What's new with Samsung One UI 8

At first glance, One UI 8 might look like a minor update to One UI 7, but Samsung’s latest interface actually hides several meaningful upgrades beneath the surface. 

While the visual overhaul isn’t drastic, the improvements in usability, AI features, app design, and Samsung DeX make this one of the more subtle but telling updates in recent years.

Let’s break down what’s new.

Quick Panel Changes

Samsung has kept the familiar layout for the notification and quick panels, but with some small visual refinements. One UI 8 adds slightly more defined borders and rounded accents across system panels for a cleaner, layered look.

Gallery

The Gallery app gets a fresh redesign. The menu is now more compact and uses a two-tone blur effect and icon-focused layout, making options easier to distinguish, with a more translucent look.

My Files

A sleeker, more itemized layout replaces the old blocky list, allowing more information to appear on-screen. It’s easier to browse and optimized for a more hybrid one-handed use.

Samsung Internet

Samsung Internet adopts the same visual language as Gallery in terms of UI, with a redesigned tab bar and menu layout, improving consistency across core apps.

Weather

The Weather app now features a more 3D and lifelike scene, complete with layered visuals like clouds, grass, and sand dunes, replacing the previous flat more 2D graphics.

Calendar and Reminders

The Calendar app introduces a smarter and more intuitive layout: you can now toggle between Event and Reminder without having to choose one at the start.

Meanwhile, the Reminder app ditches the old hamburger menu for a cleaner, tile-based layout and three-dot menu on top.

Smarter Multitasking

90/10 Split View: Multitasking gets a small but clever boost with the 90:10 window ratio, letting users minimize one app to pretty-much 10% of the display and being able to quickly switch between the two apps in the 90% view with a tap or swipe. (Which is technically faster than gesture switching between apps.)

New in Samsung Labs

New in Samsung Labs under settings is “Back swipe preview”, which if toggled, pretty much gives the animation iOS has when you swipe from the left of the display to go back in menus or a browser. 

Which in turn gives us a preview of the previous screen or menu.

This option only appears in Labs when using Swipe gestures over Buttons for navigation.  

Samsung DeX Overhauled

What used to be referred to as “DeX” in the quick settings panel is now “Wireless DeX”, which is more of a naming update than a functional change. 

The biggest functional leap is the new Samsung DeX experience.

Samsung completely reworked the desktop interface, relocating the taskbar, improving the app drawer to not take up the whole screen when opened, a more updated battery icon and finally adding widget support to the home screen. 

This makes DeX feel more like a true PC environment, with drag-and-drop flexibility and better multitasking between the phone and monitor or TV.

Galaxy AI Enhancements

While the Galaxy AI section looks nearly identical, One UI 8 adds new capabilities under the hood:

Drawing Assist now includes additional art styles such as Art, Nouveau, Webtoon, Soft Illustration, and InstaToon.

Additionally, the interface for generating or editing AI images has been slightly refined with a full search bar and improved preview options.

Now Brief (S24 series and above)

Next up, Now Brief updates which only apply to the Galaxy S24 series and above generations.

It looks mostly the same, but introduces some new features. With One UI 8 we now get a voice narration toggle that reads out your daily summary. New content integrations like Parking Spot reminders and contextual YouTube recommendations based on your account.

There’s also additional widget support, including Google Finance stocks.

Instant Audio Eraser (S24 series and above)

Another update for a feature only found in the S24 series and above is Instant Audio Eraser, a powerful tool that removes background noise.

Compared to the old already present Audio Eraser feature, One UI 8 just allows us to use or toggle this feature more easily, by presenting us with shortcuts in places we wouldn’t find it before. 

Like viewing Videos in Gallery, Voice recordings in Samsung Notes, the Voice Recorder app, and Transcribed calls.

With this feature we can now clean up recordings instantly, rather than manually opening Audio Eraser each time.

Final Thoughts

And that’s pretty much it.

While One UI 8 doesn’t radically change the look of your Galaxy phone, it’s a much deeper update than it appears. Between the refreshed core apps, new Galaxy AI tools, system-level multitasking, and the revamped DeX, Samsung has brought meaningful quality-of-life improvements throughout this update.

If the hints of One UI 8.5 are anything to go by, we can expect an even bigger visual overhaul next.