16 things you should do with your new Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra

ByNicholas Sutrichlast updated

So many great ways to make an amazing phone even more extraordinary.

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If you just picked up a Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, you're about to get one of the best experiences any smartphone can deliver. But while it's a great phone out of the box, our Galaxy S22 Ultra tips and tricks will ensure that you get an even better experience than ever before.

Upgrade the video quality

Samsung spent a good bit of its marketing budget talking up the high-resolution recording abilities of the Galaxy S22 Ultra. The phone can record at an incredible 8K resolution, but this isn't something enabled out of the box. In fact, the phone doesn't even record at 4K resolution — the industry standard for years now — by default. If you don't change anything, you'll be recording at a rather soft and ugly-looking 1080p resolution, instead.

Thankfully, changing that is quick and easy. Here's how to upgrade your video quality right away.

You can also choose to record in 8K, but there are two notable issues with using this quality normally. First off, 8K recording is capped at 24FPS. That means all your recordings will look a lot more like a movie in a theater than a smartphone recording in one way, but it also means motion in your videos won't be as smooth.

Second, 8K recordings take upa lot of space. You definitely shouldn't even consider this quality option unless you have a Galaxy S22 Ultra with 512Gb or a larger amount of storage.

Customize air commands

One of the coolest things about the Galaxy S22 Ultra's S Pen is that it can do a lot more than just write on the display. When you remove the S Pen from its holster, you can click the button on the S Pen to bring up an air command menu. This shortcut menu is chock full of unique things you can do with the S Pen. While the default menu is great, some of the additional hidden options might be more useful for you.

Unlock your phone faster

The under-display fingerprint sensor on the Galaxy S22 Ultra is fantastic, but you normally have to press the power button first to unlock your phone. That gets annoying pretty quickly, but there's a quick solution. Samsung's always-on fingerprint feature doesn't keep the fingerprint icon there all the time — despite the feature name — but, when enabled, all it takes is a tap on the screen to unlock your phone.

Now, when your Galaxy S22 Ultra's screen is off, all you'll need to do is tap the display when you pick up the phone, and the fingerprint scanner will show itself.

Alternatively, with this feature enabled, you can unlock your phone even without the screen being on. It's a bit tricky to get the placement right since there's no physical indication, but placing your thumb in the exact location of the fingerprint scanner will unlock your phone.

Find apps easier

For some reason, the app drawer on the default Samsung home screen launcher isn't sorted logically — at all. Thankfully, getting them alphabetically sorted is an easy fix. After all, you have the home screen for customizing folders and other shortcuts.

Now your app drawer is automatically sorted alphabetically. Any new apps you install will have their icons placed in logical, alphabetical order, making it easier to find them.

Additionally, you may want to remove any folders in the app drawer to keep things as alphabetical as possible. Any icons placed into folders no longer appear in the main group, making finding apps confusing. Deleting a folder in your app drawer will not delete the app, so feel free to remove any folders and get everything back in order quickly!

Get better game performance

Samsung's Game Dashboard is a feature so good that Google officially adopted it on Android 12. Enabling it will give you quick access to taking screenshots, recording videos, sharing to Discord (and other streaming apps), turning on gaming Do Not Disturb, and even providing an easy way to monitor your phone's temperature and other performance metrics. Here's how to enable and use it.

Game launcher is an easy way to find any installed games. Any games found in the launcher can be further optimized by enabling game prioritization while playing. To do that, open any game of your choice located in the game launcher and follow these steps:

Game prioritization will disable incoming heads-up notifications — to keep you focused on your game — and prioritize the app itself so that performance is at its best. Once Samsung rolls out the throttling patch, this mode should also help alleviate any performance drops you might see after long play sessions.

Add a little color

Android 12 introduced a new concept that changes the phone's user interface to match the wallpaper color. It's a neat little trick that helps make your phone look more likeyour phone and nobody else's. But what if you want to just change the color without changing your wallpaper? Here's how to do that.

When choosing to theme app icons and the UI color, note that only supported apps will see an icon color change. For the most part, this list contains mostly Samsung apps and fewer third-party apps. For instance, as of this writing, the Google Chrome icon doesn't receive a color change to match the theme.

Customize the display

Samsung's phones are designed to look a certain way out of the box. Normally, this means the incredibly brightlight mode, larger text, and cartoonishly vibrant colors. While those settings will certainly make some people happy, you might want to tweak your display to fit your style a bit more. So here's how you can adjust the display and text size, tone down those colors, and make the display a bit more friendly on the eyes (and battery) with dark mode.

Gestural navigation

Over the years, smartphone navigation has evolved from physical buttons to virtual buttons. Now, gestural navigation is akin to the latest and greatest way to control your phone. While Samsung doesn't enable this out of the box, it's easy enough to get a quick upgrade and begin swiping your way through your phone instead of pressing those buttons at the bottom.

Remove Samsung Pay from the home screen

If you've enabled gestural navigation in the above step, you might consider removing the Samsung Pay shortcut from the home screen. When that shortcut is enabled, swiping up on your home screen to open the multitasking overview screen is basically impossible, as it's the same gesture that opens Samsung Pay. Thankfully, you can turn off this function and still use Samsung Pay as your payment app, even on the lock screen.

Swap out Bixby (and fix the power button)

Samsung has worked hard to make Bixby a great tool for many things, but overall, Google Assistant is still the best choice for most people. The power key is used to launch Bixby out of the box instead of bringing up the power menu. So let's fix those two things and get a better experience.

Enable call screening

While Google made a name for itself with Google Assistant-based call screening on Pixel phones, Samsung hasn't sat back idly and done anything at all. If you're sick of dealing with spam calls, Samsung's caller ID and spam protection are easy to enable and will help better filter junk calls throughout the day.

Get a better keyboard

As with many apps and services, Samsung makes its own keyboard that's enabled when you first turn on the phone. While Samsung Keyboard has improved dramatically over the years, Google still makes the best keyboard you'll find anywhere. GBoard, as it's called, is a free keyboard that can be downloaded from the Google Play Store and easily enabled, giving you much better text prediction, customization options, and even nicer haptic feedback while typing.

Time for a privacy check-up

Android 12's other big feature is the privacy dashboard, a new settings section that will help you better manage your privacy across all the apps you have installed. Privacy dashboard alerts you whenever an app has accessed your camera, microphone, or location and keeps a historical record of any time an app has accessed any of these permissions.

Any time you open an app, and it accesses your location, camera, or microphone, a small green icon will appear at the top right-hand corner of the screen. This icon will disappear after a moment, but a tiny green dot will remain while these permissions are still being accessed. So be on the lookout for it any time you open an app!

To find out which apps have accessed any of these permissions — plus several more — you'll need to head to the privacy dashboard. Privacy dashboard on all Samsung phones stores permission access history for seven days, six full days longer than the default setting in Android 12 on Pixel phones. Here's how to find privacy dashboard:

Smart home controls

If you've got smart home devices, you're likely using a service like Google Home or Samsung SmartThings to keep things organized. If so, there's a quick and easy way to control all your favorite smart home devices right from your notification shade, making it just a few taps to turn lights on or off, unlock doors, or set the thermostat.

Good Lock for the win

The Good Lock app is the best way to customize your Samsung phone in many ways. Good Lock can help you multitask better by fitting more app tiles on Overview — that's the multitasking screen that appears when you swipe up and hold or press the multitasking navigation button — which makes it easy to swap between several apps at once without ever having to scroll over.

Good Lock can help with many other things, but we also love the notification history feature enabled by NotiStar. Few things are more frustrating on an Android phone than accidentally swiping away a notification you haven't read yet. There's normally no way toundo this action or find a notification history in Android, but Samsung has developed an app called NotiStar that does precisely that. You can easily pull up your entire notification history and view it at any time, including on the lock screen.

Another Good Lock module worth checking out is Theme Park which, as you might have guessed from the name, gives you even greater control over colors found throughout the UI on the phone. Use it to make some really amazing themes that can make your phone feel truly yours!

Kids' mode

The last tip is for families with children. Sometimes, letting your kids use your phone is a necessity. Of course, this isn't desirable for several reasons, but the worry of kids seeing or interacting with something inappropriate is top of the list. Thankfully, Samsung Kids' Mode is a quick setup and is totally free. So now you don't have to worry about what your kids are doing.

Keep it safe (and from wobbling)

The Galaxy S22 Ultra is one amazing phone, but it's also super slippery. Adding one of the best Galaxy S22 Ultra cases to your phone won't just protect it all day long, it'll also solve one of the biggest annoyances with the phone's design: that awful wobble that comes from the protruding camera lenses on the back.

No matter how you rock it, though, be sure to enjoy your great new phone!

Nicholas SutrichNick started with DOS and NES and uses those fond memories of floppy disks and cartridges to fuel his opinions on modern tech. Whether it's VR, smart home gadgets, or something else that beeps and boops, he's been writing about it since 2011. Reach him on Twitter or Instagram @GwanatuTopicsSamsungSamsung Galaxy S22 UltraSmartphonesAndroid Central Newsletter

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