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Galaxy phones are on track for a much needed screen recording upgrade
3 hours ago
- Samsung’s new One UI 8.5 interface brings an improved video recording menu.
- The feature now lets you record only a portion of the screen, rather than the entire screen.
- However, it’s currently slightly challenging to work with, especially if you use swipe gestures for navigation, and we hope Samsung fixes it.
After months of leaks, Samsung’s next big update, One UI 8.5, is finally ready for beta testing. And it brings a highly modified interface that could spark opinions about drawing inspiration from Apple’s iOS 26. But in addition to the renewed system UI and apps, One UI 8.5 is also bringing improvements to key functionalities, and one of them is how screen recording works.
With Samsung’s first official One UI 8.5 beta build released, we’re now seeing a new menu for screen recording features. One of the chief changes is the ability to record only a part of the screen instead of the entire screen, which is easier than cropping the video later.
One UI’s ability to capture only a part of the screen was also spotted in a leaked build a few months ago. This was also possible previously in One UI 6 through Edge Panels, but was later removed in One UI 7. Meanwhile, other Android OEMs, such as OnePlus, offer a similar option to select only a portion of the screen while recording it.
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Now, when you start recording the screen in One UI 8.5 beta on a Galaxy S25, you’ll see the option to choose between the entire screen or a partial screen. If you choose the latter option, you will notice pull bars around the edges of the screen that you can move to adjust the area meant to be recorded. This differs from the screen recording option in stable One UI 8, which only gives you the option to choose whether to capture media or not.
However, while the feature was in place, we found it extremely difficult to move the grab bars because they were so close to the edge, and could trigger the back gesture.
Notably, even with this addition, One UI still does not support recording the screen only while using a specific app, a standard Android feature. In addition to selecting a particular app, Android now also lets you choose whether to record the screen only for an external display, which again appears to be missing from the latest One UI 8.5 build.
We’ll ensure sharing an update if that changes.
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