This is Samsung’s new Silicon Valley HQ

Samsung works very closely with many Silicon Valley based companies which is why it makes sense for the company to have a physical presence in the area. For a company of Samsung’s size and stature a couple of floors in a business park somewhere won’t do the trick. Samsung needs to have a proper complex of its own that rivals many others that are scattered throughout Silicon Valley, and that’s why it has spent $300 million on a new HQ located in San Jose, California.

It’s a 10 story complex which features a “fitness center in the sky,” a clean room for semiconductors and a total floor space of 1.1 million square feet. The HQ will be split between semiconductor research and development as well as marketing and sales related functions. NBBJ is the architecture firm tasked with the project and it says that Samsung’s new HQ is 85% complete, the tasks remaining have to do with landscaping and interiors. Samsung has not revealed how many employees will work at its new HQ in Silicon Valley.

 

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Having bad Galaxy S6 battery life? Blame Google

The Galaxy S6, like its “edge” sibling, is a fine piece of crafted hardware and software from Samsung, and is a testimony to the company’s growing ability to interpret consumer needs in the changing smartphone market. The Korean manufacturer scaled down TouchWiz in the latest devices, a welcome change for many Google fans who want Google and Google alone in the software experience.

However nice the device, there’s always a drawback or two, no matter the trouble area. Fortunately for Samsung, the drawback in the Galaxy S6 has a bit of a twist. Business Insider just recently wrote a post about its testing time with the Galaxy S6, and the site touched on battery life (a major topic of smartphones and mobile devices in general). We’ve witnessed that Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and S6 edge have provided a few problems here and there for some individuals, with some users getting a few hours of battery life while others get a day of battery life. The site’s conclusion? Samsung’s TouchWiz UI isn’t the problem; the design of the Galaxy S6 isn’t the problem; the battery size in the Galaxy S6 isn’t the problem, and neither is the Quad HD screen resolution.

The culprit, according to the site? Google. Google’s voice assistant, Google Now, is to blame for the Galaxy S6’s battery woes:

I experienced the same questionable battery life that many Galaxy S6 owners were reporting. This one isn’t Samsung’s fault. I was getting only slightly better battery life than with my old Nexus 5, and I was about to put the S6 back in its box and ship it back to wherever it came from. Before I did that, I tried one last thing. I switched off Google Now, Google’s digital assistant, and my battery life skyrocketed to last me about 36 hours on a single charge with relatively decent usage, including music streaming.

In the end, what many consider to be Samsung’s strength in the Galaxy S6 and S6 edge (letting Google’s vanilla Android experience shine through) may be the new devices’ greatest weakness. There’s no way to verify that Google Now is the problem, and this hasn’t been the case in a number of user experiences, but it’s interesting (though isolated), to say the least. If you can never get enough battery life, or want to give the claim a spin, you can always disable it on your device.

Take a look at what we think of the Galaxy S6’s battery life if you’re still deciding whether or not to pick up Samsung’s latest.

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How to use quick settings on the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge

Samsung was the first to embrace the fact that Android’s notifications shade can be used for more than just displaying notifications. It was Samsung that introduced that concept of having a few toggles in the notifications shade for quickly controlling various system settings like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and mobile data. These toggles are being called quick settings these days, and the number of options available have only gone up over the years.

The Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge bring noticeable changes to Samsung’s software interface, including the removal of a few features that many considered bloatware. But the quick settings are still present, and you can customize them to add or remove options as always. What’s different this time around is that you can only have 10 options in the notification shade at any time, while in earlier devices you could expand the list to access all the available toggle options.

But the idea is still the same – quick access to some general settings, an idea others (including Google and Apple) have embraced. If you’re new to Android or Samsung devices, then you might be slightly confused at first, so let’s take a look at how you can edit and customize the quick settings to your liking.

Using the quick settings is pretty simple. First, drag down from the top of your phone’s screen to open the notifications shade. See those five round buttons at the top? Those are the quick settings toggles we’ve been talking about. If you scroll to the left in the quick settings area, you get access to five more toggles. Using these toggles is as simple as tapping them to turn the particular function on and off, plus you can also go into more detailed settings for each function by pressing and holding its icon.

Now, if you are not happy with the default set of options, you can swap them out for other options. Pressing the EDIT button at the top right of the notifications shade will take you into the quick settings customization menu. Here, the ten icons in the highlighted area on the top are the currently enabled quick settings, and the additional options are just below.

To swap out one of the existing toggles with another one of your liking, simply press and hold on the toggle you want and drag it into the highlighted area and drop it wherever you wish the option to be placed. This will replace the existing toggle. You can re-order the toggles to your liking, and you can also remove some of the options if you’re not keen on having all the ten slots filled with toggles.

Once you’re done setting up the quick settings options, pressing DONE on the top of the screen will save your new layout. You can now access these toggles from the notifications from everywhere on the phone (Android lets you swipe down even in full-screen apps for access to the status bar) to quickly turn on or turn off the related settings.

Easy peasy, right?

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Samsung goes after Apple Continuity with Samsung Flow

Samsung has launched a new app called Samsung Flow on the Play Store today. Heard of Apple’s Continuity feature? This is basically Samsung’s take on the same thing and allows you to take whatever you’re doing on one device to another and carry on from there. For example, you could be reading an article on your phone and then switch over to your tablet to continue reading. Or, you could click on a map link in an article on your tablet, and instead of having the maps app open on the tablet itself, you could do it on your phone instead.

Flow also supports pausing an activity and then resuming it at a later point of time. It uses Android’s basic share mechanism to transfer activities from one device to the other, though it is only supported on a couple of Samsung devices for now (the Galaxy S5, Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 edge, Galaxy Alpha, Galaxy Note 4, Galaxy Note Edge, and the Galaxy Tab S.) It’s also a beta and is limited to the US market. Head on to the source link to find Flow on the Play Store, and if you can manage to grab its APK file, do let us know so we can share it here for our non-US readers!

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