Tech for Luddites

I recently got a Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone. I had an S3 a couple of years ago and one of the features I liked was the the built-in camera’s Voice Control feature, which lets you take a picture using a voice command like “Capture” or “Cheese.” But when I tried to use the feature with the S5, it wasn’t working by default and I (thought I) looked through all the settings but couldn’t find it.

Enter the Google.

Sure enough, there is a setting for Voice Control, but I didn’t realize it because when you open the camera’s settings, you have to scroll to see more options. This was not obvious to me at all, so I figure others might have missed it as well.

And, yes, once I knew about this, I suddenly noticed the pale, thin scrollbar to the right of the buttons, but I really didn’t see it before. The most annoying thing, though, is that there’s plenty of room on the screen to show more buttons, so you wouldn’t expect scrolling to be required. So why, Samsung… why?! 🙂

I looked at the Settings for a couple of other Android phones I have and they have completely different options, and I don’t know if other Galaxy phones use a similar layout or not. But it’s worth checking out if you want to make sure you’re aware of all the options you have for your phone’s camera.

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