Four Galaxy features I felt were gimmicks that quietly won me over

Phones these days have more features than we know what to do with. That's just a consequence of the race that smartphone manufacturers find themselves in, a race to outperform their rivals not matter how trivial the outcomes may seem.

I've used Samsung phones exclusively for nearly two devices now. A lot of features have come and gone since then, and there have been several that I haven't returned to because they made no sense to me. However, there are four features that I dismissed initially which have quietly won me over.

Edge panels are a legacy feature that I rarely paid any attention to. They just felt too clunky. However, Samsung has improved this feature with One UI 8.5. They can be properly utilized in landscape mode now. That changed has help enhance the usability for me. I use it every day now and find it genuinely annoying when I use any other phone without it.

Samsung DeX had its strengths, but as long as it required a wire hookup, it wasn't really that important for me. That changed once Samsung enabled wireless DeX. It may have sounded like a party trick at first, but it quickly turned out to be the preferred solution to run slide decks from a TV at work without carrying a laptop. It wins you over faster than you'd realize.

One-handed mode is another example of don't knock it until you try it. I never thought I'd ever use it and while that was correct for the most part, it was only when trying to use my phone on a packed subway with one hand on a pole did I realize the true value proposition of this feature.

Transcript Assist felt redundant next to every other recording app available for Android, but I'd impress upon you to launch the app and play around with it, particularly if your job requires you to interview people. Having the ability to record audio and generate written transcripts with speaker labels is seriously underrated. I haven't opened a third-party recorder since.