Have you tried accessing the hidden service menu on your Galaxy smartphone?

There’s a hidden service menu inside your Samsung Galaxy smartphone featuring a lot of diagnostic tools to help measure your device’s ongoing performance.

How many of you know that there’s a hidden service menu inside your Samsung Galaxy smartphones? I just happened to come across whilst playing with the Galaxy S3 keypad. This service menu features a lot of diagnostic tools to help measure your device’s ongoing performance. You can check whether the color capabilities of your smartphone has any dead pixels it or whether the vibrator is working as it should just by accessing this menu.

Accessing the service menu is as simple as getting to your phone’s keypad and typing *#0* #. It would have been easier had Samsung unveiled this for us! As soon as you type this, you will find a 5 X 3 grid matrix.

Color testing:

The top row shows the color testing capabilities of the phone. You can see the RGB (Red-Green-Blue) pattern aligned. Now, as soon as you click on Red, it will display a full red screen. You can now easily get to know any decay in your color capabilities if you see variable colors in this screen. Same testing goes for the green and blue buttons.

Receiver and Vibration

Indication that your phone’s receiver is all normal can be known from this button. Upon tapping, you should hear a short, high pitched beep. If you don’t you might as well have some problem.

Same goes for vibration. You should be able to feel a long unprecedented vibration making sure that the phone’s vibration is intact.

Front cam

This one would lead you to a testing of the front camera.

Sensors

This one would let you check all the sensors built in. The interface of this is something cool even if someone doesn’t understand the terms. You have 5 sensors to test here.

• Proximity sensor
• Barometer sensor
• Lights sensor
• Gyroscope sensor
• Magnetic Sensor

Touch Screen

This is one of the most useful buttons. Tap on it and you would come across a grid. Tap on the boxes to color them in green or just touch on the screen to leave black lines. Now, if your tapping doesn’t leave a box green or a black mark in the empty area, you should know that there’s something wrong with the touch sensor for that particular area.

Sleep, Speaker and Sub key

Tapping on the sleep function will take the phone to sleep mode and to return you’ll have to unlock. True, this is how the sleep mode should work. The speaker icon is self-explanatory. If on tapping you don’t hear a sound, either there’s some problem or you need to increase the volume of your phone.

LED and Low frequency

The last row of icons tests various functions of the phone.  Tap the Front cam button to make sure that the front camera is operating as it should. The screen should show you whatever the front camera of the phone is seeing.Tap the LED button to test the various LED colors.  Each time you tap the screen, you should see – in order – Red, Green, Blue, End. Tap the Low frequency button to test various LCD frequencies.

Some of these might not come in very handy to us in terms of the technicalities, but someone might want to test these before buying a handset.

Please note that this service menu is available across most Samsung Smartphones. Only that the options might differ. We tried this on the Samsung Galaxy S3.