Fixing your smartphone can seem like a daunting prospect; knowing that your phone – full of personal information and confidential photos and apps – will be in the hands of a stranger for a while without you present.
And sure enough, the vast majority of repair experts are trusted experts, but now Samsung phones are getting an extra feature that will help ease your mind. This is called Repair Mode and is rolling out to the company’s phones, starting with the Galaxy S21 series.
When enabled, Repair Mode allows you to block access to certain functions or apps on your mobile phone – for example, you can lock your social media accounts or gallery apps so that they cannot be accessed by strangers.
According to Samsung, once you hit Repair Mode, your phone will restart and “you won’t be able to access your personal data like photos, messages and accounts and just use the default installed apps”.
That means you can hand your smartphone over to repair companies without worrying about your information or having to backup and reset your phone.
It’s unclear when this update will hit users’ devices, and while we know the S21 series will be the first to receive the feature, Samsung hasn’t provided a timeline of when this mobile family, or subsequent ones, can expect to gain access to the mode. of repair. That said, we expect Samsung to be staggering its updates region by region as this is a common practice in the industry standard.
Review: A good time to get a Samsung phone
Samsung has been surprisingly generous in 2022, with several updates bringing new features to its smartphones.
Sure, the company has a habit of bringing the latest functionality from its flagship phones to older models shortly after launch, but we’ve seen more this year.
For example, the company recently released the Photoshop-style Enhance-X app that lets you use AI to fix photos, even ones you didn’t originally take on a Samsung phone.
It looks like Samsung is taking a page out of Google’s book, which was previously good at bringing new tools and features to Pixel phones with its regular Pixel Feature Drops.
Because of this, and also because of Samsung’s promise that its newest phones will receive four years of software updates, now is a great time to buy a new phone from the company. We’ve got a list of the best Samsung phones if you want to peruse them, but our list of the best Android phones overall will help you check out Samsung alongside its rivals.