How to fix the flaws of the Samsung Galaxy S5

Silence the camera

Another one that Samsung refuses to change, the camera on the S5 is — like its brothers — very noisy. What do we mean by that? Well, good luck firing a shot with a silent shutter.

We’ve heard a few reasons why Samsung does this, and while none are official, the consensus seems to sit around that this is a legal requirement, due to the people out there rude enough to be taking pictures without telling people, in ways one might view as perverse, with a sound being the requirement.

Honestly, this isn’t something we’ve seen confirmed, but there are ways to shut the camera app, with the obvious one coming from a replacement camera.

Silent Camera

Price: Free, but it does show ads

Proof that the S5 camera can be used without making a peep, Silent Camera will make it happen. The controls aren’t as good as what Samsung offers, and occasionally it crashes, but hey, this is one camera that will shut up.

Camera JB+

Price: Around $3

Silent mode isn’t switched on until you go into settings and do it yourself, but once again, silence is possible from the camera, and this one is built the way Google imagined a camera to work in the previous version of Android. A newer version is possible from Camera KK, which has been inspired from KitKat, but this will cost you a little more.

Camera FV-5

Price: Around $5

A more complicated camera for people who like more control, we also found that on the Galaxy S5, this one won’t make a sound. We’re particularly happy that FV-5 also offers a lot of choice and control from its interpretation of how a camera app should work, so that’s awesome too!

Gallery lag and image rotation

Sigh. We’re honestly over this bug, which Samsung has never totally fixed, and tends to pop up when you have a few networked galleries.

The issue is this: when opening Samsung’s gallery app on the Galaxy phones, it takes minutes — not seconds, but rather a minute or more — to let you access your pictures. There have been times where we’ve given up, actually, when the gallery refused to load, and the interface would look broken, as if parts of it were running, but doing nothing.

We have no official reason why this happens, but our research seems to suggest it comes from loading from multiple gallery sources, such as Dropbox, Flickr, Picasa, and so on, with TouchWiz’s gallery seemingly having issues with this.

This seems to produce lag, and lots of it, slowing the gallery down and making it hard to view your files.

Unfortunately, the S5 still has this issue, and while the innards of this new phone seem to have sped everything up, dropping our minutes down to ten or twenty seconds, it’s still an annoying bug, and one that we wouldn’t be surprised to see go beyond the borders of Australia.

The other gallery bug that’s more than just an annoyance now is the automatic rotation, or the lack of one on Samsung phones. This rears its head whenever you rotate the phone to view a landscape image, and unfortunately, the picture won’t follow you, forcing you to press a button that rotates the image to match the view.

It’s weird, because the button only lights up for use when the accelerometer picks up that you’re rotating the phone, so why doesn’t the image just rotate regardless? We’re betting this has something to do with the lawsuits between Apple and Samsung, but other manufacturers don’t have this problem, so it’s still annoying.

Fortunately, there’s a fix for both of these issues, and that is to replace the gallery.

Now unlike the camera, launcher, and lockscreen, there are less gallery replacements on offer, so our choice is one of the only options out there, but it manages to replicate the gallery and make it the way Google wanted it to be.

Gallery KK

Price: Free with ads, $1 to remove ads

Your online galleries won’t load, but everything else will with this one, and images will even rotate automatically for you when you change the orientation of the phone. Gallery KK also brings in easy editing tools, such as colour filtration and Instagram-like effects, as well as cropping, frames, and more processing options.

Anything else you come across

We’ve only had the S5 for a few days, and these are the issues we’ve come across that have fixes, but nearly everything that has a problem tends to be a result of the software, not the hardware.

That’s a good thing because it means not just that Samsung did a great job with the hardware — it usually does — but also that the bits of software you may be struggling with are easily fixed.

And that’s the thing about Android: it’s a fairly modular operating system, and if you don’t like an aspect of the software — default camera, default web browser, default phone dialer, default keyboard, default messaging app, default homescreen, and default anything else — you can replace it.

Android 4.4 “KitKat” seems to make this easier, and in the settings page of the Samsung Galaxy S5, you’ll even find a section specifically for “Default Applications” which will let you change these quickly, provided you have something installed.

So if you don’t like the Samsung’s choice of keyboard, grab something else from Google’s Play Store and change it. And if you don’t like the camera, change that too. And if you find anything else that you don’t like, don’t feel obligated to keep it there. Rather, search for a replacement in the Google Play Store, because it’s your phone, and it’s totally your right to make it work the way you want to.