10 “hidden” Samsung Galaxy S5 features you probably already know about (as told by Samsung)

Many people are of the popular opinion that TouchWiz has gotten bloated beyond repair. No matter which side of that line you stand on, TouchWiz on the Samsung Galaxy S5 is packed with more features than you know. Samsung has detailed 10 hidden features that many of us may or may not have known about. Grab your Galaxy S5 and get ready to dive in:

1. You can write on it with a Pencil. For those times where a finger just isn’t enough. On a more normal note, we’re glad it doesn’t require a capacitive stylus for pen input. How to do it: Settings, then Display, then enable the ‘Increase touch sensitivity’ feature.
2. Tilt the phone to construct a smart playlist. You can turn the phone to landscape mode while in the music player to get a smart playlist based on the currently playing song. Neato.
3. Use the toolbox to get a shortcut to your favorite apps anywhere in the OS. We already knew this one, but I guess Samsung thought it was truly secret. You can press and hold it and drag it to the edit button if you want to edit the apps inside.
4. Use “Private Mode” to protect your sensitive things. Because nothing’s worse than a snoopy child or spouse putting their nose where it doesn’t belong. Whether it’s photos, video, voice recordings, voicemail, documents or more, you can protect any of it by heading to the Settings menu.
5. Kids Mode. Yup, give your child a safe sandbox in which to play with your phone. Parental controls are aplenty here, including the ability to set how much time they can use the phone before they’re locked out. You can even download new apps and have them show up as “gifts” on the Kid Mode home-screen so they’ll have a nice surprise waiting.
6. Enable camera from the lock-screen. Settings > Lock Screen > Camera Shortcut. Voila — an icon that can take you directly into the camera from the lock-scree. Nothing new, exciting, hidden or secretive about that.
7. New Camera Modes. Virtual tour lets you take a series of photos that can be presented as a digital tour for friends, family or clients later on, while shot and more gives you some post-snap effects to apply.
8. Priority Senders in messaging. Get a lot of texts but only really care about a few people? Have their names stay at the top of the messaging app at all times — the others can wait.
9. Show caller information while you’re in the call. Go to Settings > Call and check the Show Caller Information box to see the last message you got from them, and any recent updates from them on Google+.
10. Accept incoming calls without being kicked from your app. This is probably the most useful of them all –there’s nothing worse than getting a call in the middle of a round of Quiz Up only for that annoying friend of yours to want to talk about absolutely nothing. The popup will let you answer (even in speaker mode, if you want) or decline the call without interrupting what you’re doing. Quite frankly, we wish all phones had this option. Settings > Call > Call Notification to enable that one.

And that’s about it. Obviously there’s a lot more that you can do on the Samsung Galaxy S5 — much of which we covered in our review, and some that will be touched on in upcoming tips and tricks articles — but this is a pretty nice starter kit to get you going. Let us know of anything cool you’ve found buried deep into the tons of settings menu this phone has.

[via Samsung]