Let's take a look at the Galaxy Note 2
settings. If you're used to Ice Cream Sandwich, or
a previous version of android you'll find things have been moved
around a fair bit by Samsung. Partly that is because of Jellybean the latest operating system update
from Google partly because of criticism that some
of their stuff was just buried under many levels of menu. So the top area here, which in wireless networks is pretty much
unchanged, you have your wifi access, bluetooth, you can check your data usage so how much data you've actually been
using and also set warnings and thresholds on there to prevent you from going over
any bundles you may have. In more settings you have a flight mode, access to mobile network changing,
tethering to important hot spots is in here as is virtual private networks and where you can turn your nfc and
communication for other features on and off, and also DLNAs for nearby devices as well. And if you happen to be using Kies by wifi
which is Samsung's updating software pushing information backup
between the device and pc.
Home screen mode. Allows for two different modes really for
using the device. If you're someone who is new to android or
if you're coming from an iPhone where things are a little more basic, you can switch to a basic mode and it
just cuts down on the home screen the amount of clutter. Basic mode is the standard mode and then
you've got easy mode which puts it into a more slimmed down fashion it's much easier to use. This is really aimed at those people who
aren't all that au fait with mobile phones or coming from a
different uh…
Operating system and might be overwhelmed
by the pure number of features that Samsung provide here. if you come into blocking mode here, that
allows you to turn off certain types of alarms between certain times so you can set your your incoming calls,
notifications, set up times to allow them etcetera, really really useful feature. and something that in the past was done
by third party apps. Sound, this is self-explanatory this is where you are going to be setting up your ringtones, vibration settings everything relating to how the phone is going
to communicate to you by audio. Vibration intensity is in there as well you've also got the screen lock sound which
is turned off, that ripple effect is quite annoying.
Display self explanatory again but in here is where your wallpapers will be found
but also LED indicator as well The phone has a little LED and when you get notifications that LED
will flash particular colours depending on the notification you've got. You can go in and tweak all of this here along with your wallpaper. Page Buddy, this is a really useful feature which
detects what you happen to have just done with
the phone, so if you pull the S Pen out it will automatically
flip to S Pen mode put your earphones in it will switch to music mode. Docking
it will go into a dock mode etcetera. Really, really useful and it saves all that
fiddling around going into this mode or the music app. If you've plugged the headphones in then
clearly you want to use music.
You also have your brightness controls auto rotation and screen time out and
two useful features that I found were turned off by default, smart rotation and
smart stay. Smart rotation and smart stay use the camera and sensors to work out
whether it needs to leave the screen on or whether the screen needs to be
rotated intelligently. So if you happen to be lying down when
you're using the phone, you may have noticed on some devices that the screen will start flicking backwards and forwards and it can't quite work out if you are lying down or standing up.
Smart rotation helps to alleviate that
problem and smart stay makes sure that the screen stays on if you happen to be looking at the phone. It uses the camera, detects your face and
says you are still looking at the device I'd best not turn the screen off now, he's
probably using it. A worthwhile feature and quite welcome actually to see that on this device. Little user
experience 5things can make a big difference to how frustrating using a device can be. Really good to see that coming in. You can change your font styles as well if you
are that way inclined, touch light duration which is how long these lights stay on
at the bottom, display battery percentage if you want it
at the top, personally I find that rather scary, I'd rather not know, it's about 50%.
Auto adjusts screen tone as well. The storage areas this provides a running list basically of what you have stored on the device and
what category that would fall into and you can then go into those areas
to see those individual apps as listed and the movement etcetera as you need to. Power saving, really really useful if you happen to be out and about and the battery's getting low
and you're going to be away from charge
for a while flip this on it will drop your power to your cpu and the processor that is running your phone
and doing all the action. Power saving will be turned on for the
screen to drop the brightness right down, background colors will be muted on the internet so if you got a lot background colors
strong background colors use more power white doesn't really use an awful lot of power. And turn off haptic feedback, anything that
happens to be drawing a lot of power off the battery. All of that can then be disabled on the fly. You could check your battery usage and you can see which elements are actually
using the most battery power.
Clearly, the screen is always going to be
pretty close to the top but it allows you to see if you've got an application that happens to be running in the background that is maybe drawing a little
bit more power than you wanted. You can close that one down. And the application manager provides very
similar functionality to the storage area provides everything you've got and all
of your running apps as well and you can see the cash processes. Useful if you need to free up memory or to try to find something that
happens to be chewing up system run times. Locations How is it going to find out where you are? Using GPS will drain your battery very quickly. but on wireless network it's pretty much OK it's reasonably accurate and good
enough to get your basic fix. Your lock screen has loads of information
in here. The controls how your phone is seeing when you first turn it on and before you actually enter.
So this
area here, basically. Within that lock screen you have various security options so swipe, motion, face unlock, face and voice pattern, pin and password and each of these options then gives you
even more options depending on what kind of security
you are going for. and then you got the lock screen options
as well. So the lock screen itself can have
more information included on there like a ticker, dual clock, weather you can turn the ripple effect
in there on and off if you want to. Quick access to the camera
quite useful, with that turned on if you take your phone out of
your pocket like this, put your finger on the screen and then
rotate, it will automatically go into camera mode for you so you don't have to fiddle
with the buttons or anything like that.
And with the camera starting up in a fraction of one one-and-a-half
seconds, really really nippy and quick to work
with your camera on the fly. So those were all your lock screen
options, worth having a play in there see what kind of functionality
you want to turn on. One handed operation. Shall we say security next? This handles all of your encryption
on the device. So if you happen to be working
within a business network there's a very good chance you will need
to have this turned on and enabled. It will allow all of the data that
goes in and out of the phone and the data that is stored on the
phone to be encrypted. Very very useful and very important
if you're working on a corporate network. One handed operation. Because this is such a big device
five point five inches, the vast majority people can't actually reach with
their thumb from one side to the other.
of the screen so what we have is
one-handed operation. What it does is it puts the keyboard
into a floating window which allows it to drift from one side of the screen
to the other. Or for you to drag and position it exactly
where you want on the screen whatever's comfortable to then
one thumb board it. Litterally, it's a small size keyboard
but if you measure it and compare to something like a Galaxy S3 or something else you're actually getting the same size keyboard just properly positioned for where you want to use it. It actually works pretty well and I
found the accuracy is just as good. You've got that flexibility there really useful if you're a one-handed
operator like I am. Language and input, another self explanatory one, this is where you are configuring
what language your device will be operating in and also what language it
will respond to for voice recognition and so on.
And
text to speech input. All of that can be controlled in there. Cloud services are from Samsung. That allows you to back up all
of your data in your device such as SMS messages, MMS messages and
logs.. It's a bit weak frankly, I don't know why they include
that and dropbox. It's useful I suppose but so limited
there are better options out there third party for it. Backup and reset allows you to back up the physical device
and also reset and wipe all the data on the device. And then this is where accounts are
held now If you are coming from Ice Cream Sandwich accounts used to be a separate option
called accounts and you had to go into that then into the account you wanted and
settings and everything like that Now just down at the very bottom of
your settings list and you can then go in to configure each
one of these independently or add a new account.
Add a new account gives you oodles and oodles of different options
including Microsoft active sync and bespoke custom service as well if you want to. LDAP is in there everything you could possibly need. As you add new apps to your device if they have an account option it will appear in your account settings. At the very bottom you have the system
settings motion controls are from Samsung and these are very useful ways that you can use your device by using various
motions to create actions within the device. So direct call. If you have the phone number up on the screen you
don't have to press the call button you can just lift the phone to your head, the phone will detect that you want to
make that call it will then start the dial for you. Smart alert for captionless messages everything available in here there's really
really useful features and to move the icons If you turn over the phone you can
immediately mute or pause what it's doing.
Some useful stuff in there that's worth
taking a look at. S Pen controls are in here as well,
including detachment sounds, dominant hand battery saving popup notice and the alert if you happen to walk out of the room and
not put the pen back in. Accessibility, date and time, developer
options are all pretty standard stuff really and I won't go into those in
too much detail. But if you go into developer options, you can actually make your device
a little bit faster again. Where you have window animation scale
transition scale and animated duration scale put all those on point five by default they are on point one. If you've
got a really fast device the phone won't actually need to wait at
all for the animation to redraw on the screen
It's fast enough to just transition really really quickly.
Works on the S3, works on the Note 2
beautifully and just makes the phone feel a little bit nippier again by a fraction of a second. Hey, we're all about
squeezing every last bit of performance out of these devices. So those are the settings, and the software
of the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Truly a beautiful device, truly a
beautiful software implementation as well.