Smart Stay is a nice little feature that will keep your screen on while you are looking at it and here is how to enable it on the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.
The display on our phones eat up more battery life than any other component, by far. The best thing to do when wanting to conserve the battery life is to keep the display off whenever it is not in use. So it makes sense that cranking down the display time out setting to as low as it goes is best, right? Most Samsung devices have the ability to turn the screen off after 15 seconds of not being in use.
Technically this is the best for conserving battery, it can end up ruining the experience of your phone because if you don’t touch the screen every 15 seconds(or if the application doesn’t tell Android to not turn the screen off when idle) then the screen will turn off in the middle of using it.
Samsung knows your pain and they have added in a feature a few generations ago that solves just that. The feature is called Smart Stay and it detects whether or not you are actively looking at your device.
If the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge detects your eyes are looking at the phone, then it will ignore whatever time out setting that you have set on the device. Whenever the device is laying down and not in use then it will recognize this and then turn the screen off after that amount of time has passed. This feature lets you crank down the display time out setting to 15 seconds while still keeping the screen on for however long you are using it.
There is a little caveat though and Samsung warns you about this before you toggle it on or off. As the images say above, Smart Stay works best when the Galaxy S6 or Galaxy S6 Edge is held in an upright position. This means that when the S6 is laid flat on the table, it is not going to be detecting anything. So sadly this feature isn’t that great if you are in the bed and looking up at the S6. Samsung tells us that Smart Stay also works best when the room is well-lit, so again, this probably won’t work very well at night time. It might work pretty well, but it won’t give you the best results. Lastly, Samsung tells us that the front-facing camera is how this feature works so when an application is using this hardware then it can’t detect whether or not you are looking at it.
So now that we know the basics, let’s take a look at how to enable it. . .
Galaxy S6 Enable Smart Stay
- Launch the Settings Application
- Locate and Tap on the ‘Display’ Option
- Tap on the ‘Smart Stay’ Option
- Toggle the Feature On
Explanation
That is all there is too it. It’s very easy to enable or disable, you just have to know where to look when you need it. Since Android now has a way for you to search through the settings, you could simply search for Smart Stay after you launch the Settings application. Either way, the result is the same. Remember though, this feature does have its limitations so you could find your device turning itself off, even if you are looking at it, if the S6 is not upright or if you are in a dark environment.
Are you a fan of Samsung’s Smart Stay feature or do you instantly turn it off when you buy a new device or perform a factory reset? Tell me your thoughts about this feature in the comments section below.
I have a brand new galaxy 6 and it does not have “smart stay”. It does have “always on”, “touch screen wake”, “raise wrist to wake”, Al of which don’t work. The only way to turn on screen is pushing the power button. Very disappointing looking at a black screen. My Garmin stays on all the time and lasts at least 10 days. My wife’s Fitbit stays on all the time also!
Al Busch