Samsung Galaxy S10 LED case turns off after sometime, users report

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Bundling accessories with a gadget is proven to be worthwhile trick to attract consumers. Heck, I would be thrilled to get a Spider-Man branded controller free of cost with the purchase of the Marvel superhero exclusive PS4.

TBH, the official Marvel smart cover of Galaxy S10 should be equally effective!

As a smartphone maker, Samsung understands the urge. They do have plethora of accessories in their inventory, targeting the flagship Galaxy S and Note lineup of phones. You have to pay for most of them, of course!

The South Korean OEM used to provide a futuristic flip cover, dubbed as LED View for previous gen Galaxy flagships. With 2019’s Galaxy S10, Samsung revamped the design and introduced a separate LED case and made it more aesthetically pleasing.

In the new design, the LEDs are on the back. There is no front cover anymore. The notifications as well as the ’emotional’ effects can only be seen if the phone is laying face down.

The Samsung Galaxy S10 LED Back Cover is a multifunctional case designed for work and life that shows you LED notifications on the back side of the cover. The back cover LED lights will notify you of incoming calls, messages, current time and more.

In earlier version of their operating system i.e. Samsung Experience, Samsung provided a separate utility called LED icon editor to apply different icons to incoming call notifications and create new shapes.

In One UI (based on Android 9 Pie), they integrated most of the functionalities inside the firmware. Packages like com.samsung.android.app.ledbackcover and com.sec.android.cover.ledcover are now part of the operating system.

As you can see in the video, the phone automatically recognizes the cover after attaching. The built-in LED Cover app has options to choose between the ‘Moon lighting’ effect (twinkling stars) or a set of cute animated LED icons. 

Users would receive a notification that the LED icons are on, and can toggle through the icons from the notification.

One major downside of the case is you can not use NFC while using the case. Samsung developed a custom NFC based communication protocol to talk with the case, thus you will be greeted by a notification that says “NFC isn’t available while using Light control” if you want to use Samsung Pay or similar NFC dependent apps while using the case.

However, users have also reported another anomaly. The LED effects do not stay on more than a couple of minutes. Moreover there is no way to control the behaviour.

I purchased the official S10+ LED case but it’s automatically turning itself off after around 10 minutes.

I’ve spoken with Samsung support on the phone who said (but didn’t know for sure) that it shouldn’t do this. I have had the case exchanged and it’s still the same.

So I went into the Samsung store in Trafford, Manchester and they said they also didn’t know for sure but it made sense that it shouldn’t turn off as it’s supposed to interact with calls, texts etc… They said they would get back to me and never did.

(Source)

Common workarounds like testing on safe mode, turning off battery saving mode or manually toggling NFC settings were not sufficient to resolve the actual issue.

I have the same issue! I even excluded the app from battery management. I called Samsun and they had no idea what I was talking about. It must be a bug I would assume.

(Source)

https://twitter.com/Mrs_g0ybe/status/1107992834018295809

It seems that Samsung shipped a half-baked product in a hurry. Moreover, advertised features like contact specific icons can not be found. Possibly future software upgrades will patch the existing shortcomings and bring those functionalities.

I cannot seem to get all the features to work. Samsung claims it can do notifications and “colorful” LEDs. There are literally zero settings in the LED cover app or elsewhere. Cannot see a way to set contact-wise icons. Cannot find an “icon editor” as mentioned in the description. Is this coming in a later software update? Right now all I can do is set an icon from the 8 choices (not 54 as mentioned in the description). Bummer. There is zero support or instructions regarding this cover.

(Source)

Adding new features to the case via firmware patch is not oxymoron. Developer Jozsef Kiraly aka fonix232 proved the existence of such methodology as well as other hidden goodies by reverse engineering the Samsung Cover SDK.

Galaxy S10 LED Cover users, keep an eye on the upcoming software updates. Do notify us if you will spot something new.

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