I have a new Samsung Galaxy S7 and I really like it. I’m still getting used to some of the new features, however, most notably the “Always On” feature where the display’s never completely dark. Is there some way to change what’s shown, however?
You’re running Android 6.0 Marshmallow and that’s just as responsible for this neat feature – Always On – as Samsung is with its shiny new Galaxy S7. Still, after years of having our cellphones and smart phones automatically go dark after a minute or two of inactivity, it’s both cool and a bit weird to notice that the S7 screen never goes completely black, but instead has a subtle display of the time and a few icons for incoming email messages, etc.
There’s not a lot you can do to customize your Always On display on the S7, but you can tweak things a little bit, including picking from a couple of different backgrounds and, perhaps most importantly for people who are always worried about their battery dying, you can also completely disable this feature.
To start, go to Settings > Device, as shown:
From this point, select “Display“, and you’ll now have this screen:
You can see that the last of the options is the Always On Display, but confusingly the “On” makes it look like you can’t actually make any other changes. How wrong that is! Tap on it to access the Always On Display settings:
If you would like to completely turn off the Always On Display, well, then it’s not an always on display, is it? That’s okay, just tap on the slider on the very top to make it go from “ON” to “OFF”. Done.
There’s a bunch you can mess with here too, however, starting with “Content to show“. Tap on that.
There are the three basic choices you have: clock, calendar and image. The clock is the default, and it turns out that there are a number of options you can access by tapping on “Clock style” just below this menu:
If you choose “Calendar“, instead, then you have access to Calendar styles:
Two choices. Not quite so exciting! Oh, and tap on “Background Image” on that main Always On Display settings screen and it turns out there are a couple of different, subtle images from which you can choose:
So subtle you can’t really see what I’m talking about. But check it out yourself, you’ll see what I mean.
Anyway, that’s the story on customizing and changing the Always On Display on the Samsung Galaxy S7 running Android 6.0 Marshmallow. Hope that helps you fine tune your display!