Samsung Galaxy Note 9 update to One UI 2.0 (Android 10) in the Philippines

The One UI 2.0 update for the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 has arrived for my phone a while back and I personally think that the refresh feels zippier in terms of UI animation speed. While I couldn't say that there are a ton of new features that came with the update, I think that the small changes all contribute to the overall enhancement to the user experience such as a global flag for dark mode (which may or may not be supported by individual apps) which is a must-have for any AMOLED screen, a new gesture control freeing up much-needed screen real estate for phones with on-screen buttons (I'm sticking to the 3 bars gestures for now), even more granular control for app permissions, a new share screen (I hesitate to call it new and improved since I do not see much improvement except for the look and feel), among other enhancements.

It is curious to note the absence of the Live Captioning feature being highlighted by Google but we do see a Live Transcribe setting on the Accessibility menu (an app from Research at Google will be installed) — the difference is that transcribe will work on audio and captioning will work on video on the fly. Live transcribe is an app that will work on older phones though, unlike Live Captioning which was touted as an Android 10 key feature and was supposed to work universally across all applications and will not require an internet connection. Hopefully, they roll it out with the next incremental release.

I did not notice any S-pen specific enhancements with this update, but perhaps I have not been using it long enough to discover any.

Another thing to note is that for the universal dark mode to work with any themes you might be using, you will need to update that theme first (if the developer has an Android 10 compatible version) for it to properly work with the dark mode setting. Otherwise, you will get the notification that dark mode will not work with the theme you have on and it will advise you to revert to the default theme.