[AT&T OTA brings night mode] US Samsung Galaxy S10 camera night mode release seems imminent as Asian Snapdragon models got the update

New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….

Low light photography is the next big thing in the consumer focused smartphone industry. More and more OEMs are incorporating advanced computational photography methods (often marketed as ‘AI’) to capture the last bit of light from the target and come out with a stunning picture.

Despite being one of the largest Android OEMs, Samsung fans were disappointed to notice the lack of a dedicated night mode in the stock camera of the Galaxy S10 lineup after release. The low light performance of the flagship was rather mediocre compared to the competitors, even with GCam ports.

Fortunately the Korean OEM listened to the feedback from their users, and brought the functionality to specifically capture low light targets. The feature is simply called ‘Night mode’ in camera settings.

That’s not the end, as subsequent updates greatly enhanced the night mode implementation. However, these camera centric improvements were limited to the global models powered by Samsung’s in-house Exynos SoC. North American users, especially US carrier models were deprived for some unknown reasons.

FYI, the US Galaxy S10 comes with Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 platform, and they are known to be better performer than the Exynos models. But the extreme delay in getting the night mode feature makes the superiority rather pointless.

In one of our older articles, we discussed about the limitation of US Snapdragon powered S10 units. As a matter of fact, Samsung sells the same Snapdragon variant of the phone in Hong Kong which comes with an unlocked bootloader. Now this particular edition is getting a new OTA that enable night mode in camera.

It’s worth mentioning that Samsung bundled June security patches with this OTA, which made it the first S10 variant to receive the most recent patch. There is a little UI tweak with the charging animation as well.

Now, when you plug in the charger, in the middle of the screen you see (maybe for 1 second) your actual battery percentage inside a circle, with a subtle animation.

(Source)

On the other hand, the camera improvements are cumulative as the night mode should work with the ultra wide lens out of the box. The current update is only applicable for the SM-G97x0 (China and Hong Kong) model, so don’t try to flash it on SM-G97xU/U1 (US) units.

Nevertheless, the arrival of the night mode in Snapdragon Galaxy S10 ensures that US models are finally getting the chance to unleash the true potential of their camera. Stay tuned, as the June update should hit anytime now.

The June update for US Samsung Galaxy S10 variants has been leaked. Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T users can now sideload the ASF7 build on their Galaxy S10+. We don’t know anything about the camera night mode for now. Head over to this article for further details.

The update is now available officially via T-Mobile update servers. Interestingly, Verizon and AT&T users still need to wait more to get the OTA via ‘official’ channels.

However, camera night mode and QR code scanner functionalities are not present in this build.

Looks like AT&T decided to push a slightly older build (ASF6). Believe it or not, camera night mode does exist in this build!

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