It’s been about two years since the release of the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. You may think you’ve seen everything there is to see on the humble Galaxy S9, but chances are, you probably haven’t explored all the features that the phones have to offer. While some things may not have changed much from the Samsung Galaxy S8, there are still plenty of new surprises that will surely enhance your mobile experience.

Whether you just bought the phone or you’re looking to give it some new life, check out these tips and tricks for the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus.

To get the best wired and wireless headphone experience with your Galaxy S9, try Adapt Sound. The built-in tool measures the frequency levels of your headphones by giving you an audio test. Don’t worry, you won’t have to study for this one.

Give your favorite song a listen. Your sound and overall audio experience should be improved thanks to the boosted mid and high frequencies.

We stare at our phones more than ever. To reduce eye strain and get a good night’s rest, turn on a blue light filter. As the name suggests, this filters out the blue lights emitting from your screen, which reduces the strain and burn that it usually leaves from long exposure.

One of the most talked-about features on the Galaxy S9 was the introduction of AR Emoji, which creates emoji customized to your likeness. While it’s definitely not as polished as Animoji on the iPhone with Face ID, it’s a fun option for chatting. While the look of the camera in Samsung’s new One UI has changed, the process is much the same as the video above.

While it may be fair to say the Bixby Vision is Samsung’s answer to Google Lens, it’s not quite as polished. With Bixby Vision, you use the camera on your Samsung Galaxy S9 or S9 Plus to gain contextual information about certain items and locations around you.

Right now Bixby Vision has seven different categories: Place, Text, QR Code, Food, Wine, Shopping, and Image. In addition to those seven categories, there is also a feature called Makeup that allows you to virtually try on different products from Sephora and provides purchase links when you’ve found the perfect look.

While we have an in-depth Bixby tutorial, we’ll focus on Bixby Vision basics here.

Now Bixby is all set up, here is the fun part. You can easily access Bixby Vision from the Camera and Gallery apps by tapping on its icon. The first time you use Bixby, you also have an option to add a Bixby Vision icon to your home screen.

Shortly before Samsung unveiled its newest flagship, the company promised the Galaxy S9 would reinvent the camera. Along with a ton of other new camera features on the Galaxy S9, Super Slow-Motion was introduced. With Super Slow-Motion, you can capture video at an incredibly high frame rate (960 fps to be exact), creating Matrix-like video footage.

Should you choose to try out the automatic mode, tap the auto mode at the bottom of the camera and make sure the object you want to capture in slow motion is in the defined box. Press the shutter button to start recording. You will see the box turn yellow when it is about to capture the clip. As with the manual mode, you can initiate slow-motion recording multiple times within the same video.

While Samsung did make a number of upgrades to its camera hardware, don’t expect the latest flagship to have a facial identification feature that matches what you find on the iPhone XS. With Samsung’s new Intelligent Scan feature you can unlock your phone using iris and facial data. Be warned, however, that the feature has more than its fair share of hiccups so you may want to set up an alternate authentication method.

To get the best data you’ll want to make sure you’re in a well-lit room without a lot of backlight. You also need to remove your glasses for the iris scan, and once set up you may not be able to authenticate with them on.

If you have sensitive documents or photos you don’t want to share with everyone, the Samsung Galaxy S9 offers a feature called Secure Folder that allows you to store sensitive items in a private, secure folder.

Setting up Secure Folder takes seconds.

Next, you need to choose the best authentication method to access Secure Folder. If you’re using a PIN, password, or pattern to authenticate, you probably want to select something different than what you use to access your phone. Once you’ve entered your preferred authentication method, a Secure Folder will be set up and added to your home screen.

To use Secure Folder, simply tap the homepage icon. You’ll see options to add photos, apps, and files.

Samsung Pass allows you to auto-populate personal details such as your name and email address. Sure, Google provides a similar feature with autofill, but Samsung Pass works in the native internet browser.

Each time you use Samsung’s browser to sign in on websites or enter personal information, it will be saved to Samsung Pass for future use. When you want to use the information stored in Samsung Pass, just authenticate using an iris scan or fingerprint.

Want to customize your home screen? If you don’t want to go as far as changing your theme, there are still plenty of customization options available. Here are a few of our favorite features.

To change the background, follow these simple steps.

If you want to make more extensive home screen changes, long press on the home screen and select the Home screen settings icon. From here you can adjust icon size, change your grid layout, disable app icon badges, and more.

Now that you’ve customized your home screen, why not tweak the always-on display to your liking? While most people are fine with the default always-on display settings, it takes seconds to switch it.

If you want to customize the always-on display, do the following.

While plenty of phones offer a portrait mode, the Samsung Galaxy S9 kicks it into high gear with its Live Focus option. Live Focus allows you to create customized portraits that look stunning.

Next, you can choose to turn off the beauty filter before taking the photo (it’s on by default) by tapping the sparkle icon and moving the slider to zero. Finally, make sure the two Live Focus circles are yellow before pressing the shutter button.

Once you have taken the photo you will see two images in the Gallery. One is your Live Focus shot, while the other is a regular wide-angle shot. Luckily, you can still adjust the background blur to the Live Focus image from the slider that will appear in the gallery.

While you will see both images in your Gallery, you may still want to manually save the images by tapping the overflow icon and selecting Save image. The benefit of manually saving the images is that both will be uploaded to your Google Photos account.

Although Bixby has improved exponentially over the past year, it is still not everyone’s cup of tea. It used to be that you could simply disable the Bixby button, but that’s no longer possible. However, you can make it a lot harder to trigger.

While you can’t officially disable Bixby entirely, you can set it so a single tap opens another app. We’ve put together a guide just for that, as it can be a lengthy process.

Quick Settings Tiles allow you to quickly access frequently used features on your phone. Just swipe down and you can easily connect to Wi-Fi, turn on the flashlight, or even quickly pair a Bluetooth device. If the number of Quick Settings Tiles seems overwhelming, it may be a good idea to make some adjustments.

Let’s be honest: Samsung’s Navigation bar is wacky. The reason Samsung continues to default to the back icon being on the right side is beyond us. Luckily if you’re one of the people who find Samsung’s custom Navigation bar annoying, it is incredibly easy to fix.

Conversely, if you fancy giving Samsung’s gesture navigation a go, head back to Navigation bar and select Full-screen gestures. That allows you to swipe up from the bottom to go home, go back, or access your multi-app selection.

Depending on the carrier, your Samsung Galaxy S9 may come with a lot of apps you will never use. Unfortunately, some of these apps are baked in and can’t be uninstalled without rooting the phone. However, you can hide the apps so they don’t take up screen real estate.

There are two ways to hide apps.

If you need to access a hidden app, simply search for it by name.

Low-priority and irrelevant notifications can occur at any time, day or night. If your phone’s text or email notifications wake you up, you might want to enable the Do Not Disturb feature. With Do Not Disturb, temporarily blocking unnecessary notifications is easy enough. You can even schedule a “notification-free time” when you don’t want to be interrupted.

Obviously, it’s essential that people can reach you in case of an emergency, even if your phone is in Do Not Disturb. To set exceptions, like allowing certain contacts to reach you through Do Not Disturb, modify your rules. Head to From there, you can choose the button and begin listing the contact information or modifications you prefer.

If you’re operating multiple social media accounts on several platforms, you may want to try out Dual Messenger. This tool is included in your Galaxy S9 from the beginning. Using the Dual Messenger app, you can create and share multiple instances of the same app. 

To turn on Dual Messenger, you can follow and hit the toggle button.