Newsletter
The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge smartphones from Samsung are about to become history, as the company gets ready to announce their new flagship phone for 2016. However, these are still pretty amazing devices and the company keeps giving it some attention through software updates. Although it’s been months since Google introduced Android 6.0 Marshmallow, only a couple of weeks ago that Samsung started rolling out the update from Android 5.1.1 Lollipop for South Korean consumers. The new software will be made available to consumers around the world in the following weeks, but if you are eager to know what has changed in the system, here are some good news: an internal document from Samsung has leaked online, explaining with details some changes made to the newest version of Android.
Visually you will notice some differences, starting with the lock screen, which got colorful icons for the Phone and Camera shortcuts. Additionally, the clock is now centered and the weather information seems to be gone. If the device has an unlocking pattern, now it takes two steps to unlock the phone. Previously, the dots for the pattern were shown right away, but in this new version the user has to swipe the screen and then enter the unlock pattern, adding a second step to the process. There’s more added to the lock screen, most notably the increase of waiting time after 12 failed attempts to unlock the device. Additionally, a new setting named Auto factory reset” will wipe out the phone if there are 15 failed attempts to unlock it.
Now jumping to the user interface, Samsung has finally unified the visual outlines of their own icons, giving them a rounder look, so now the Phone icon doesn’t look weird with other icons in the bottom bar. The company has also revamped the Quick settings panel. First, it seems that the colors have been changed to light gray instead of the previous blue. Second, the Edit button has been put behind an Extended pane, which shows all the icons available for toggling, and S Finder and Private Mode also made their way to this panel, instead of being persistently shown, taking up a lot of space. Other goodies include the ability to change individual app permissions, improvements in the Messages app, new emojis, support for the MIDI audio format, and much more. As mentioned before, the update started rolling out to South Korean users and should be made available for other countries in the coming weeks or months, so sit tight and keep tuned with us to stay up to date with the arrival of Marshmallow to your device.