Samsung One UI 9 Brings My FanCam and Expanded Quick Panel Controls

My FanCam is one of the update's standout tools. It turns a wide shot into a tight tracking shot of a single person. In a Samsung marketing clip, a rock band performance is shown with each member highlighted; when the user selects the guitarist, the video crops around him in close-up. Engadget said the feature is well suited to concerts, dance videos for social media, and highlights from children's sports games. It can track a subject across an entire video without requiring a special shooting mode. Users open an already recorded video in Samsung Gallery and tap the Galaxy AI button, an icon that looks like sparkles. The feature works on-device without sending data to the cloud, and Engadget found it available and working in airplane mode. It does require a Samsung account login. Engadget tested My FanCam on the Galaxy S26 Ultra and S25 Ultra. One UI 9 is still rolling out to older models, and outside reporting shows Galaxy phones in the S24 series are the oldest models to have My FanCam in the beta version of One UI 9. Similar functionality has been available in AI-powered video editing apps such as CapCut for years, but Engadget called native support in Samsung's Android software a welcome addition. Achieving a comparable tracking shot in a manual editing program like Adobe Premiere Pro can take hours, the publication said.

One UI 9 also expands Quick Panel customization. Samsung split quick settings and notifications into two panels with One UI 7 in 2024, then allowed more customization in One UI 8 and 8.5. In One UI 9, the biggest change is to the volume and brightness sliders. Users can remove the ringer mute shortcut that was attached to the volume slider and the dark mode toggle attached to the brightness slider, turning the sliders into standalone controls. The sliders are also more minimal, losing the large UI pads around their borders from earlier software versions. Borders around tiles have been removed as well. The most subtle change is to the music player widget in the Quick Panel, which also appears atop the notifications panel and in the live notification chip at the top left of the screen. The small waveform on the scrubber bar during playback now matches the current album art.

Engadget said it has grown accustomed to sloppy AI features accompanying new smartphones, and that many One UI 9 inclusions seem like things real people might appreciate. Even some AI features are more grounded than the gimmicky photo generation features of the past couple of years. The publication found the Now Nudge feature, intended to serve contextual information when needed, lackluster in practice; it still had not shown anything useful even with a large amount of data being fed into it, Engadget said. Some more pedestrian additions to the software turned out to be handy. Engadget also highlighted better document scanning as a One UI 9 feature, noting Samsung has offered a document-scanning feature for many years.