Samsung Is Giving You a Lot of Control Over Your Galaxy's Display
The gap between smartphones and computers has never been closer: Your phone is powerful and can likely do most of the things you traditionally needed a computer to do. Some things, however, are still quite different. Display settings, for one: The controls I have over my iPhone's display pales in comparison to what I can adjust on my Mac. For most display settings, I'm reliant on Apple's defaults.
That's no longer the case with Samsung—at least, for some devices. While Android devices tend to offer more control over settings (including for the display), Samsung is taking things to another level. The company just released a new "Display Assistant" app in beta alongside the company's One UI 7.0 beta. This new app adds a number of new controls for the display on your Galaxy S24, which can help for maximizing battery life or just generally getting more out of your screen.
What does Display Assistant let you control?
With the new Display Assistant beta, you'll find six different settings you can mess with that all adjust how your display behaves. With "App's screen timeout," you can set a timer per app that turns off the display. Maybe you want to keep your display active for longer on apps like Instagram or WhatsApp, but prefer to keep it shorter for apps like banking or credit card apps.
"Keep screen on" lets you choose to keep your device's display on for 30 minutes at a time, except when you press the power key, reboot the phone, or the battery is below 15%. "Brightness limit profile," on the other hand, lets you override the standard brightness limit on your Galaxy, and push it brighter than Samsung typically allows. Android Police warns doing so will cause your phone to run hotter than usual, and it will take longer for it to cool.
"Adaptive brightness options" allows you to either double or quadruple the speed your display's brightness changes, while "Standard refresh rate apps" lets you set a 60Hz refresh rate for specific apps. This is a good call for apps where you won't miss the smooth motion of 120Hz: Cutting the refresh rate in half will save battery, and since this is app-by-app, you don't have to completely go without 120Hz throughout your Galaxy.
Finally, there's "Screen Curtain," which puts the screen in a "doze" state, as the beta puts it. It doesn't go into more technical details than that, but Android Authority says it puts your display in an "extremely low brightness mode," without actually locking the screen. Samsung says it's good for situations such as phone calls, playing games, YouTube, and YouTube Music, but I'm not so sure about two of those example. Sure, for phone calls or YouTube Music, keep the brightness all the way down (or off, even), but you probably want to be able to see what you're doing if you're playing games or watching YouTube.
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How to try out Display Assistant
If you want to try the Display Assistant beta and have more control over your phone's display, you'll need a couple things. First, this only works on Galaxy S24 devices at this time. Second, your S24 needs to be running One UI 7, which is currently in beta. Once you're running the beta, you can install the app from the Galaxy Store.