How to access the Galaxy S3's secret service menu

Kris Carlon 2014-04-11T11:23:54Z1 hour ago

Kris Carlon

Putting down roots in Berlin after six years of traveling is a major step for Kris Carlon, who has spent more time living out of a tent lately than sitting at a desk. Kris comes to the AndroidPIT Editorial Team via a lengthy period spent writing on art and culture in Australia and other places he has lived. He joined the Android community while resurfacing in civilization back in 2010 and has never looked back, using technology to replace his actual presence in other people's lives ever since.

Some of you may not know that the Galaxy S3 has some cool hidden features that let you play around in ways far beyond what you normally would. We've already shared some simple hidden features of the Galaxy S3 but this time, we're sharing a built-in service menu that lets you test everything from your S3's pixels to your sensors and touch responsiveness. If you're the kind of nerd who likes to get under the hood of your smartphone, this is the menu for you.

The Galaxy S3 still has lots of life in it, but here's how you can run your own diagnostic tests on it. / © Samsung

So, how do you access the service menu? The diagnostic tool is primarily meant for service technicians, so it's easily available but not widely known about. Just go to your dialer and enter the following code to bring up the diagnostic tool: *#0*#

Just type *#0*# into the dialer to bring up the secret service menu screen (right). / © AndroidPIT

This will bring up the above service menu screen, with options ranging from color floods (so you can easily isolate dead pixels on-screen), to speaker performance, LEDs, cameras and vibration. Some of it is not exactly going to be useful on a daily basis, but for a one-off novelty it's kinda cool to see (and it's a nice little prank to play on a friend's phone too). Plus, if anything on that list starts causing you problems, you know exactly where to go to test it for yourself before shipping your S3 off for repair. Here's some of the tests in action.

You can test all of your sesors (left) and your display's dimming (right) / © AndroidPIT Galaxy S3 touch responsiveness test (left) and low frequency LCD test (right) / © AndroidPIT

Check out our list of secret Android codes (there's a link at the bottom for Samsung-specific codes too).

If you have root access and want to delve a little deeper into the internal settings of your Galaxy S3 you can also try out a cool little app called Note 2 Hidden Settings which simply places a menu skin over some of the other internal settings to be found in your Samsung device. It was made for the Note 2 but it works fine on other devices like the Galaxy S3 too.

Have you ever tried to repair your smartphone problems yourself? Did you know about service menus and Android codes before?

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Hide Spare Cash or Other Secret Stuff in a Hidden Wall Compartment

We all need to hide stuff every once in a while. YouTube user supergokue1 shows how to create a small compartment in the wall where you can stash some valuables.

To begin with, he pulled off a small piece of trim between two doors. He then cut out a piece of dry wall to make a small cubby hole. By simply placing the trim back in place, your valuables are hidden out of site. As a couple commenters point out, you can use velcro or magnets to ensure the trim doesn't idly fall off. If you want to make extra sure that the compartment isn't discovered, you can re-seal the trim with the original nails. This will make it harder to remove again, but also help ensure no one stumbles on to your stash.

As Three Thrifty Guys points out, hiding spots like these for valuables were much more common during the Great Depression when trust in banks was eroding. You can check out their post on the subject at the via link below for more tips on where to hide your valuables around the house.

Diy secret hiding place | YouTube via Three Thrifty Guys

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Secret App Down For Hours, Silicon Valley Goes Back To Work

Secret, the anonymous gossip-sharing app and current Silicon Valley addiction, is currently experiencing a significant outage following yesterday’s update, which introduced a variety of new features, including anonymous invites – a mechanism the company hoped would help grow its userbase, and subsequently, the amount of content shared on the service. (Uh-oh, maybe that new trick actually worked too well?)

According to…well…our own attempts to browse Secret while lying in bed this morning, on bathroom breaks (c’mon, admit you do this too), and, oh yes, Twitter posts, the app has been down for at least three and a half hours and counting.

Something tells me that this might end up being a productive Friday after all.

Currently, users report seeing an error message in the app, saying “our servers are hiding,” while the website itself claims “Over Quota.”

For those unfamiliar, Secret along with Whisper, Snapchat, YikYak, and others are part of a new social trend around anonymous sharing. The company recently raised $8.6 million in funding from a number of well-known angels.

What makes Secret maybe more addictive than the rest is the way it cleverly taps into your address book to reveal whether a poster is a “friend” (meaning you know them), or a friend of friend, which of course has you trying to figure out who may be behind the post. The app has also become sort of the go-to water cooler for Silicon Valley gossip (and more controversially, trolling) which has seen it breaking news like that GitHub sexism story or the new startup from Keith Rabois, the former Square and PayPal executive, now Khosla VC.

The app was probably the breakout hit at this year’s SXSW conference, but has since dropped out of the top 1,000 apps in the U.S. in the days after, and is now currently ranked in the top 200 in the social category on the App Store. While it seems like everyone in the tech industry is enamored of the service, these metrics show that Secret still has a long way to go before it catches on with a mainstream crowd.

That’s where the recently added invite feature would come in – you can, as of yesterday, invite your friends to the service without having your name attached to the message. That’s another interesting trick designed to protect your anonymity, not to mention the sort of social embarrassment that comes along with being the pushy, spam-vitation sending friend.

We’ve reached out to Secret for info as to what’s going on, and will update when and if we hear back.

UPDATE, 11 AM ET: And, like magic: Service down for hours –> hit publish —> service comes back. You’re welcome?

UPDATE #2: 11:34 AM ET: Secret responded to our inquiry, saying that the outage began at 4 AM PT. However, the company declined to detail the cause, or say whether or not the issue was related to yesterday’s update.

Secret Shoots For Growth With New Anonymous Invites

Want to be sure you don’t miss any juice gossip or heartwrenching tales from you friends? Now when you re-open Secret, you’ll start where you closed the app instead of at the top of the feed so it’s easier to read comprehensively. Secret’s latest update also adds anonymous invites that could help it grow by letting you ask a friend to join the app without them knowing it was you.

Additionally, there’s comment notifications that bring you back to where you left off in the conversation, and the Street Fighter-esque option to hit shuffle when composing a Secret to easily replace a drab white background with a colored, textured one.

Secret, a well-funded app, has seen its popularity wane following a strong surge of usage during the SXSW conference. Secret has slipped out of the top 1,000 most popular applications in the United States. It is currently ranked 104 and 148 in the social category in the United States and Canada, respectively.

By adding the ability to directly invite friends to the service, Secret is hoping to build a viral-loop that will at once grow its userbase, and also improve the service for its current users; the more secrets that users can read from their friends, the more useful, and in theory, delightful Secret becomes. There is, of course, the risk of overzealous recruiting — spam, in other words — with anonymous invites. [Update: Luckily, Secret is purposefully trying to avoid spam by throttling invites if multiple users send them to the same person, and not providing an option to invite all your contacts.]

To really improve the browsing experience, though, Secret may want to move towards a dynamically filtered feed that optimizes for showing you stories from immediate friends. Right now, you always get a mix of friends, friends of friends, nearby, and popular distant Secrets. But if you don’t open it for a few days, a juicy tidbit from one of your friends could get lost near the bottom of the feed, drowned out by Secrets from people you don’t know.

Gossip from friends seems the most compelling, so filtering out the non-friend Secrets could make the app more fun for those who only check it occasionally. This would be similar to how Facebook shows you the best stories since you last visited rather than just the most recent ones, and how Tinder stacks people who’ve positively right-swiped at the top to increase the liklihood of giving you matches right away.

Secret CEO Responds To Cyberbullying Criticism

Secret’s CEO Discusses Cyberbullying Policy

When it comes to cyberbullying in his anonyous sharing app, Secret co-founder claimed “We don’t see very much of that, if any” when we spoke on stage at SXSW. Secret’s users might disagree. Thankfully, through these highlights from our fireside chat, you can see Byttow acknowledge the darker side of anonymity. He reveals Secret is considering an 17+ age limit and other barriers to bullying.

Now just seven weeks old, Secret and the opportunities it creates for spreading hate have become controversial issues in Silicon Valley. Without names attached, people are free to insult and troll as they please. Posts criticizing/defaming public figures in tech including founders and investors are not uncommon, and were especially prevalent in its first days on iOS. Discussions of the ethics of anonymity heated up after Secret raised $8.4 million in a round including Garry Tan’s Initialized, Google Ventures, and other prominent funders.

Marc Andreessen tweet-questioned whether it was ethical to build or fund systems that “designed to encourage negative behavior, tearing people down, making fellow souls sad.” Others like Hunter Walk suggested apps should be judged on their potential to do good, not their worst use cases.

Early in the talk, Byttow said his company would rely on its userbase to set norms and handle most moderation. But by the end, he clarified that Secret does take a firm stance against abuse and will step in and remove content when necessary.

Secret had already begun to take productized steps towards combatting bullying by the time we took Byttow and I took the stage at SXSW on March 8th. When users try to post something that includes a proper name, Secret pops up a dialog explaining that defamatory and mean posts are against its community guidelines and may be flagged or removed. While Byttow dodged whether company names are similarly protected, he reiterated that when it comes to humans, “posting about someone else and using real names is obviously against our guidelines”.

In our talk, Byttow says these types of post are absolutely in. Byttow says that Secret is naturally better protected from cyberbullying because unlike Whisper, PostSecret, or Ask.fm, Secret isn’t a public feed where anyone can post or reply. On Secret, you only get posts from your community or that your community already interacted with. Byttow emphasized that the Secret users often share calls for help, and the community frequently rallies to support them.

The company is seeking other ways to minimize abuse. Byttow says that limiting Secret to people age 17 and over is “something we’re talking about for sure”. It’s also considering a direct way for people to report not just objectionable posts but ones that defame them personally. And in a case where a user is depressed — no matter where those feelings came from — Byttow says Secret’s next update will pop up a link to suicide prevention resources if their posts mentions suicidal thoughts. He also said the team is interested in using its funding to grow its moderation team beyond the 1.5 people who currently moderate all of Secret’s content.

It’s reassuring to see that Secret is increasing its focus on fostering positive community. While the app has big potential to out bad actors and create honest forums for criticism, Secret threads can devolve into name calling and unconstructive hate. Getting its policies hammered out now is critical as Secret is poised to expand. Byttow says he hopes to launch internationally in one to two months. Secret is also working on an Android version and just hired Twitter’s VP of Analytics and Android lead Sara Haider to head up the effort. Finally, Byttow hopes to build an API for Secret, turning it into a platform.

But unlike most startups that can just push a minimum viable product, it could be dangerous for an anonymous app like Secret to expand with a minimum viable community policy. It needs concrete rules established for how to deal with content in the grey area between bullying and freedom of expression. Until the kinks are worked out of its policy, traction amongst merciless high school students or in languages its team can’t moderate could lead to depression or violence. Yet if Secret can find a way to keep discussion civil but not sterile, it could become a powerful outlet for what we’re scared to say.