Samsung Galaxy owners are getting a great free Android upgrade

If you've got one of the best Samsung phones it's about to get even better. Samsung's One UI 5 will be rolling out to the Samsung Galaxy S22 series before the end of this month, and to more Galaxy phones in the weeks to come. And it's a really nice upgrade, too.

Samsung has published a guide to One UI 5 on its official news blog, but here are the highlights coming to the South Korean firm's best Android phones shortly.

1. Bixby Text Call

If you've ever needed to communicate with someone when you can't speak – at a gig, or in the quiet carriage of a train, or like your writer today who has completely lost her voice – you're going to love this one. You can answer phone calls by typing a message, and Bixby turns your end of the call into texts. Your responses are turned into audio for the caller, and their speech is turned into text for you. If it works as well as Samsung suggests it does, this could be really useful and quite good fun too.

2. More customisation

Much like Apple's Focus modes on the iPhone 14, One UI 5 enables you to set different modes for different places and times of day, so for example you might have a sleep mode, a driving mode and a work mode. You can combine that with Routines to trigger specific actions based on what you're doing, and there's much more customisation for the Lock Screen including the ability to trim video for a moving Lock Screen image. 

3. Improved notifications and widgets

The notifications in One UI have been given a good tidy up, and the new Stacked Widgets enables you to drag and drop widgets on top of each other to create scrollable stacks that make the most of your on-screen space. There's also a new feature called Smart Suggestions that'll suggest apps and actions based on how you've been using your phone.

4. Better connections

The new Connected Devices menu makes it easy to see all the connected devices and use features such as Quick Share, Smart View and DeX. It also includes the Buds menu for switching your Samsung Buds from one device to another.

In addition to the above features there's also a host of security improvements including new notifications on the Share Panel that'll warn you if you're about to share personal information, such as a picture containing your ID documents or bank cards.

It's definitely worth checking out the official newsroom blog, as Samsung has packed it with animations that give you a really good feel for how One UI 5 looks and works. It's looking like a really good upgrade that'll make Samsung's best phones even better.