Gemini 3.1 Pro launched back in February of this year—quite a while ago, in AI terms. Now Google has jumped to the next full number with Gemini 4 Argon, which it says "excels at deep work in complex, real-world tasks."

You can get the new AI model now inside the Gemini app if you're on the AI Pro ($19.99 a month) or AI Ultra ($99.99 or $199.99 a month) plans. Users on the free and AI Plus ($4.99 a month) plans miss out for now, though you can expect a smaller, cut-down version of Gemini 4 Argon to roll out to these tiers eventually.

What can Gemini 4 Argon do?

Google has a long list of areas where the new AI model excels. There's mention of complex engineering tasks (like checking millions of lines of code for efficiency improvements), predicting molecular structures in chemistry, and delivering 3D visualizations. It also enhances knowledge work across legal, finance, science, and coding.

Google says Gemini 4 Argon is now better at advanced physics modeling, picking through genetic databases, protecting software from vulnerabilities, and resolving problems in physical space (handy for robotics development). The new model "answers questions more directly with less hedging, doesn't repeat itself more than necessary, and skips clichés throughout the responses," according to Google.

Gemini has some suggestions for how to use the new model. Credit: Lifehacker

With many in the industry worried about an AI-driven apocalypse of some form or another, Google has upped its defenses against misuse and jailbreaking. The company has significantly upgraded its blockers for harmful requests, limits on AI agent overreach, and resistance to malicious prompt injections.

All of these stats are things you would expect to read about in a new AI model announcement, whether it's from Google, Anthropic, or OpenAI: "Our new model is better and safer than ever, and particularly good in these specific benchmarks we've chosen." But is it any more helpful for the average user tapping away in the Gemini app?

I don't have any pressing scientific breakthroughs to research or large-scale software optimizations to run, but I have put Gemini 4 Argon to the test against GPT-6 Sol, which is the latest model available to consumers through the ChatGPT app—though you need to be on at least the Plus plan ($19.99 a month) to get to it.

Testing Gemini 4 Argon against GPT-6 Sol

Make no mistake: Both of these new AI models are quite capable. I first prompted Gemini 4 Argon and GPT-6 Sol with the following: "Using information online, create a web app I can run locally that plots the lighthouses of the world on a map. Clicking on a lighthouse should give me some details about it, show how far its light reaches, and display a simple 2D model showing its shape and height (if known). Put a lighthouse keeper in each model pop-up for scale."

At the highest, slowest levels of "thinking," these AIs took a while to get back to me: Nearly 10 minutes for Gemini and almost 26 minutes for ChatGPT. Both hit the same problem—restricted access to map data online—but both were able to make a rudimentary world map of their own when prompted a second time.

The ChatGPT effort, dubbed "Beacon," wasn't bad, apart from a bit of map clunkiness (it clearly needs to work on its cartography skills). It presented plenty of information, laid out everything well, and gave me nice, neat diagrams on each of the lighthouses featured. The day/night mode worked fine, and it was an impressive bit of coding work, even if it did take 26 minutes.

However, the Gemini effort, called "Pharos," was better in almost every respect. The map was more detailed, lighthouses actually showed their light range (with an impressive animation), and there was more information on each location—perhaps due to Google's expertise in web search. Some of the layout choices were a bit off, but Gemini 4 Argon produced what was clearly the superior app in less than half the time.

ChatGPT's lighthouse map was pretty good—but had its problems. Credit: Lifehacker

Next, I fed PDFs of 10 recent scientific studies into each AI model. The prompt: "Give me a brief summary of each of these studies in plain English, with a single sentence each for the main finding, one study strength, one study weakness, and the main implication." While I hadn't read the studies through entirely myself, I had read news stories on all of them, and I lowered the "thinking" level to low.

This time ChatGPT was faster—25 seconds versus Gemini's 55 seconds—and gave what I thought were the better summaries, at least for my purposes. Gemini did well, and its answers were accurate and to the point, but the summaries ChatGPT gave were easier to understand and shorter. ChatGPT also offered some overall thoughts on the most promising study, which Gemini didn't.

Finally, I checked the imagination and creative juices of the models: "With the success of the Apple TV shows Severance, Slow Horses, Silo, and Widow's Bay, give me five pitches for new show ideas on the platform that combine elements from some or all of these shows. Try and be as original as possible and keep each pitch to around 100 words." I put the "thinking" level back up to "high" for this job.

Gemini's lighthouse map offered more information and a better layout. Credit: Lifehacker

(Is this how Apple TV executives actually get their ideas nowadays? I hope not.) As far as the answers the AIs gave me, Gemini was faster than ChatGPT (1 minute and 28 seconds against 3 minutes and 48 seconds, respectively), and both served up responses that were a bit more literal in their mashing up than I wanted: failed secret service agents and supernatural terrors abounded, which is I suppose what I asked for.

The ideas were mostly "Widow's Bay set somewhere else" or "Slow Horses set somewhere else," and didn't make a whole lot of sense for the most part, but the best Gemini offering was about a Silo-style underground bunker whose operators go through a Severance-style procedure every 24 hours: outside, the bunker protecting it from zombies by night; inside, the bunker planning social activities for residents by day. It's not perfect, but I might watch the trailer at least.

My favorite of the ChatGPT suggestions was a show about a remote, Severance-style weather station whose employees discover they're not recording the weather—they're creating it. Again, it didn't really logically hold up, but overall I found the suggestions from GPT-6 more nuanced, more likely to be an actual show, and better "thought" through. Maybe Gemini should've given itself more time to "think."

This is only a narrow set of quick tests, but, in my view, it seems Gemini is back to, at the very least, an even playing field with ChatGPT. It performed much better on the lighthouse task, though its summarizing and TV show pitching weren't quite as impressive. Access to the best models requires a subscription on both platforms, but if you're able to, it's worth comparing them against each other on the jobs you most commonly need AI for.

Love it or hate it, AI is changing tech at a rapid pace. Case in point: AI is now being used to reverse-engineer big-name software packages. Once complete, developers upload the cloned versions online as open-source tools that anyone can use for free. It seems no company is immune from these dupes, no matter how big it happens to be. That includes Adobe, and its legacy software like Photoshop, which now has a free-to-download AI clone called "PhotoCraft." I gave this clone a shot, and while it isn't perfect, it's remarkable how similar it is to the real deal.

The ArtCraft apps have their own launcher. Credit: Lifehacker

What's the story behind apps like PhotoCraft?

One of the developers leading this particular charge is Brandon Thomas, a seasoned software engineer who has used Claude Opus 5.5 to build copies of Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat Pro, After Effects, and InDesign in the Rust coding language. They all get new names—Photoshop is PhotoCraft, Premiere is FilmCraft—but they're very similar in terms of features and layout to what Adobe puts out and charges a monthly fee for. It's another seismic industry shift driven by AI, and Thomas is apparently building clones of Microsoft Office apps next.

According to the developer, Thomas "got bit by the dark pattern 'cancellation fee' one too many times," which prompted the start of the project. "AI lets us take back tech and set the clock back to the pre-shitty era," says Thomas. "But now you can just create 1:1 functional equivalents, clean room, that are highly performant and cross-platform. Nothing is stopping you." In another comment, he declares, "Software is over." 

It's not clear exactly how Thomas completed this project, but he has used the term "vibe coding," so it sounds like some kind of AI-powered observe-and-copy is going on here, even with his programming experience. The developer has also suggested this is a more worthwhile endeavor than supporting open source apps such as LibreOffice and GIMP as, in his view, "There is no reason to save broken software."

This looks a lot like Photoshop... Credit: Lifehacker

Are apps like PhotoCraft legal?

As Ars Technica points out, reverse engineering is usually tolerated as long as no code is directly copied, but if the new suite of tools too closely matches the look and feel of the apps they're cloning, that could mean legal trouble. The truth is, no one's sure yet—and it brings up again the legality of the AI models themselves, which have been trained on vast amounts of human-made code to get to this level.

Adobe is no doubt taking a very close look at this, but while it's still available, I decided to give the software a try myself. You can download the apps from the ArtCraft website, though they're labeled as "early alpha" and "in development" for now. According to Thomas, 99% feature parity with the Adobe equivalents should be "measured in months and not years".

Getting started with PhotoCraft

The ArtCraft web portal offers a launcher app through which you can manage the entire 'Craft' selection of tools, but I focused on PhotoCraft as Photoshop is the only Adobe program I really make much use of. My first impressions: It definitely looks like a Photoshop rip-off.

PhotoCraft has the same color scheme, the same layout of panels, and the same menus in the same order—with the exception of Plugins, which I suppose will take a while. The keyboard shortcuts are the same, as far as I could tell, and the various preferences screens are very similar too—both in terms of the options you have and how they're laid out.

Editing a screenshot of Photoshop, in PhotoCraft. Credit: Lifehacker

Most of the Photoshop work I do involves cropping and combining images, tweaking their colors and balance, and getting them in fixed formats for articles. I was able to transform my workflow from the Adobe app pretty much wholesale: The same panels, the same dialogs, and the same tools (from the clone stamp to the magic wand).

Plenty of image editors ape Photoshop, of course, because it's the industry leader—Pixlr, anyone?—but this seems on another level entirely. PhotoCraft is also fast and slick, and as far as I could tell, free from bugs. The only bumps I came across were some clunky snapping and selecting operations, which could definitely be improved upon but didn't actually break anything.

I'm by no means a power user of Photoshop, and people with more experience than me have found plenty of issues under the hood. I suspect that when it comes to playing around with more advanced tools and layer functions, cracks might start to show in the way you would expect from AI code trying to copy what another program does. I'm not sure "watch this program and make something that behaves the same" is the best way forward for software development.

A lot of the same tools are available, in the same place. Credit: Lifehacker

That said, for me, PhotoCraft did everything I needed it to in terms of image manipulations, adjustments, and layer control, and did it well. How the app carries on long-term remains to be seen, as AI-written bug fixes and feature upgrades will presumably be piled on top of existing AI-written code—and that's assuming Adobe doesn't get involved.

Personally, I'm not going to cancel my Photoshop subscription: I can afford it, I use it, and I'm not yet ready to trust my projects to something that's been coded by AI. But this is the era we're in now, where AI can look at something—a painting, a website, a movie, a sprawling Adobe software application—and give you a very convincing imitation in not much time at all.

An abundance of AI imagery is something we all have to live with these days—from school posters to restaurant menus—and while there are still certain tells that indicate something was made with AI, they're not always present. In a lot of cases, it can be almost impossible to distinguish an AI image from a real one.

This is a problem for all kinds of reasons, and, as such, the AI companies are attempting to address it. Images produced by Gemini and ChatGPT come with an invisible watermark called SynthID. That way, AI-generated images don't need visible branding in order to identify their origins. Of course, you need access to a detector to know whether this watermark is present. As it happens, Google just launched a standalone SynthID checker tool on the web, free for anyone to use. I gave "SynthID Detector" a shot, and while it largely works as expected, it isn't perfect.

How Google's SynthID Detector works

SynthID doesn't promise to always detect AI. Credit: Lifehacker

For a while now, Gemini has let you upload an image and ask if it is AI-generated. With the new online portal, it's even easier to check—though you do still need to sign in with your Google account. Once in, you can check a wide variety of files. This checker supports JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, WEBP, AVIF, HEIC, HEIF, TIFF, TIF, and GIF image formats; MP4, MOV, and WEBM for videos, and WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, AAC, and M4A for audio. As long as a file was made by a SynthID-supporting AI, it should have a watermark. (The SynthID watermark is a standard supported by Nvidia, OpenAI, Kakao, and Google, though OpenAI has its own detection tool.)

Google doesn't say exactly how SynthID works, presumably to make it more difficult to get around, but does confirm the watermark is "robust against common transformations." It also says the watermark is "woven into the content itself", which means pixels for images and video, and frequency components for audio. The company also admits its detection tool isn't infallible. What it calls "heavy modifications" can degrade the watermark sign, as can multiple "transformations" applied to the same image. The recommendation is to use files that are as high quality as possible, so it seems to me that more data makes detection more reliable (similar to AI text detectors).

Google also says the SynthID watermarks are "imperceptible" to humans, so you don't need to look or listen out for them—they're only revealed by an AI detector tool like this. If you're generating images, video, or audio with AI, the watermarking shouldn't impact the quality of the end result in any way.

Putting SynthID Detector to the test

I started with some easy tests. The detector correctly spotted that images created in Gemini and ChatGPT, and downloaded directly to disk, were indeed fake. It only took a few seconds to confirm, and it also identified the AI tool that had been used to make them.

It also correctly marked one of my own photos as AI-free, although it did hedge its answer a little, saying that it was "unlikely" that the media was made with AI. All the detector could say with confidence was that there was no SynthID watermark, showing that it's this watermark in particular that it's checking for. It's not looking for any other signs of AI.

In the majority of tests, the detector worked flawlessly. Credit: Lifehacker

I then tried screengrabs of the same AI images, and the detector correctly flagged that they came from Google and Anthropic's AI tools. This shows there's something buried deep in the pixels, rather than in the file metadata itself, revealing the SynthID watermark. You can't just copy and paste to get around it. Applying an oil painting filter in Photoshop to an AI image didn't trip up the detector, nor did adding a slight blur. Adjusting color, contrast, and tone made no difference, and the detector still spotted SynthID when I cropped and combined two different AI images: one from Gemini, one from ChatGPT.

Eventually, I did beat the detector. Once, when I heavily pixelated an AI image—at which point I rather suspect my disinformation campaign would be pretty ineffective anyway—and once when I created a composite image, which was 75% real, 25% AI-generated. With less AI to work with, the detector can falter.

Only the man in the foreground in this photo is AI—but the detector flagged it as fake. Credit: Lifehacker

On the back of that result, I used ChatGPT to add an extra person into an otherwise genuine group photo, though this time the tool detected SynthID—even though less of the overall image was AI. There might be some work to do in images that are only partly AI, which is understandable as the detector has less data to work with.

There is a quota limit here, which seems to be around 10 files per day—but 10 each for images, videos, and audio files. Once you've hit your limit, you need to wait 24 hours to try again. As far as I could tell, the SynthID Detector is exactly what Google says it is: a useful check to have, but far from a guarantee one way or the other.

Plex has been around for almost 20 years at this point, and has added plenty of features and functions in that time. We've previously covered some of the ways it can be useful for creating your own personal streaming service.

Even if you're a seasoned Plex user, you should find something of use here, as there's everything from tweaking the metadata that the apps use to create your library, to improving the quality of your video streams—with a particular focus on films and TV shows (though Plex is capable of handling music and photos, too).

Edit your show and movie metadata if Plex gets it wrong

Your filenames and folder structure should give Plex enough information to correctly label TV shows and movies, but it doesn't always get it right every time. If you spot a mistake then there are a few ways to change it.

From the main page for a show or film, click the three dots and choose Refresh Metadata. This gets Plex to check again with its online sources, so if the data was missing or incorrect the first time around, this may fix it.

Your second option is to head to the listing for a specific movie or show, click the three dots, and then pick Fix Match. This lets you pick from a selection of online search results, and is useful for titles that are very similar to each other or very common.

The final way of fixing metadata is to go to an individual movie or episode, and click the Edit button (the icon that looks like a pencil). This lets you enter manual metadata edits that won't be overwritten by any online databases that Plex references.

Clean out the clutter from your library

Delete leftover bundles from your library. Credit: Lifehacker

As your media library grows and evolves, clutter can start to build up—particularly when it comes to items you've removed, that tend to leave metadata, preview thumbnails, and other bits of digital detritus behind. These leftovers are known as bundles.

You can clear out bundles and keep your library trim in a couple of ways: In the web app, click the three dots next to your media server on the left-hand navigation pane, then choose Manage Server > Clean Bundles.

The same option is in the troubleshooting part of settings on the web. Click the wrench icon (top right) to open Settings, then choose Troubleshooting > Clean Bundles. You can also follow the Scheduled Tasks link on the same page to have Plex do this chore automatically every week for you.

Set up multiple editions of the same movie

There may be times when you have multiple editions of the same movie in your library—director's cuts, perhaps, or extended editions—and if you have the Plex Pass plan then you can label these as separate entities inside your library

You can either change the filename on disk to have the edition in curly brackets after the title—so "Blade Runner (1982) {edition-Final Cut}.mp4" for example—or click the Edit button (the pencil icon) on a movie listing page and enter the details in the Edition field.

Add subtitles to your media with FileBot

FileBot can find subtitles for you. Credit: Lifehacker

Your Plex content isn't automatically going to come with subtitles attached, and that's where the FileBot tool can help. Get the program installed on your system, sign up for a free account at OpenSubtitles, and you're ready to start looking for your subtitle titles. This is done via the Subtitles panel inside FileBot.

Use the green user icon to log into OpenSubtitles through Filebot, then search for your films and shows via the drop-down at the top and the Find button. When you find the files you need, double-click them to move them down to the lower window—in there, you can right-click, choose Export, and save them in the relevant Plex library folder.

There are other options, like a basic built-in subtitle search that's available if you have the Plex Pass, and the standalone Bazarr app, which gives you more options than either the integrated tool or FileBot, but takes longer to set up.

Share your Plex library with friends and family

You don't have to keep your Plex library to yourself, but there are some tricks to sharing it with friends and family. From the web app, click the wrench icon (top right) to open the Settings pane, then choose Manage Library Access on the left.

Click Grant Library Access to let someone else into your media library: You'll need to supply a Plex username or an email address (which will be used to prompt them to sign up for a Plex account). You're then able to select the servers and libraries they can access. If you have a Plex Pass, you can set more limits in terms of age ratings and whether or not your friends and family can download content.

The wrinkles come with remote access. If you as the media server owner have a Plex Pass, then your friends and family can stream content remotely, as well as on the local network; if not, they each need a Remote Watch Pass ($2 a month or $20 a year) if they're not watching on the same local network as you and the server.

See who watched what and when with Tautulli

Tautulli is one of the best Plex add-ons around, giving you a host of useful stats about your media server—including records of who watched what. Once you've downloaded the installer for Windows or macOS, you'll be taken step-by-step through the process of connecting it to your Plex server.

If you've shared your Plex library with the family, then you can, for example, see what the kids are watching and when, and even the devices they've used and how much bandwidth they've used up along the way.

The plug-in is interesting enough even if you haven't shared your library: It's possible to break down viewing to day-by-day or hour-by-hour graphs, see the movies and shows you're watching most often, check out detailed information on your media files, and keep track of when new films and shows are added.

Create collections for easier library management

Use Collections to organize your Library. Credit: Lifehacker

Collections are a useful way of applying some order to the chaos of your Plex media library, and the feature is perhaps not as well known as it should be. You can collect whatever you like, whether it's feel-good TV episodes or spy films.

To get started with collections, click the Edit button on a listing page (the pencil), then choose Tags, and enter something into the Collections box. If the collection already exists, it'll show up as you start typing.

You can also set up smart collections, where media files are added automatically. Set a search filter via the Library tab on your Films or Shows screen, and if you click the Add to button (the plus and horizontal lines icon on the right), you get a Create Smart Collection option. Any files that are added in the future that match your search filter get automatically added to the collection too.

Make videos look as good as possible

Most of the time Plex will handle video quality automatically, and do a good job of it, but there might be occasions when you're not getting the best quality possible (particularly if you're watching on less powerful devices).

To make sure Plex is always serving up video as best it can, in the web app click the Settings icon (the wrench, top right), then Transcoder. If you know you've got the computer to handle it, you can set the top Transcoder quality drop-down to Make my CPU hurt, and enable the Use hardware acceleration when available.

In the apps for individual devices, you'll also find video quality options in the settings. Put video quality up to Maximum for best results—you may need to experiment to find the limits of what each device can handle.

Customize the Continue Watching pane 

You can decide what's in Continue Watching (up to a point). Credit: Lifehacker

You might not have given much thought to the Continue Watching pane that shows up on your Films and Shows pages, but you can customize this on the web to suit your own preferences—and maybe remove some content you don't want to keep around.

Click the wrench icon (top right) to open Settings, then select Library on the left. You're able to set a threshold (a number of weeks) beyond which titles disappear from Continue Watching, as well as limiting the number of titles included in title. Turn off the Include season premieres in Continue Watching checkbox to hide premieres for new seasons when you've finished old ones—otherwise they'll show up indefinitely.

The settings you configure here should propagate to the Continue Watching rows in your other apps; try closing and restarting them if not.

Get the channel surfing experience back with QuasiTV

If you miss the traditional channel surfing experience when using Plex, there's a solution in the form of QuasiTV: This app works on Android TV, Google TV, and Fire TV devices, and wraps your Plex library and streaming services in a more conventional interface.

Sign into Plex, point it towards your libraries, and it'll create a custom channel guide filled with your shows and movies. These might get assigned to genres, or to the TV stations they originally aired on, and you can browse around until you find something you like—just like the old days.

It's not the most efficient way of searching through your Plex media library, but it's fun to use, and when I tested it out I rediscovered a few movies and TV episodes that I hadn't watched in a while.

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Samsung is rolling out a major One UI 9 update, based on Android 17. If you've got one of the Galaxy S26 handsets launched at the start of the year, you should see it pop up on your device soon (it came pre-installed on the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Galaxy Z Flip 8 devices unveiled in July).

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After the Galaxy S26, next in line for the update are the Galaxy S25, Galaxy Z Fold 7, and Galaxy Z Flip 7 phones—though Samsung hasn't said exactly when the software will arrive for those devices. After that, phones from as far back as 2023 should eventually get One UI 9, including the Galaxy S23, Galaxy Z Fold 5, and Galaxy Z Flip 5 handsets.

If you do have an eligible phone, you'll want to dive in and start making the most of the update as quickly as possible. These 10 hacks should get you up and running. From making your device more secure to creating your own custom widgets, these are my favorite tricks and tips for the updated OS.

Cut down your doomscrolling with "AI Network Guard"

AI Network Guard is a new feature in One UI 9 that cuts off the internet when you open an app you've put on a specific restricted list. It's actually designed to stop kids from stumbling across unsuitable content, but it works great for limiting doomscrolling for grown-ups as well.

The feature isn't easy to find, though—it's on the same hidden menu that features Samsung's wifi signal scanner (why Samsung is keeping it hidden is anyone's guess). From Settings, tap Connections and Wi-Fi, then tap the three dots in the top right corner and select Intelligent Wi-Fi. On the next screen, tap the Intelligent Wi-Fi button seven times to reveal a new Connectivity Labs option.

Go into Connectivity Labs, and you will at last discover AI Network Guard. Follow the instructions to set up a PIN, and you can then pick the apps you want to block internet access for. Use the Downtime feature (via the three dots, top right) to set certain periods in the day when those apps can be used as normal.

Tailor your phone's menus by adjusting "Quick Panel" shortcuts

More customization options are available for the Quick Panel. Credit: Lifehacker

One UI has always impressed in terms of the number of customization options it gives users, and there's a new tweak available in the latest update. If you swipe down from the top right corner of the screen to get to the Quick Panel, then tap the pencil edit button, you've got more freedom to adjust its layout. You've always been able to swap widgets in and out, but now you can position them in any way you like (just tap and drag), and change their sizes (via the handles around the edges). The sound button is also now decoupled from the volume slider, so you can manage them separately. Tap Add a control to introduce new elements, and tap Done when you're finished.

Use "My FanCam" to spotlight one person in your videos

If you want one person in particular to be the star of a video, My FanCam is here for you in One UI 9. It lets you load up a video you've already recorded and create a new clip with a specific individual front and center. The obvious use case for this is your kid in the school play or at sports day, but you can use it for whatever you want. You do need to give My FanCam plenty of material to work with in terms of footage and framing—it can't magically produce new angles or new clips out of nothing.

To get started, open up a video from the Gallery app, then tap the Galaxy AI button (the stars) and My FanCam to get started. After a few moments, you'll be able to choose the person you want to follow and select crop and aspect ratio settings.

Build your own "Now Brief" cards to receive more relevant alerts

You can have up to three custom Now Brief cards. Credit: Lifehacker

Samsung Now Brief is aiming to give you timely alerts throughout the day about information that's relevant to you—such as weather updates or appointment reminders—and in One UI 9 you can make it more useful with the option to create your own cards. From Settings, tap Galaxy AI > Now Brief, then choose Custom cards. You can have three active at any one time, centered around weather details, health statistics, or particular categories of video pulled from the web.

Cut down on car sickness with "Motion Assist"

Google has finally gotten around to building something to match the anti-car sickness Vehicle Motion Cues feature that Apple put into iOS last year, and it's called Motion Assist. It was rolled out as part of the Android 17 update, and Samsung has carried it over to its own One UI 9 upgrade.

To find it, open up Settings, then choose Google services > All services > Motion assist. Beyond enabling and disabling the feature, you can customize the color, shape, and opacity of the dots that flow across the screen while you're moving, and which will (hopefully) keep any nausea at bay.

Liven up the interface with a "Motion Photo" wallpaper

Give your wallpaper game a bit of a lift by setting a Motion Photo as your phone's backdrop, rather than a static image. These images are accompanied by short videos when they're captured, giving you a second or so on either side of the still frame—tap the little icon that's an 'A' inside a series of rectangles to turn it on in the Camera app.

One UI 9 lets you set these Motion Photos as wallpaper to add a bit more movement and interest. You still set the wallpaper in the same way: Wallpaper and style, then Change wallpapers > Gallery from Settings. You should see a Motion photo option appear on compatible images.

Search your phone more quickly by adding "Finder" to the home screen

There's now the option to add Finder to the home screen. Credit: Lifehacker

The Finder is the search tool built into One UI, and it's traditionally been available at the top or bottom of the app drawer that appears when you swipe up on a home screen: You just type in the app or file you want to find on your phone. One of the nice tweaks introduced with One UI 9 is the option to have the Finder on the home screen for more convenient access. Open Settings, then choose Home screen > Show search on Home screen to enable it.

Keep an eye on what your AI assistants are up to

AI continues to become more integrated into our phones, and Galaxy handsets are no exception: You may well have several third-party AI apps on board your device, as well as the built-in Galaxy AI features. One UI 9 ushers in a new "AI Assistant Activity" dashboard that lets you keep tabs on what AI apps and their agents are doing on your phone, from booking concert tickets to analyzing photos. You can see everything that's been happening in one place. You can find the dashboard from Settings by tapping Security and privacy > AI assistant activity. Any actions AIs have taken on your behalf can be viewed app by app, with filters for activity over the last seven days or the last 24 hours.

Learn faster by taping over your Samsung Notes

The new Tape tool in Samsung Notes. Credit: Lifehacker

Perhaps not a One UI 9 upgrade that's going to grab many headlines, but a useful one nevertheless: Samsung Notes now has a Tape tool that works exactly like the name suggests: It lets you put a bit of digital "tape" over part of your note. You can use this as a revision aid, as a decoration for scrapbooking or journaling, or to protect sensitive information when you're sharing screenshots of your notes. You'll find it along the bottom toolbar when a note is open (the icon looks like a piece of tape). You can choose different colors and patterns for your tape, change the size, and have the app automatically straighten your taping too. Use the tape icon on the tool pop-up to show or hide all your tape.

Run diagnostics to spot potential problems in the new "Warranty and Care" menu

This is a tip that you'll hopefully not have to call on too often, but there's a new Warranty and Care section in Settings that brings together a few older features and adds some new ones on top. From here, you can sign up for Samsung Care+, check if your phone is still under warranty, book repairs for your device, or run a diagnostics check on your phone. You can even ask Bixby for some troubleshooting tips and advice.