Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge have definitely been the talk of the internet for the beginning of the year. Samsung came to the match swinging hard with their totally revamped designs. Not only is the design completly different, the internals are top of the line, and by far. So now that you have such a powerful device, what next? Well I decided to throw together a quick list of 5 things that you should do with your brand new Galaxy S6/S6 edge.
First, disable all of those unwanted apps. There is nothing worse than booting up a brand new phone and finding it is loaded with tons of apps that you have probably never heard of or even wanted to use. Unfortunately, Samsung doesn’t give us the power to completely install those pre-installed applications like WhatsApp, Microsoft services, Lookout, etc.
While there still isn’t the ability to uninstall those default apps, Samsung at least made it easier than ever to disable them. All it takes on the Galaxy S6/S6 edge is going to your application drawer, press edit in the top right corner, then press the minus on any app that you want to disable. It will still be there, but it will no longer ask for updates, take up extra storage, etc.
Once you have the apps of your preference disabled, its time to take care of another prevalent issue with the Galaxy S6/S6 edge. Currently, this is only a problem with T-Mobile because of HD voice, but I’ll go over it nonetheless; it helped me. One issue plaguing T-Mobile users is excessive battery drain from cell standby. The culprit, T-Mobile’s HD voice, also known as VoLTE.
If you are experiencing some battery drain from cell standby in your battery stats, just go to your phone dialer, press ‘more’ in the top right corner, and that will bring some hidden settings. The third selection down is the option to enable or disable Voice over LTE. This will turn your cell standby battery drain from a pesky annoyance to being undetected.
The last thing we will turn off in this list is the annoying Flipboard Magazine Samsung loves to bake into the homescreen. While it isn’t the worst, it isn’t optimized as much as it should be. There is slight lag when swiping from the Flipboard screen over to the next screen. All you need to do to disable the Flipboard screen is pinch the homescreen to zoom out. Once you are there, swipe to the left and uncheck the box over the top of Flipboard.
Now that the little performance hogs have been disabled, it is time to add a few customization features to the Galaxy S6/S6 edge. One thing that Samsung has clearly left out from these devices is the ability to control the amount of time the capacitive keys stay lit. Previously, you could have them always on, always off, or last a certain duration. For whatever reason, Samsung decided to leave this feature out, probably to save that little extra bit of battery.
Luckily for us, developer NotQuiteInsane found a way to control the lighting duration without the need for root permissions. It is called Galaxy Button Lights and can be found on the Google Play Store. I currently use this and have not had one problem. I use the always on settings and even after a reboot, it still remains enabled. There has been no effect on battery life for me.
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Lastly, this is a little trick that can give you battery percentage without taking up precious notification panel real estate. One thing I don’t understand is why the big OEMs don’t include the circular battery icon. It is by far the best looking and it doesn’t take up much room, but I digress.
Once again, there is an app on the Play Store called Battery Percentage which employs a percentage inside the battery icon. That means there won’t be an enormous 24% taking up space. The only issue with the Galaxy S6/S6 edge, is that Samsung still follows some KitKat color scheming and the percentage inside the battery icon is white. It is visible, but only starts after the battery gets lower than 75%. Regardless, it is definitely convenient, even if it isn’t always visible.
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