Samsung's increased focus on gaming with the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge was interesting to see. The company promised superior performance on its latest flagships, and also built in dedicated tools to let users get the most out of their gaming experience. Samsung's Game Launcher app lets us access all our installed games from a single location; Game Tools offers various features, such as an option to disable the device's capacitive keys so that they don't get in the way, and the ability to take in-game screenshots and record gameplay videos.
But this focus on gaming didn't exactly start with the S7 and S7 edge. Samsung launched the Game Tuner app way back in October last year, with support for the Galaxy S6 lineup and the Galaxy Note 5. Game Tuner, as the name suggests, allows you to fine-tune game settings – you can decrease a game's texture quality and resolution to increase frame rate, or limit the game's frame rate to save battery power. It's extremely useful should you decide to make use of Game Tuner, but oddly, Samsung has kept the app away from those who would need it the most.
Those folks would be users of Samsung's mid-range and budget smartphones. Let's face it, if you're buying a flagship device, performance in even the most high-end titles is never really a problem. Saving battery power is a valid use case as we all know how power hungry high-end phones can be, but other than that, Game Tuner doesn't really offer much to flagship smartphone owners. Less powerful devices, however, could benefit greatly, especially from a feature that reduces a game's graphical quality and would make visually demanding games more playable.
Similarly, Game Tools could also do with support for more devices, both older flagships (Game Tools is only supported on the S7 and S7 edge for now) and devices with humble specs. After all, every Samsung device comes with capacitive keys that can get in the way while gaming, unlike on-screen keys that simply disappear when an app or game goes full screen. Budget devices might not have the horsepower to record in-game videos and offer playable frame rates at the same time, but being able to disable those pesky capacitive navigation keys would be a boon across every Galaxy device.
I get it. Samsung has a lot of mid-range and budget devices with varying hardware specifications, and making Game Tools and Game Tuner compatible with the different GPUs and SoCs could prove to be difficult. Still, as it stands now, these apps – especially Game Tuner – aren't being used to their full potential. I don't recall the last time I needed to reduce a game's frame rate on my Galaxy S7 edge, but it's something that crossed my mind a few times when I was testing the recently launched Galaxy J5 (2016) and Galaxy J7 (2016) for the SamMobile review.
Make it happen Samsung. These gaming tools really need to come to cheaper smartphones and tablets – these devices might not offer you the same level of profit as your flagships, but they would certainly be able to offer a better user experience with something like Game Tuner. In the end, that's what it is all about, right?
