Why search when you can Glance? An awesome, free to use inbuilt feature for smartphone users.

Every day we are bombarded with tonnes of information and news on the Internet, but wouldn’t it be nice to just get the best stories on your phone for you to actually process it without distractions and ads. The new range of handsets released by Samsung and Xiaomi have a new content partner – Glance, to deliver a transformative lockscreen experience. Glance shows you wonderful updates on the lockscreen each time you wake up the phone. If you are using a phone from Samsung’s J, M or A series or any kind of Xiaomi phones then you just have to activate this feature on your lock screen and enjoy highly personalized information on your fingertips.

With a plethora of apps buzzing your phone with notifications, and each website trying to influence you with ads and click baits, it is quite interesting to see how Glance is helping declutter and customize information for you. Along with some brand-specific customization of the UI on the lock screen, the overall user experience is pretty delightful as I tried this myself and I am sort of hooked on it for a while. Let me quickly tell you how to go about it, and make the most it.

How to use Glance on your android phone

While some of you might think Glance is an app, but it is just a feature designed for Android users and you can’t download it from the Play Store. All you need is to get a Glance-enabled phone to be able to use it and enjoy the colorful nuggets of information curated for your taste.

Here’s how you activate the service:

For a Samsung phone (J / M / A series or any kind of Xiaomi phones) get Glance by following this flowchart:

Go to Settings – Lockscreen — LockScreen Stories — Turn on

Once Glance is activated on the phone, it will seek a few basic permissions and take you to a section where you can shortlist and select the genres that you are interested to learn about. It offers content in Hindi and Tamil in addition to English, so you can choose the preferred language and get content accordingly.

What did I like about this feature?

From news, business, sports, travel, fashion, entertainment to science and technology – there are almost 18 categories to choose from. For instance, I picked the fashion, news and science category to begin with and enjoy the content on Glance in different ways. The first is on the lock screen —every time I unlocked the phone, I found a different story accompanied by a stunning image and a headline.

The next one is when I really liked something in the lock screen and wanted to explore more – for a Samsung phone, I had to swipe down from the center of the phone and it took me to the next page with more details about the content. In some cases, it was also accentuated with a small video, which I could tap and play to discover more. For me, using Glance on my phone is not just an easy way to stay updated, but it also makes me happy to see such beautiful images that are absolutely delightful additions to my smart screen.

I would suggest you try it and see if the beautiful images bring a smile on your face each time you unlock your phone – and, don’t forget to share your experience in the comments below.

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