Samsung knows the pandemic has changed technology, so Galaxy phones are changing too

The COVID19 pandemic has forced us to work, go to school and socialize from home, which means our technology has reached a new importance in our lives. While the lockdown is over, time at home in 2020 has given Samsung a lot of ideas to improve the smartphone experience.
These takeaways will appear in One UI 4, Samsung’s next major software update, launching on Monday from the Galaxy S21 series.
The update is mainly focused on improving areas such as privacy, ease of use, personalization, and communication, which Samsung has found has become especially important as more people begin to spend more time on their phones during downtime. This is another example of the broader shift that has taken place in the tech industry as companies begin to adapt their products to make remote working and socializing easier.
One of the features of Samsung’s update is the ability to record audio and video during conference calls, an addition inspired by distance learning. “We realized that our users might want to record audio or video while they interact remotely with their teachers or students,” says Jeong. “So teachers may want to record an audio or video meeting to keep track of the lessons or sessions they have taught students.
But perhaps the biggest change affecting Samsung’s strategy when designing One UI 4 is the increased time we spend on smartphones. A recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that screen time among teenagers has doubled during the pandemic, not to mention virtual learning.
So Samsung is trying to make its smartphones easier to see in the long run with aesthetic updates coming in One UI 4. “In terms of visual design, we made many design-related decisions based on the main principle of comfort,” Hyun Kim, head of Samsung’s core user experience team, also told. CNET through interpreters. “As device use increases, the comfort of your eyes [and] reduction of eye strain becomes more important than ever.”
The company has made a number of aesthetic changes to its software, such as reducing the number of colors in the user interface and adjusting the size and layout of fonts. It’s also working with Google to allow for darker screen dimming than before when using the phone in low-light environments. Samsung’s emoji pairing feature that lets you send two emojis at once is also enabled by the way we rely on our phones to communicate and socialize in 2020.
Samsung is just one example of the pandemic’s long-term impact on how tech companies design and develop their products. This effect is also visible in Apple’s iOS 15 software. One of the top features of the update is SharePlay, which lets you easily watch movies and TV or listen to music with others via FaceTime. Such a feature would be especially useful during downtimes, when many people are looking to host virtual movie nights on Zoom.
CES 2021 also showcases the best efforts of tech companies to create products that reflect the lifestyle changes caused by the pandemic. In addition to Razer’s high-tech visor and temperature alarm, we’ve also seen laptops with better cameras that seem to be designed for working remotely.
In addition to the above mentioned additions, One UI 4 also brings features like a new privacy dashboard, the ability to choose to share your exact location with apps, more uniform widgets with rounded corners and more palettes to customize your phone’s theme. . The software is currently available for the Galaxy S21 series and will soon be available on older Galaxy S phones, Galaxy A phones, and Samsung foldable devices and tablets.