To ensure that unwanted users don’t have access to your Galaxy S9 it’s best practice to use a lock screen to secure your device. In this video, I’ll go through all of the screen lock types that you can use to secure your Galaxy S9.
We’re going to take a look at how to change your screen lock type on your Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. What we’re going to do, is swipe down from the top, and then go into our settings. From here, we’re actually going to go down to the lock screen security, and then we could see, at the top of the screen, screen lock type. Currently, I have it set to swipe, and if we tap in there, you’ll see my different options.
I can add a pattern, a pin, and a password, and then there’s also biometrics, down at the bottom, such as Intelligent Scan, that uses the iris and face recognition together. Then, there’s also fingerprints.
Now, choosing one of the biometric options, will automatically have you choose a pattern, pin, or password, but you can also choose to use the pattern, pin, or password, without using any of the biometrics. Although, I do highly recommend using one of the biometric features, since that does give you a lot more security on your device.
The typical one that I like to choose is the fingerprint, so if you tap that on, you see the fingerprint is going to ask you to set up a secure lock screen, and add in, at least, one fingerprint. If we continue, I’ll either choose a pattern, pin, or password. A pattern allows you to draw a pattern on the screen, and you can see, I just do this, right here, by drawing the pattern, and then, I tap continue.
The thing that happens when I go back in here will choose fingerprint, and then, actually choose to use a pin, you see I can use at least four digits, so I need to, at least, choose four digits. Then, I can go ahead and enter as many digits as I would like to, and then I confirm my pin by tapping okay.
Then, the last one, we’ll go back in there, and choose fingerprint, again. With the password, this will allow us to add in an alpha-numeric password, such as one where you might typically use on our computers. You can choose any number of characters, symbols, or numbers, and choose that in here.
What I’m going to do, is actually go ahead and go with a screen lock type of fingerprint, and then I’m going to choose a pattern here, so let’s just choose a pattern. I’ll draw my pattern and continue, and then, confirm it. You have to confirm it, no matter what you choose, whether you choose a pin, a pattern, or a password. You’ll have to confirm that, to continue. So now that I’ve confirmed that, you see, it’s going to ask me to register my fingerprint by swiping down on it.
Typically, in the past, you’ve kind of had to tap, and hold, and let it read, but with this one, what we’re doing, is going on the back of the phone, and then swiping down with our fingerprint. You see, as I did that, and it registered 100 percent, and I can either add another fingerprint by tapping add, in the bottom left hand corner, or by tapping done.
Now, I could go ahead and try it, so let’s touch the fingerprint sensor to unlock your phone, and it looks like my fingerprint was recognized by tapping on it. Now, you can see it’s prompted me to choose how my notifications appear on the lock screen. I can choose to hide the content. You see, I’m getting a preview there, at at the top of the screen. I can show notification icons, only. Then, I can also adjust the transparency here, on the lock screen, for my notifications, and you see, I can make it totally opaque, or make it actually solid.
Choose whichever you feel is best for you. I’m going to go ahead and go with somewhere down here, where it’s high transparency, and my text color has automatically been reversed, based upon the background. You see, I can choose that for auto text color reverse, or I can leave it alone. I’m going to go and choose it to auto reverse. Now, I’ll tap done.
You now see on my screen log type has been set to a pattern and a fingerprint, and to get into that menu, I will need to confirm my pattern. I actually did that wrong. I’m going to go to confirm my pattern, and now I can get in there, and make sort of adjustments that I would like to.
As another added security feature when using a secure lock screen, you want to come into secure lock screen settings, confirm getting into here, by entering in your pattern, pin, or password, and then, I like to change my secure lock time. By default, it’s set to ten minutes. What I’d like to change it to, is instantly, when the power key or screen times out.
What this means, is that when you lock your phone, whether by the screen timing our, or pressing the lock button, you will have to enter in your password, passcode, pin, fingerprint, iris scanner, face unlock, whatever you’ve set it to. You’ll have to enter it in, each time your phone is locked. By default with ten minutes, what that means is, my phone could be locked, I could put it in my pocket, I could … You could throw it in your purse, set it on your desk, and the phone won’t securely lock itself for ten minutes.
That means that within that ten minutes of locking my device, if I were to happen to get up, or move anywhere, and someone were to grab it, they would still be able to get into my phone, without having to enter in any sort of security code, password, face recognition, iris scan, or fingerprint, whatever. There would be no need for that. I always change it to instantly, because that means, once I lock my phone, no matter where it ends up, whether it’s my pocket, you put it in your purse, set it on your desk, whatever, the phone is automatically locked, and trying to get back into it, will require either your passcode, or any one of those biometric settings that you’ve set.
There’s also a couple of different options, such as making your pattern visible, factory reset after failed attempts, even lock network and security, but I always, always, always recommend adjusting that secured lock time, so that way, your phone is automatically locked and secured, whenever your device is locked.
That is how you change your screen lock type. In this one, we did add in a fingerprint, but we’re actually going to dedicate a video to adding in fingerprints and even adding in multiple fingerprints, as well as going through various multiple biometric readers.
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