Today, I’m gonna show you how to enable variable or adaptive screen refresh rate on your Samsung Galaxy A32 and M32 smartphones, but, before that, what even is a variable screen refresh rate, or adaptive refresh rate as Samsung loves to call it?
What is variable or adaptive screen refresh rate?
Simple, this is a feature that lets your phone’s screen to automatically adjust its refresh rate, either to a higher or lower value, depending on the content currently being displayed on it.
This helps to maintain a balance between the phone’s battery life and the fluidity of the phone’s UI, as the phone doesn’t have to be stuck on high refresh rate setting at all times, which in practice, has shown to consume more battery, and at the same time, it still doesn’t have to be stuck at a lower refresh rate setting.
The Samsung Galaxy Note20 Ultra and the Galaxy S21 series are the only Samsung phones that have this feature for now, all thanks to the new LTPO display technology, but, with this tutorial, I will show you how to get a quite similar feature using Bixby routines, on your Galaxy A32 and M32 smartphones.
So, you’re ready?
Well then, let’s get started. #enjoy.
How to enable variable/adaptive screen refresh rate, using Bixby Routines, on the Samsung Galaxy A32 and M32.
Step One
First of all, go to your phone’s main settings menu, and set “Motion smoothness” (screen refresh rate) to high, this will be the phone’s default refresh rate mode.
To do that, go to your phone’s settings menu, go to “Display” settings, locate “Motion smoothness“, and set the value to “High“.
After that, go back to your phone’s main settings page, and this time, locate the option that says “Advanced features“, tap on it, then make your way to the next option inside of it that says “Bixby Routines“.
From your main settings page, tap “Advanced features“. From here, go to “Bixby Routines“.
When you tap the Bixby Routines option, you should have a new page that looks this way.
This is Bixby Rountines homepage.
Galaxy A32/M32 variable refresh rate – Step Two
From the homepage as shown in the last screenshot above, tap “Add routine” located at the bottom of your phone’s screen, and when you do so, you should have a completely new page that looks this way.
As you can see from the screenshot, the page is divided into two parts or sections, the “If” section, and the “Then” section.
“If” is used to give a condition to Bixby routine, while “Then” is used to assign a task that should be completed, only when the right conditions are met.
For instance, I can say that if my phone’s battery is anywhere below 50%, then set screen refresh rate (motion smoothness) to standard (60Hz), and below are some of my personal routines that I’ve set up on my phone, using Bixby Routines.
Gaming routine. Battery saver routine.
So, with this, we can give lots of predefined conditions, and attached various tasks to them using Bixby routine, and they’re not just limited to screen refresh rates only. We can create a routine based on place, based on app opened, based on phone’s battery level, based on Wi-Fi connection status, etc.
And for this tutorial, we’re going to be creating two routines based on app opened, and based on our phone’s battery level.
Step Three
So, from the “Add routine” page, tap on the “If” block, and a new page will be opened to you with a long list of options, simply scroll down a bit, locate and tap the one that says “App opened“, and an even longer page will be opened to you, containing the list of all the apps (both third-party and factory-installed apps) installed on your Galaxy A32 and M32 smartphones.
From here, you can select the apps that you want to be run in low refresh rate state when opened. Video player apps such as YouTube, VLC media player if you have it installed, and other related video player app you might have installed should be in the list, the calculator app should also be included, your phone’s camera app, calendar app, Google Maps app, and every other app you personally don’t want to use in high refresh rate mode.
So, when you’re done selecting the apps, simply tap the “Done” button at the bottom of your phone’s screen, then head down to the “Then” section of the page.
Tap on the “Then” block, and a host of options will be reveal to you, tap the one labeled “Display“, and from there, go to “Motion smoothness“, and set the value to “Standard“.
Tap “Done” when you’re done, and tap “Next” at the bottom of your phone’s screen to complete the setup. You’ll be required to provide a name, icon, and color for your newly created routine, do that quickly, and the routine will be activated.
So, with this routine, your phone will be running on a refresh rate of 90Hz natively, but whenever you open any of those apps you chose while setting up the routine, the phone will automatically dial back to 60Hz, adaptive refresh rate handling, isn’t it?
You can follow the steps to add as many routines as you want, depending on tasks you want your phone to help you take care of without needing you to touch anything, but two additional routines I want us to add is the one for gaming, and another one for battery saving.
Galaxy A32/M32 adaptive refresh rate – Step Four
So, for the one for gaming, simply go to “Add routine”, and from the “If” options, locate the option labeled “Game is being played“, now go to “Then” section, go to display, and set motion smoothness to “High“.
So, what this does is, no matter what your phone’s native screen refresh rate was set to, once you open a game on your Galaxy A32 and M32 phones, the phone cranks it all the way up to 90Hz, which is the ideal refresh rate for playing games on a phone.
While for the one for battery saving, simply go back to “Add routines” page once again, from the “If” options, select the one that says “Battery level” and set it to below 51%, still under “If” options, go to the next option which says “Charging status“, and select “Not charging“.
Now, go to the “Then” block, go to display, and set motion smoothness to “Standard“.
So, what this does is, once your phone’s battery drops to 50% of its full charge, the screen refresh rate automatically dials back to 60Hz to save the remaining battery life, until the next time you recharge, and it pushes it back to 90Hz.
So, that’s basically some of the basic routines you can set up to mimick the adaptive or variable screen refresh rate handling that is found only on Samsung flagship smartphones. Tell us in the comments section below if these steps worked for you, and if you find this tutorial helpful, kindly give it a thumbs up by sharing it, and as always, I’ll see y’all tomorrow, #peace out.
