Our smartphones keep us connected anytime, anywhere, but many of us are finding modern life a little too connected. We’re looking for ways to cut out distractions and manage the flood of incoming notifications.
If you’ve got a Samsung Galaxy handset and you’re looking to embrace the dumb phone life, either temporarily or indefinitely, then you’ve actually got a more straightforward interface option built right into One UI. It’s called Easy Mode, and it’s been around for years, even though it’s not necessarily something everyone knows about.
Besides acting as a way of dumbing down your phone experience and freeing you up from quite so complex a mobile interface, it’s also helpful for seniors or kids who don’t need all the bells and whistles that a Galaxy phone comes with—so maybe this is something you can set up for other people in your family too.
How to enable Easy Mode
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You can switch to and from Easy Mode by opening up Settings on your Galaxy phone, then tapping Display and Easy Mode. You get a quick blurb of text explaining what Easy Mode is, and you can enable it via the toggle switch. Right away you’ll see the text on screen becomes bold and gets bigger
Two new options appear: The first is Touch and hold delay, which lets you set how long a continuous touch on screen has to last before it’s recognized as a touch and hold. It’s useful for people who can’t always be precise when selecting what’s on screen.
The second option is High contrast keyboard, a special black-on-yellow keyboard that will take over from the normal look when Easy Mode is enabled. You can modify the colors of this keyboard, or switch it off if you prefer. The keyboard text will still be bigger and bolder, but the colors will be the same as usual.
How Easy Mode changes your phone
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With Easy Mode enabled, everything is bigger, and, well, easier. From entering your PIN on the lock screen to browsing the web to scrolling through settings and menus, all the on-screen elements are more visible and easier to hit. There are also changes to your home screens besides the larger elements, including the Edge panels being disabled (if you had them enabled).
Swipe left on your main home screen to find a quick shortcut to the Magnifier tool. This takes you to a simplified camera interface, where you can use the zoom slider to take a closer look at something in the real world (such as small text on a document). (The same tool is always available (Easy Mode or not) via Accessibility > Vision enhancements.)
Swipe right on your main home screen to get to a special „speed dial“ page put in place by Easy Mode (replacing Google Discover). To begin with, it’ll just be a grid of spaces waiting to be assigned, but you can tap on any of them to add a contact. It gives you quick and convenient access to your favorite contacts for calling and messaging.
Other tweaks you can make
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Easy Mode gives you a quick shortcut to make everything on your phone more obvious and accessible, but you can change the text size of One UI whenever you like, with or without Easy Mode. Head to Settings then choose Display > Font size and style to make changes, which are applied straight away.
To change the size of on-screen elements, including app icons and menus, it’s Display > Screen zoom from Settings: Use the slider at the bottom of the screen to make everything larger or smaller. Unlike the font sizes and styles customization options, screen zoom doesn’t appear when Easy Mode is active.
More options are available via Accessibility > Vision enhancements in Settings. From here you’re able to apply a high contrast effect to fonts, keyboards, buttons, and other elements, and there are also settings for reducing the number of animation, transparency, and blur effects you see across the interface.