key and select Add shortcut to home.

Then go to your Home Screen, find the Contact you’ve just added. Press, hold and drag to another position.

If this doesn’t work, then try this alternative method:
Go to one of your home screens.

Find a blank space, long press and hold.

Select Widgets, then scroll until you see the Contacts Widget. From here there are various options to add contacts to your home screen as bookmarks.

While in your email App, a handy trick is to pinch and zoom out to see a ‘day view’ of your emails. This is handy if you have a lot of emails and want to quickly sort them by recency.

With the recent versions of Android you can now take photos while recording video by simply pressing the screen.

This will save that particular frame to the gallery while continuing to record video.

To change keyboards (if you have additional keyboards installed), you can switch between them by pressing the small keyboard symbol in the top left of your screen. You will need to be in keyboard input mode (i.e. typing something) for this to work.

Note: you need to have more than one keyboard installed for this to work.

If you find that a particular App is sending you too many notifications, there is a quick way to disable these.

When you receive the notification, pull down the notification screen. Then long press on the notification. You should see a small ‘i’. Press this and you should see the notifications specific to that App.

Simply select Block notifications to disable them for that App only.