Why do my smartphones say that the Internet has stopped? How to remove TouchWiz on your Samsung smartphone
The shell (interface) is the calling card of any Android smartphone. The degree of satisfaction with the device as a whole depends on how well thought out and easy to use it is. Today, one of the most common shells among Android smartphones is TouchWiz, a proprietary shell for Samsung smartphones. The latest edition of TouchWiz debuted along with this year's flagship Samsung Galaxy S4 brings a lot of changes. Soon this shell will be used on all new devices of the manufacturer. In order not to repeat ourselves every time in reviews of new Samsung products, we described all the features TouchWiz skins in a separate article.
The current TouchWiz shell is based on the operating system - the most current at the time of writing this review, not counting smartphones developed jointly with Google. In this regard, we note that updating TouchWiz to the current version can be expected along with firmware containing Android 4.2.2 and vice versa, firmware containing an update to the operating system to version 4.2.2 will also carry latest edition TouchWiz shells. By tradition, the description of the interface begins with the lock screen, that is, what the user first sees when turning on the smartphone. But in this case, we will move somewhat away from the usual framework and start from the very beginning - the first time you turn on the smartphone.
Special and basic settings
The first thing the user is asked to do is select the interface language. Then there are two options: go to “special features” or “Next”. “Accessibility features” mean enabling automatic screen rotation when changing orientation, backlight timeout, voice pronunciation of passwords you enter, options for answering/ending calls, and others. If everything is very clear with the first three points, then the subsequent ones require a more detailed description.
Answer/End Calls includes settings for answering and ending calls. All possible options can be seen in the given screenshot. These include receiving a call using the hardware Home key, a separate key on the touch screen, and also using your voice. You can end a call either in the traditional way, by pressing a key on the touch screen, or by pressing the hardware “Power” key on the right side of the case. Thus, the need to access the touch screen is completely eliminated, which can be useful in cases where the smartphone does not have a special sensitive layer that allows it to respond to touches by any objects. For example, in winter, when your hands are in gloves and you need to answer the phone. You will either have to remove them or use the described settings in advance.
Following the settings for answering calls, there are font size settings, displaying the “special features” menu when you hold down the power key, saving all selected settings and then sending them via Bluetooth, NFC or transferring them to a computer, scaling the image on the screen with a triple press, displaying in negative , color adjustment, on-screen text-to-speech conversion, sound adjustment, auxiliary menu appearance and partial blocking touch screen. As you can see, there are more possibilities than you can imagine, and few Samsung Galaxy S4 owners know about the presence of most of them. A significant portion of these features are designed to help people with disabilities, which is commendable because such devices are very difficult to find.
Having configured or skipped the settings with special features, we continue to personalize our gadget - we set the date, time, and also add existing or create new accounts in Samsung account and Google. Accounting Samsung entry allows you to automatically archive messages and call logs in case you need to restore them. Google has something similar. For example, if you previously used another Android smartphone where you had configured Account Google, when setting up a new device, it will be enough to enter it so that the applications available on the old smartphone are installed on the new one. The same applies to saved passwords for Wi-Fi networks, browser bookmarks, contacts, photos, calendar, and so on.
The next important step in setting up your smartphone is “Basic Features”. As with setting up special features, there is a very large number of various items here. Let's list them all in order: S Beam– a function for wireless (using NFC and Wi-Fi Direct) data exchange with a similar device. To exchange, just turn on the S Beam in the menu and bring the back side to another smartphone;
Guidance– the principle of operation is explained in the screenshots;
Gesture control– control the device using gestures without having to touch the screen. This is another feature that makes it easier to work with a smartphone in difficult weather conditions;
Intelligent anticipation– the smartphone follows your gaze using front camera and, depending on whether you are looking at it or not, turns the display backlight on or off;
Smart pause– the principle of operation is the same as that of smart wait, but is used to control the video player - if the user looks away, playback is paused and resumes when he looks at the screen again;
Smart Scroll– works in the browser and mail client. When the screen is tilted to the side, the smartphone automatically moves to the next or previous letter, or turns pages;
Easy mode– a simplified view of the shell, designed for users who have not encountered Android smartphones;
Display optimization– the last settings menu, in which the user is asked to set an optimized display mode that works in the camera, gallery, video player and browser. Optimization affects the adjustment of color balance, saturation and sharpness of the image.
That's it, with preliminary settings it's over! You can start using your smartphone.
And only now can we move on to describing the capabilities of the Desktop, Lock Screen, Notification Panel and more.
Lock screen
The lock screen is the first thing an Android smartphone user encounters when waking up from sleep mode. On the lock screen, from top to bottom, the following information is located: a clock or a personal message (you can choose a color, font type) with the clock and date, as well as the name of the operator.
If desired, you can add five shortcuts here for quick access to applications, and remove the hint on how to unlock the screen. In addition, the user can choose how the screen will be unlocked. To do this, he is offered seven options to choose from, including an option without blocking.
No less interesting is the ability to automatically remove the blocking when you are in certain areas (determined by Wi-Fi networks). When active mode auto-unlock, the smartphone itself will unlock the screen in places specified by the user, while the screen lock will be disabled. There is also the possibility of choosing one of two unlocking effects or using the standard one built in by yourself. operating system. Finally, the last option for unlocking is using your voice. To do this, you need to press the “Home” key and say a predefined or existing phrase. It is worth noting that voice control in the new Samsung models implemented at a very good level. See the work voice control can be seen in the video review.
The last thing to talk about when describing the lock screen is widgets. We have already written about one of them - a watch or a personal message, but there are many others. To access them, you need to swipe the screen in the clock widget area from left to right or right to left. If lock screen widgets are enabled in the menu, then when you move from right to left, you will be taken to a page with 11 shortcuts, or launch the camera. All 11 shortcuts can be replaced with any others available on the device. If you slide the screen from left to right, you will find yourself in a window with many widgets, some of which are pre-installed and some that you have downloaded. In total, the lock screen, in addition to the main window, can contain four additional windows with custom widgets, and one with shortcuts quick launch or access to the camera. To date, TouchWiz has the most extensive options for personalizing the Lock Screen.
Desktop
The desktop is the screen where the user ends up after unlocking the smartphone. It can contain from one to seven
windows with widgets and shortcuts located on them.
Clarification: if the smartphone was locked while an application was running on it, then when the lock is removed, it will be displayed and not the Desktop. To get to the Desktop you need to press the “Home” button.
There are five shortcuts at the bottom of the screen: four for accessing applications and one for calling up the Application List. The location of the shortcuts can be changed at your discretion. In addition to shortcuts, there may be folders with shortcuts at the bottom of the screen. To create them you need to call context menu(using the “Menu” key), and select “Create a folder” or touch the shortcut and do not release it until the icon for creating folders appears in the upper left corner of the screen, where you need to drag the shortcut you selected. The third way to create folders is to hold on a free part of the Desktop and then select the “Folder” item in the menu that appears. Folders can contain more than 35 shortcuts.
In order to display all desktop windows on one screen, you need to move two fingers. In the menu that appears, you can choose which window will be the main one or delete unused ones.
Moving between windows is carried out using the standard method for touch devices - scrolling, or by pressing and holding on the area above the shortcuts at the bottom of the screen, where there are two, three, five (depending on the number of Desktop windows) rectangles, one of which looks like a house.
Installing widgets and shortcuts on the Desktop is a simple and straightforward task. To do this, you need to drag the object you need from the corresponding section or click and hold on the free space of the Desktop, and then select the desired item in the window that appears. When you install any of them, thumbnails of all windows appear at the bottom of the screen with a schematic representation of the widgets and shortcuts located on them, which show where there is free space left. If there is no free space, but the Desktop allows you to add another window, your smartphone will automatically perform this operation for you. Some of the widgets support scaling - another way to compete for free space.
List of applications
Application list – a menu where all the applications available on the smartphone are collected. From here you can go to the “Widgets” and “Downloaded” tabs.
Here, as on the Desktop, folder creation is supported. True, unlike the Desktop, there is only one option for creating folders - through the context menu. All labels are arranged in a 4x5 matrix. Labels can be swapped, sorted alphabetically, in list form, or at your discretion. From here you can also send any of available ways links to applications installed by the user, as well as hide any of them.
Notification panel
The notification panel is a window that can be accessed by swiping down the screen from its top edge. It contains notifications about current events (letters, messages, information about application activity, etc.), icons for controlling various modes smartphone operation, as well as a brightness adjustment scale. By clicking on the icon in the upper right corner, you are taken to a menu with all possible settings icons. There are a total of 20 different icons. To change the operating mode of a particular module, just touch it. If you want to go to the settings of this parameter, you need to hold your finger on it for a few seconds.
Telephone functions: calls, contacts, messages
With each new generation, smartphones acquire more and more new functionality, but despite the progress, the smartphone still remains a means of communication, therefore, it is used for making calls, sending and receiving messages. Samsung does not forget about these functions, improving these parameters with each new version shells. The digital dialing keyboard contains not only numbers, but also letters of the Latin and Cyrillic layout. This means that when you dial a number, the smartphone automatically matches the entered data with contacts from phone book not only by phone number, but also by letters.
During a conversation, the user has the following functions: turning on the speakerphone, turning off the microphone, connecting a Bluetooth headset, as well as turning on high volume, noise reduction, and adjusting the sound (adaptive, soft or ringing). In addition, during the call you can go to contacts, notes and messages. If the number to which the call was made is not saved, at the end of the conversation you will be asked to add it to your contacts.
The call log groups identical numbers, showing in brackets on the right the number of incoming and/or outgoing calls to the same number. To find out detailed information about received calls, you need to click on the number of interest.
When making a call, the contact picture is displayed on half the screen. To quickly dial a number, just swipe across the contact field from left to right. To send a message, from right to left. Simple and very convenient!
A huge amount of information can be added to each contact in the phone book, ranging from a personalized ringtone for voice and video calls to messages. In addition, a contact can contain a date of birth, more than ten phone numbers, the same number of events, one of several call options and a lot of other information. In the settings you can set which contacts will be displayed, all or only those that have phone number, specify the sorting type: first name, last name and display: first name, last name.
The TouchWiz shell text keyboard supports predictive input (T9) and gesture typing. By adding a media file to a message, it is automatically formatted as multimedia. Using the volume keys, you can change the font size, and by pressing the menu key, you can add emoticons or text, and you can also set the message to be delayed by setting the time and date when it will be sent. If you wish, you can use a translator, although the Cyrillic alphabet is not yet supported. The last thing you can do with the message is to add the recipient to spam numbers.
In the message settings, the user specifies when the limit is reached, old messages and MMS will be deleted automatically. Here you can also find settings for receiving reports, SMS and MMS centers, but more interesting are the choice of message background and style. In addition, in the settings you can set an alert in the notification panel about incoming messages, turn on the screen backlight when received, a ringtone and vibration, the frequency with which the smartphone will remind you of an unread message and whether to show the message text in the status bar.
In addition to the described features, the TouchWiz shell is distinguished by a set of pre-installed software, including the well-known Premium Suite, which we examined separately using the example of a Samsung smartphone Galaxy Note II and ChatOn messenger. In order not to repeat ourselves, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with the set of applications included in the Premium Suite package by following the link; here we will concentrate on the remaining programs and utilities. Clock – a set of four utilities: alarm clock, world time, stopwatch and timer. There is no need to explain the purpose of each, we will only note the capabilities of the alarm clock, since it has something to describe. So, in addition to the ability to ring at a given time, the alarm clock allows you to specify the day of the week, select the melody and type of signal, its volume and trigger only in specified places, set to pause with a specified repetition frequency and, best of all, has an intelligent signal. Triggering based on a given location is useful in cases where you are not at home. Having determined by network or GPS coordinates that the subscriber is in a different location, the alarm clock will not go off, even if it is usually supposed to wake you up that day. Convenient if you travel frequently. Pause will be useful for those who find it difficult to wake up from just one alarm, and the smart alarm is one of the most pleasant features of TouchWiz. The user sets the time before the alarm goes off when this signal turns on. Its main difference from an alarm clock is that the melody starts playing at a minimum volume, and the melody itself is the sounds of nature. As a result, before the alarm goes off, you will already be warned by the pleasant sounds of nature, which will help you avoid a bad mood in the morning.
The advanced calculator (in landscape mode) allows you to choose from three font size options.
Voice recordings can be saved to the device’s memory or to a card, in stereo or mono mode using noise reduction during recording.
We will separately talk about applications for listening to music, FM radio and watching videos. The audio player can sort songs by playlists, albums, artists, music square and folders. Playlists include: favorites, popular files, recent files or recently added.
For ridiculous appearance, frequent freezes, a large amount of “garbage”, and if the latter is solved by minor updates, then you will have to come to terms with the design. However, we should not forget that TouchWiz also has a bunch of useful functions that are not available on stock Android or anywhere else. Meanwhile, many users had no idea about this, so today we will dispel this myth and show what the Samsung system is really capable of, which is updated through the years and has managed to remain “unchanged.”
Below are the most interesting features:
Multi-window mode
Many people want to use more than just one application at a time. For these, the company has come up with a multi-window mode that will allow you to open applications as windows on the desktop, as well as divide the screen itself into several applications. All this will significantly speed up and simplify the use of the device, rather than constantly switching from one application to another if necessary.
One-handed mode
Size matters, which is why the company decided to compromise by implementing a one-handed feature. Hold the steering wheel, cook dinner, stand in the subway: is your other hand busy? "One hand" is your choice.
Call optimization
Stock Android 5.0 has learned to hold a call background in case you decide to switch to the desktop and use the device to the fullest. The function is convenient, but TouchWiz has significantly improved it: now you don’t need to pull the curtain to open the call window. The subscriber is displayed as a small square on the left edge of the desktop - convenient. In addition, in Note Edge you don’t need to go to the application at all; you can answer a call directly from the desktop using a swipe on the side screen.
Sorting the application list
Everyone knows that it is impossible to change the location of icons in the menu of all applications, however, not for TouchWiz, which is able to sort them in various ways: combine them into folders, show only downloaded ones, and so on.
Hiding an application is not a problem
Along with the above, the functional features are complemented by the ability to hide icons from the menu of all applications, thanks to just a couple of gestures. Do you want to hide your personal information from prying eyes? TouchWiz makes it easy.
Quick access to switches
In 5.0, to go to quick settings you need to pull the curtain twice, in TouchWiz - once: at the top the curtain has a horizontal scroll menu, which includes many switches. Meanwhile, in addition to quick access, we have the power to edit them.
Close everything at once
Stock Android does not have the function of automatically closing all open applications; on the contrary, TouchWiz can surprise you with such a useful and necessary function.
History of the calculator
For many students and engineers, a functional calculator with the ability to remember previous actions plays an important role in a smartphone; this is exactly what the built-in solution from Samsung is.
File manager
Surprisingly, in stock Android there are no basic applications in the list file manager. "Android is a symbol open source- they said. Of course have Google Play. But why, when TouchWiz has a beautiful and effective manager built into it?
Quick sound settings
The new version of Android has received wider customization of sound effects, but to edit them extensively you need to go straight to the settings, while in TouchWiz all this can be configured in a pop-up menu from the desktop.
Battery Saving
And we continue to compare with the stock version, which received battery savings only in Android 5.0, TouchWiz, in turn, received this function much earlier; Korean engineers are constantly updating and optimizing it.
Disable or disable
By holding the power button we can turn off our device - everyone knows this, however, in addition to the shutdown button, TouchWiz received a wider menu in which you can switch to Airplane mode, Emergency mode, restart the device or turn it off.
Swipe to call
Copy quickly
According to colleagues from phonearena, copying text is always accompanied by some problems, which are even more noticeable on small screens, but for TouchWiz this is not a problem, except for the larger edges of the selected text, Note 4 and Note Edge, having an S-Pen, are able to select text only “floating” on the surface screen without touching it.
14 TouchWiz Features Vladimir Ukhov
Android is an open source system source code. This means that once Google creates it, it also shares it with other software creators, who can do whatever they want with it. An example of this is the TouchWiz user shell, which has been the subject of heated debate for many years now - not all people are its fans. If you're looking to remove TouchWiz from your phone, we'll walk you through a few options that can help you do it, whether you're a regular user or an Android expert.
All Samsung smartphones have a proprietary home interface called TouchWiz. Since the recalled Galaxy Note 7 model, the new interface Grace UX. With Samsung devices updated to Android versions Nougat this new design was expanded. The interface has undergone some changes, including the name (from TouchWiz to Samsung Experience), as can be seen in Galaxy flagship S8. However, not all users like this new user interface. If you own a Samsung smartphone, but have not found a common language with its interface, we will help you part with it.
Disabling TouchWiz apps (without root)
The steps below will not completely remove TouchWiz from your device, but they will rid it of various annoying updates that constantly request pre-installed applications and which constantly “eat up” internal memory devices. You can get rid of notifications and apps that were pre-installed by Samsung. To start, get rid of the shortcut and widget, but to actually stop the application, go to the Application Manager, find the application you need and click on it.
Once you are logged into the application, follow these steps:
- deselect the “Show notifications” option;
- clear cache;
- delete data;
- Click on the “Disable” icon.
Now the application will only be in sleep mode, plus it will not be updated and will remain at its original size. If you want to turn it back on, open the Application Manager and in the Disabled section you will see all the applications that you disabled previously.
Installing a third-party launcher instead of TouchWiz
This is the most drastic change you can make without rooting your device. If Touchwiz's icons or high-contrast backgrounds aren't your thing, you can always give it a makeover to make your Android user experience more palatable.
Using a third-party launcher, you will be able to change the appearance of your desktop and icons. To do this, go to the Google Play Store and download one of the many launchers available, the most popular of which are Nova, Apex and Google Now.
After you open the launcher you installed for the first time, your smartphone will ask you which launcher you would like to use. Select the one you recently installed and click on the “Always” icon. If for some reason you want to return to TouchWiz again, go to Settings>Default Applications>Home Screen, then select your launcher and click on the Home key.
Uninstalling TouchWiz: installing AOSP ROM and getting root rights
If you wish to completely remove the TouchWiz interface from your device, your only option is to install a new custom firmware (ROM). Doing so will void your device's warranty, causing the Knox counter to reset to zero.
To reflash your Samsung smartphone, you will definitely need special program Odin. In addition, before flashing you must install software called Custom Recovery, and then install a new custom ROM firmware from it. Some of these firmwares include root rights initially, while others may not have such rights.
The most common Custom Recovery option for Samsung is TWRP. To install it you will need the correct file for your phone model (you can download it from official page TWRP). To install Recovery from using Odin, you will need a file with a .tar extension.
Once Custom Recovery is ready, you can start searching for a ROM without TouchWiz elements. By the way, if you have a little knowledge English language, you should take a look at the forum of xda-developers.com, where you can find many custom firmware based on pure Android (AOSP). You should also find out how often such firmware is updated, and read the comments of forum users. If you don't know where to start, then Lineage OS may be the right option.
Do you like the TouchWiz interface? If not, what changes have you made to make it better? Tell us about it in the comments.