One of the most underrated features of Touchwiz on the Samsung Galaxy S7 andGalaxy S7 edge is the Private mode. This feature has been a part of Touchwiz right since the Galaxy S4 days, but not many people know about it.
Private mode is a great way of hiding your sensitive and important files and photos in your phone from prying eyes. And with fingerprint support, Private mode on the Galaxy S7 is now better than ever. Compared to third-party apps, Private mode on Touchwiz is better integrated and discrete, so most people will never know that you have actually hidden anything from them.
So, here’s how to use the Private mode on the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge to hide your important files and photos.
Step 1: Go to Settings -> Privacy and Safety -> Private mode. Toggle the Private mode switch to On, which will then prompt you to go through the set up process. During this process, you will have to set up a pattern/PIN unlock to access Private mode. Note that this pattern/pin will be different from the one that you use to unlock your device.
Step 2: To set up fingerprint unlock, tap on ‘Private mode access type’ and enable the ‘Fingerprints’ option from under ‘Alternative verification.’
Step 3: You can hide files in Private mode in Gallery, Music, Voice Recorder, and My Files. Open any of the applications, select the file you’d like to hide, tap on ‘More’ at the top-right corner of the display and select the ‘Move to Private’ option.
The contents that you move to Private mode will now only be visible when you enable Private mode on your Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 edge. To quickly enable Private mode, simply expand the Quick Settings panel from the notification shade and tap on the ‘Private mode’ option. You will have to verify your identify using the password/PIN or your fingerprint first before the mode gets enabled.
Private mode is also available on the Samsung Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 edge+, Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 edge, and other previous generation high-end flagship devices from Samsung.
Do you find the Private mode in Touchwiz useful? If yes, do drop in a comment and let us know about it.
While its interface might take a little while to learn to navigate, it is slim and attractive, one of the best looking available. The grid overlay is also a useful thing to have and there are two kinds of on-screen levels, as well, to help make sure you're shooting straight.
The usual manual controls can be found here – ISO, exposure, focus, white balance – and there are some fun additions, too, like the Light Painting mode that lets you see your photos develop on screen with motion blur. The in-built gallery also displays ISO and shutter speeds for each picture you've taken.
Try out the demo version, and if the interface works for you, picking up the pro version will be $5 well spent. The developer is also very engaged and keen to handle any questions or problems you might have.
FV-5 also offers grid overlays, histograms and the like, but they're tucked away in the menus, making them less accessible than through ProShot's interface. You're afforded full control over ISO, light-metering, focus, white balance and the like. There's also an exposure bracketing feature that allows you take several photos in quick succession with different exposure values, letting you review them and choose the best to keep.
It's cheaper than ProShot, and worth considering alongside that and Manual Camera (see below) if you're after high-quality manual control.
When you want a lightweight and fast camera app, Open Camera is the best choice out there. It's completely free and contains almost all the adjustment options you might need, such as manual focus, ISO and exposure time (assuming you have the Android 5.0 Camera2 APIs, which come with Android Lollipop).
What's particularly great about this app is that it has a widget you can add to your home screen, which will open the app and taken a picture with a single press. This is useful if you need to quickly grab a picture of something without needing it to look great. Otherwise, the options provided in the app will help you get your pictures looking just the way you want.
Google's own camera app offers a clean and simple interface with few manual settings (no ISO, white balance or filters, for instance). It has Photo Sphere and Panorama modes, which work on a fun follow-the-dots mechanism, and Lens Blur, which creates a depth of field effect by taking a photo and then having you slowly raise your device – the app takes in from there, creating a blurred background for the object of focus to stand out against.
The results with the Photo Sphere setting range from interesting to very impressive. When it works perfectly, you end up with a seamless 360-degree photo you can move your screen to look around.
The app does seem to have a variety of problems on various devices, with many users reporting frequent crashes, but it's worth giving it a go, because it can produce some great results when it works right.
VSCO Cam isn't the most user-friendly camera on our list. Despite its often minimal layout, it takes a while just to learn which menu you're in. But it is one of the best Android camera apps thanks to the amount of customization it offers, and the quality of its adjustments.
VSCO Cam combines a camera with editing and sharing functions to provide an Instagram-like experience, only more powerful. While it doesn't house a one-click 'beautify' option, it more than makes up for it with its premium temperature, tint, contrast and sharpen gauges.
A Better Camera is basically what it says it is: a superior camera app to the standard Android ones. A Better Camera brings a number of interesting features, including Bestshot, which takes a number of photos in succession and then provides you with the least blurred, most impressive one. It's a simple idea but it works incredibly well.
A Better Camera also includes immediate post-processing, something that is absent in the camera apps from Sony, Samsung and co, and you can record video with real-time HDR. Unfortunately, many of the app's best functions are only available via in-app purchase, so A Better Camera sometimes feels a bit like an annoying free-to-play game at times.
However, if you take a lot of pictures, and are happy with a little investment, A Better Camera certainly lives up to its name — and more camera apps should make use of its slide-out grid gesture.
Camera360 is hugely popular in the Google Play Store. It offers a comprehensive camera app that's capable of pretty much anything. It uses a lens-filter system that can be applied before a picture is taken, meaning you don't have to wait until later to see whether your picture is fixable by adding a cheeky filter. It contains a huge variety of options and effects, even if they aren't all entirely useful.
It's easy to use, though, and presents most of the important dials on the same screen, so you can adjust multiple settings at the same time. This is something which other cameras lack, but it's really useful to have everything in one place instead of going through several different screens.
Most camera apps are designed to make photography as easy as possible for the end-user. This results in some Facebook-friendly snapshots, but certainly not professional pictures. Experienced photographers may be more at home with Manual Camera, which provides a range of settings options that most other apps just don't offer.
Shutter speed, focus, white balance, exposure compensation – you get to control every detail of your picture. This app also lets you save images in the lossless RAW format, which offers completely new possibilities for further processing.
So, if you take photographs pretty seriously, but still want to use your smartphone, Manual Camera is an excellent solution. But beware, the app does require the many new APIs from Android 5.0 Lollipop, so it's currently only available to users who've received the update.
Pixr Express — Effect Express needs to be used in conjunction with another camera app, because it’s just an image editor. But boy what an editor. You’ll be hard pressed to find more image editing options anywhere on Android; the ones here range from the strange low-poly and fire effects, to the typical gamut of photo fixers and alterations.
It has the option of automatic image correction, and adjustments such as heal, focus and splash, it feels like a near-Photoshop level experience. Some of the effects and features are more useful than others, I’m not sure 'stickers' were ever a good idea for photo-editing, but there is plenty to tinker with to get your pictures looking polished. You can also add text to your photos with a number of different font-styles.
We know from previous releases of Huawei mid-range smartphones that the devices are reasonably priced but definitely not in the budget range. The Huawei Honor 7 was released at a price of $369, well below its flagships but still higher than many other mid-range devices.
Huawei has confirmed the date of the unveiling of the Honor V8 via a tweet with a teaser from the Chinese site. In addition to the date of May 10, we can see from a still of the GIF below from the tweet that Huawei is teasing out the dual camera system. More on that in a bit.
Huawei Honor V8 specs
I expect the Honor V8 to borrow some improvements from the Huawei P9 flagship this year. I also expect the Honor V8 to make build upon the specs of the Honor 7 but not deviate from it too much. The Honor 7 was an impressive device for its price range so the improvements should translate to another powerful mid-range device by Huawei.
The Honor 7 has a 1080p full HD 5.2-inch display; no slouch in the visuals. The display of the Honor is the same as the Huawei P8, which clues us into what the Honor V8 could have. I expect the Honor V8 to have the same display as the P9, a 5.2-inch Full HD LCD display.
The Honor V8 could come with the Huawei Mate 8 processor, the Kirin 950. This is an improvement on last year's Kirin 935. I also expect one more GB RAM to accompany the Huawei Honor V8, making it 4 GB.
A specs leak coming out of China has presented the V8 as having a 5.5-inch 1080p screen. This display was also said to be powered from below by the Kirin 950 processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 3,000-mAh battery. The leak also suggested that the front-facing camera will by 8 MP. And it is also said to have a USB Type-C port.
Huawei Honor V8 features
The Huawei Honor V8 is rumored to come with a dual camera system already in its flagship P9 devices recently unveiled. Rumors suggest that the V8 will feature a 12 MP rear camera but not include the Leica lenses. It's unclear whether Leica will still partner with Huawei for this device.
I expect the Honor V8 to have the same fingerprint scanner as the P9. It could have a smaller battery battery than its predecessor the Honor 7, which had a 3,100 mAh battery. I think the Honor V8 will rather have the same battery as most flagship devices this year, a 3,000 mAh battery.
Overall, I expect to see an Honor V8 with a lot of similarities to the P9 flagship and improvements upon the Honor 7. Where the V8 will deviate from the P9 is in the Leica lenses and hardware.
What do you expect to see from the Honor V8? Let us know in the comments.
