Samsung Galaxy S9 Tips and Tricks

To lock your screen while you are watching videos, simply press the power button.

This will disable the touchscreen buttons while the video is playing, but it won’t turn the screen off like the lock key normally does.

Note, this will only work on video files that you are playing that are stored on your phone. It won’t work for videos played within websites, such as YouTube videos.

To quickly hide the on-screen keyboard, press the Back button or simply tap on any empty space on screen.

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 want to resize your homescreen widgets, then press and hold on a widget for 2 seconds. If the widget is resizable, then an outline will appear around the widget. Simply drag the sides to resize the widget.

If the outline doesn’t appear or you can’t drag the lines, then the widget is a fixed sized widget.

A handy feature of Android is to quickly clear your notifications.

Simply pull down your notifications bar by swiping your finger from the top of your phone downwards.

Then when you see each individual notification, swipe your finger left or right to clear each one. You can do this with your Apps too – press and hold the multitasking button. Then swipe left or right to close Apps.

Android cleverly uses Picasa to sync photos between your account and your phone. Sometimes however, this means that you will get duplicates appearing in your Gallery when they’re not actually on your phone.

To stop this from happening, and so you only see photos on the Phone or SD card, then follow these steps:

Drag down your notification menu from the top and click on the Gear icon to bring up your Settings. Then select Accounts and Google. Then select your Gmail account.

You should see a list of options that are ticked. Scroll down to the one that refers to Picasa and untick that.

Now that’s done we want to remove the thumbnails from your Gallery, so we need to refresh the Gallery. To do that, swipe down and go to Settings again. Then select More – Application Manager. Swipe across to show ALL Apps. Then find the Gallery App and press Clear Data.

This will erase the thumbnails in your Gallery, so don’t panic that your photos have disappeared. Just wait for the Gallery to re-build its index which could take awhile.

But the good news is that your Picasa Albums shouldn’t be there anymore.

Android now comes with some great battery management built into the OS.

Pull down your notifications screen and select Settings. Then go to Battery and you will see some useful stats such as the time remaining. There are also two other options: Power saving mode and Ultra power saving mode. Select one of these to really make your phone last the distance.

Be warned that these can limit your device quite considerably.

You can also increase Battery Life by minimizing the numbers of Apps running in the background.

Android has an interesting new feature called Talkback which is designed for blind and low vision users.

The feature is an interesting way to navigate your phone however.

Simply go to Settings – Personal – Accessibility – Talkback to activate it.

Then your phone will give you an ongoing narration of its various functions.

If you have used up all of your Quick Launch spaces, then there is a trick.

Once it is full, press and drag an App from the homescreen and move it over the top of an App in the Quick Launch area. Then release your finger. This will create a folder containing the original App plus the new one. This is a great way to have access to regularly used Apps.

Once you have done this grouping, you can give specific name to that folder. For that just open the folder (containing different apps), and tap on Tools tab, and add your desired name.

First open your Contacts App and select a contact. Then press Edit at the top of the screen.

Then should then see some options to either take a photo or select a photo from your Gallery.

To enable this feature, make sure the contact is saved in the Phone memory.