Samsung One UI 3 mini review

Odds and ends, annoyances

We realize One UI 3 is in its infancy – or, rather, Samsung's implementation of Android 11 is. So we were willing to cut them some slack, despite all the betas and everything, which is why we contemplated dropping this chapter. In the end, our collective whining nature got the better of us, and we figured we should still mention what bugged us even in this 'final' release of the software – just for the sake of thoroughness.

For one, the Bubbles vs. Smart pop-up situation is somewhat weird. Bubbles do seem to make Smart pop-up redundant, as they offer similar functionality, minus the resizing. On the other hand, if you were used to Samsung's thing and do need the resizing capability, it's good that Samsung still gives you that option. Only partially, though – Smart pop-up does not work on our units for one reason or another. And that's on top of the fact that Bubbles themselves don't work reliably with all messaging apps.

The last line in the update's changelog reads that you 'can no longer connect to Chromecast using Smart View. You can use Google Home instead'. While that's an unfortunate development if you tend to use your Galaxy smartphone for casting stuff from the phone's gallery to Chromecasts or Android TV. But it's hardly the end of the world since we've been able to successfully mirror the phone's screen using Smart View on WebOS TVs, as well cast to Chromecasts from apps such as YouTube without specifically using Smart View. It's still a limitation brought about the update, and allegedly, you can work around it by mirroring your screen from the Google Home app.

Next, we've been having issues with the popular password manager Last Pass, too. Not really in Samsung's court this one, but often, when we needed to log in to a site, the Last Pass fingerprint authentication prompt would appear for a brief instant and go away before you get a chance to act on it, leaving us with no way to authenticate and log in. The workaround is to specifically open Last Pass, authenticate and then go back to the website with Last Pass already pre-authorized to log in. Hardly ideal, but it will probably get patched in the next update of the password manager.

Another early issue that we experienced, and it was a very odd one, was that Instagram would simply crash when you scroll to a particular image on certain profiles. It would do it with an infuriating consistency for those particular accounts and that particular meme. We've been unable to replicate it recently, so we gather that bug has been fixed.

We've seen complaints online about several issues with the One UI 3 beta, some of them reportedly extending to the final release too. Those include and are probably not limited to navigation gesture unresponsiveness, reduction in benchmark performance, and Google Pay not working. We experienced no tangible difference in gesture behavior, and Google Pay is functioning just fine. On the other hand, a certain reduction in benchmark scores could indeed be seen, though the 5% ballpark of the differences we're getting is hardly what we'd call significant.

Wrap-up

OneUI 3 is all about refining what was already good with previous iterations of Samsung's Android overlay and adding in the new Android 11 bits. As such, there's hardly anything not to like about it, particularly when you consider that we've been fans of One UI since One UI One - well, perhaps aside from the naming.

There is still a handful of features or bugs that need some extra polish. In our experience, those have been related to the implementation of the native Android 11 features and the third-party apps' preparedness for the new OS version. One UI itself – that remains a winner for us.