S Pen and magnification. A few questions.

[Kenneth Brodersen]

Hi everyone.
I am considering replacing my old trusty Nexus 6 with the Note 7 but have a few questions that I hope someone in here can assist with answering. I am from Europe, so I wan't be able to go "hand on" for a month or so.

I am visually impaired (about 3-5% eyesight) and use the magnification gestures in android all the time. I was watching a few reviews and noticed the N7 has a magnification feature utilising the s pen and "air view" (or what its called). That could be a real useful feature to me, but I can't seam to find any videos exploring this feature in depth. Would one of you be willing to break out the "pointy-toy" (no, not THAT one) and help me answer a few questions?
So here we go.
1) When enabling the magnifier a small area around the "pen point" is magnified and shown in a squire box. I know it is possible to change the magnification level, but is it possible to increase the size of this box?
2) What (in theory) makes this so awesome to me is that the magnified area can be moved by simply hovering over another part of the screen. Is it still possible to click something with the pen (by touching the screen) while having the magnification enabled? So let me give an example. I would like to hover over the settings icon. Click it, go down the list to locate, lets say display settings, click it and so on. All without "loosing" the magnification. Is this possible?
3) Normally you enable magnification by clicking on some icon/s pen button and selecting it from a menu. Do you guys know if it is possible to create a "default s pen action". I would like the magnification glass to automatically appear whenever I hover the s pen over the screen.

Thank you so much in avance and have an awesome day!

 

[TechnologyTwitt]

Hi Ken, just curious - do you need reverse color as well or just magnification?

 

[Kenneth Brodersen]

Hi Ken, just curious - do you need reverse color as well or just magnification?

Hi.
Nope. I don't use color inversion or screen readers. Just magnification

 

[French]

O.k., I just added magnifier to my Air Command menu...it's a square box and while it is activated I only see the ability to change the percentage that is magnified, not the box itself. But the box stays active and you can hover your pen around to move it anywhere on the screen and you can interact with whatever is magnified (so you can tap things).

I believe you are already familiar with everything else I'm going to say below but adding it for anyone that might find this thread if looking for magnifier help in general:

There is also a "magnify" feature available in the Accessibility menu. If you go to Accessibility, Vision, and scroll down to Magnifier Window you can turn this on. Turning it on to be on all the time does disable quite a few things (always on display being one of them). But if you turn it on here you can at least go in and "preset" the size of the window and the zoom amount, then turn it back off (I'll get to why you may want to do this in a moment).

There is another setting just below that called Magnifier Gestures, which when turned on allows you to triple tap anywhere on the screen to activate (I think you are using this functionality already). If you triple tap and hold and then drag your finger to move the magnify window around. It does say while engaged the response time could be slowed down in phone, calculator and other apps.

And now the "I'll get to that in a moment" above...In the main Accessibility menu there is something called Direct Access. When you go in there, turn that on and there is a list of items that can be turned on. For myself, I have magnifier and grayscale turned on. With this feature turned on you can triple tap your home button and select magnifier (if you have more than one item in the menu)...or if you ONLY have magnifier turned on in the settings the triple tap would launch it. But you would need to set up the size of the window and zoom level within the accessibility menu and you can't change it on the fly. I have mine set to the smallest window and smallest magnification setting because I really only need it when trying to select an itty bitty page number on a website page or something. Engaging the magnification here also turns off AOD so if you like that feature you would have to manually turn it back on each time you engage magnify.

I'm not sure if a shortcut can be created for the S Pen default action. Hopefully someone else can chime in on that.

TL;DR

1) Not that I could figure out (so no).

2) Yes.

3) I don't know but suspect answer is no. However there are some other ways to implement magnification outlined above and I believe you are already familiar with those.

I tend to get a bit wordy so there's a quick summary if you want to avoid the rest of it.

 

[Kenneth Brodersen]

Thank you so much. I did learn a lot. Many of the features you mention (direct actions, magnifier and triple tapping home buttons) are not available on my nexus. But you are right. I use the mag-gestures to triple tap and hold to zoom -> move my fat fingers around the screen to explore -> lift my finger to zoom out -> select whatever i was looking at (without magnification)
My hope is that the s pen could make this interaction flow a bit more fluid.

Actually I should be a bit annoyed. Your reply might just end up costing me 900$

 

[French]

...
My hope is that the s pen could make this interaction flow a bit more fluid. ...

The S pen does make the interaction more fluid. As long as you don't turn off the magnification or reinsert the pen, the magnifier comes back up whenever you hover the pen. So you can still navigate using your fingers without the pen (and no magnification window), and then hover the pen when you want the magnification window. I think the biggest challenge is that I'm not seeing a way to change the size of the square magnification window itself.

Unfortunately it looks like you will have plenty of time to ponder your choices since the battery fiasco is in full swing. But if this matters, and this is just personal choice, I'm sticking with the Note. I think it's a great device all around and unless something even worse happens I'm just trying to patiently wait out what's going on, get my replacement device and move on to have a happy and healthy relationship with the Note 7 (of course one might question how healthy it is if I'm referring to a phone as a relationship to begin with...but that topic is probably best left alone...).

Good luck and let me know if you have any other questions I might be able to answer.

 

[Kenneth Brodersen]

I think it's a great device all around and unless something even worse happens I'm just trying to patiently wait out what's going on, get my replacement device and move on to have a happy and healthy relationship with the Note 7

Having an otherwise happy relationship (with electronic devices or otherwise) end in fire and/or physical injury has always been a risk. That is why all my relationships must be preceded with a comprehensive risk-analysis and feasibility study

Thanks again. I am really excited to try it out. The recall happened just before Samsung planned to release the Note 7 here in Denmark. So it will be a few weeks until it ends up here, but I will preorder it tomorrow.