Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00Hey, what's up guys, MKBHD here.
00:04Welcome back to quarantine content.
00:06Just a little bit of entertainment for you while we're all staying inside.
00:09I'm your host, Marques Brownlee, coming at you from a slightly disheveled, slowly deconstructing
00:16Studio A as we, of course, move to our new space.
00:20And this is what's on my phone 2020.
00:24So this has somehow stayed at like the top of the most requested list of what you guys
00:29want to see in the comments section.
00:31No matter what's going on, people always ask me, hey, where's the 2020 version?
00:36So I'm going to show you guys what's on my phone, but with a little bit of a twist.
00:39So I have showed the layout, like the apps, what's on my phone before, last year, the
00:44year before.
00:45I'll link those videos below the like button.
00:46If you want to see them, check them out again.
00:48This year, my setup is again, as you can see, pretty similar to those.
00:51See, here you go, two page setup again, same general layout of the apps.
00:56I mean, I have Slack on here now instead of GroupMe, and maybe one or two other apps are
01:00different.
01:01But for the most part, you can see what's going on.
01:03It's very similar to before.
01:04But the plot twist, I guess, that you can see is the phone I'm using on the daily right
01:08now is the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, as you can see, for now.
01:12I mean, we both already know there's a ton of phones on the horizon, and I don't typically
01:16stay with one phone for too long as a phone reviewer.
01:20But this is further from the typical standard Google experience that I usually use as my
01:27daily driver.
01:28You might be used to me having a Pixel or a OnePlus phone in these videos.
01:32So I figured I would show you guys some tweaks, some things that I do to make this phone feel
01:38a little bit more stock, or at least behave more like the way I prefer it to, that usually
01:44is the default in stock phones, and just generally the ways I optimize it to make it my own.
01:48So that's what I'm going to show.
01:50And before you even ask, yes, the wallpaper is first link below the like button if you
01:54want to check it out.
01:55You don't have to ask for that in the comments.
01:57You're welcome.
01:58Let's get into it.
01:59Okay.
02:00So with Galaxy S20 Ultra, first thing, of course, I did was switch to 120 Hertz.
02:03You might recall it's set to 1080p, 60 Hertz out the box.
02:08That's in settings and display settings and motion smoothness.
02:11You happen to not be able to switch to 1440p at this high refresh rate, as you're probably
02:16already aware, but I'll take 120 Hertz over a barely perceivable increase in pixels per
02:20inch any day.
02:22But then the second thing I've enabled is gesture navigation.
02:26It's the normal Android button layout at the bottom out of the box, but I'm fully used
02:31to the gestures everywhere now.
02:33And this is also a time to be grateful for searchable settings, by the way.
02:36You don't have to memorize which category, which section, everything you want to look
02:40for is in.
02:41You just hit the search box, type in pretty much exactly what you're looking for, and
02:44it comes up.
02:46You can't use the default launcher with Samsung because you can't, as of right now, use the
02:49gestures with a third-party launcher like Nova Launcher.
02:52I believe that's an update that's pretty shortly coming, and I love Nova Launcher, but Samsung's
02:57launcher for now is pretty workable.
03:00First of all, I always go into home screen settings with a long press and change a few
03:04things in here.
03:05I always change the home screen grid size to 5x5 across instead of the default 4, which
03:10looks a little bit cartoony.
03:11And then in that same setting, I turn on swipe down for notification panel so I can always
03:15swipe down into my notifications from anywhere instead of having to reach all the way up
03:18at the top.
03:20Big phones require big phone solutions, so without having big hands, you can always get
03:25to notifications.
03:26And then I always disable Samsung Daily, that screen to the left of the home screen that's
03:30on by default.
03:31I never use it.
03:32And then in the app drawer, I sort by alphabetical, which is what literally every other app drawer
03:37does by default except for Samsung's.
03:40And then that is pretty much it for my home screen behavior.
03:44So now it's working closer to the way I want it, but there's still a good amount of stuff
03:47to do for a Samsung phone.
03:49Number one, default apps.
03:52And Samsung's not the only one who's guilty of putting their own versions of apps on their
03:55phones, but there's always a couple things that I change that I use more often than the
04:00first party alternative.
04:01So I'm always switching out Google Chrome to be my default browser, and I'm always grabbing
04:06the messaging app by Google.
04:08That's always my default texting app on any Android phone.
04:11And I also set Gboard, the Google keyboard, to be my default keyboard on every single
04:16phone no matter what.
04:17Also, for those curious, I use Spotify for like 99% of my music listening, but I use
04:22Pocket Casts for podcasts, even though I could do that in Spotify just because there's more
04:27features in Pocket Casts.
04:30And then Bixby.
04:31We got to get rid of the last little bit of traces of Bixby.
04:34So by default, long pressing the power button will open Bixby.
04:38So if you go into the settings and search for side key, you can then set the double
04:42press of the power button to be whatever you want, typically camera is easiest to remember.
04:47And then press and hold doesn't trigger Bixby, you can just have it trigger the turning off
04:52the phone menu.
04:53I guess that is the beauty of Android is they might put stuff in your way, there might be
04:56bloatware, but you can disable it, you can remove things, you can switch them up to actually
05:01be the way you want.
05:02So that's the last of Bixby.
05:03Then I go into the quick settings and just clean up those top quick settings to be just
05:07the ones I use the most often.
05:09And then I honestly get rid of the ones I never use because on the off chance I ever
05:13actually do need them, I can always search in the settings to find them pretty easily.
05:17So those are the quick settings that I use.
05:19Obviously Wi-Fi is up there and I do use flashlight a lot.
05:22And then in that same menu, there's a quick panel layout, which lets you show brightness
05:26on top and then you can uncheck show media and devices.
05:30And so now every time you swipe down from the top, brightness is always up there, which
05:34it wasn't before.
05:35And then now with a couple of phones, there's just so much RAM that you can, there's a feature
05:38that'll let you pin apps permanently in the RAM.
05:41The Samsung phone is one of them.
05:43So I do pin my tasks app, which is TickTick in my RAM permanently.
05:49I kind of experimented a bit with also pinning Spotify in there, but I found I don't use
05:53Spotify that much and it opens pretty quickly and it streams in the background fine.
05:57So just my tasks app is always in the background.
06:00And then there's a couple of other small things that I would call like pro tips.
06:04They are from an Android police article that I shared not too long ago, but I'll leave
06:07it down below as well.
06:09These are more advanced, but they are a little tweaks that just work better when they're
06:13enabled, in my opinion.
06:15So number one is use volume keys for media.
06:18By default, the volume keys switch your ringer volume.
06:20So if no volume is playing, I just want them to be purely media volume keys.
06:25So hit the volume button, swipe down, tap volume keys for media.
06:29And there you go.
06:30You can turn on show battery percentage in status bar all the time.
06:33And the beauty again of searchable settings is you go into the settings and you literally
06:36just search show percent and it already knows you want to show percent in status bar for
06:42the battery.
06:43So that's how you turn that on and now you'll know exactly how much battery you have left.
06:47And then the last one, really good one has specifically to do with Google photos.
06:51So I use Google photos as my default backup app for all photos and videos that I take
06:55on my phones.
06:56They go straight to the cloud and then I can look at them on a bigger screen.
07:00But to make sure they always upload as soon as you take the photo instead of hours later,
07:06there's a power optimization trick.
07:07So the advice to find this is to go into settings and search for optimized battery usage.
07:13Then click into that.
07:14Then click at the top, optimize battery usage.
07:17Then switch to viewing all apps.
07:20Then search for photos.
07:23And when you get the photos app, deselect it.
07:26And so now that it's out of that power optimization, it will use as much power as it needs to to
07:30keep you firmly up to date and always upload your photos right as soon as you take them.
07:34So there you have it.
07:35If you do all of these things, you're now running your Samsung phone just like my Samsung
07:41phone.
07:42Of course, there's a bunch of tips that you can pick up for your own setup.
07:44And I will say if you have your own setup tricks, leave those in the comment section
07:48below.
07:49I'll heart some of my favorite ones that can also give a better, more optimized experience.
07:53And really, I don't have to do all of this work for every phone I use.
07:57With some, there's way less and the defaults are typically how I like them.
08:01With some others, there's a lot more work to do.
08:04Some phones fall somewhere in the middle.
08:06But generally, that's now you've seen what's on my phone and what I do to set it up the
08:10way I want.
08:11And that's about it.
08:13Hopefully you enjoyed.
08:14Thanks for watching.
08:15Catch you guys in the next one.
08:17Peace.