Give your rooted Galaxy Note Edge a front-facing speaker

Turn your Edge's earpiece into a front-facing speaker. Photo: Samsung

Turn your Edge’s earpiece into a front-facing speaker. Photo: Samsung

Samsung has this annoying habit of putting loudspeakers on the back of its smartphones, meaning they become muffled when you place them down or hold them in your palm; the South Korean company hasn’t yet gotten around to copying HTC’s front-facing BoomSound speaker setup.

But owners of a rooted Galaxy Note Edge can turn their handset’s earpiece into a second loudspeaker themselves with this simple software tweak.

Samsung’s smartphone speakers have never been particularly good — even on flagship devices like the Galaxy S5 and the Galaxy Note 4. While they’re just about acceptable for playing games, they’re downright awful for listening to music, watching movies, or playing games. And if that wasn’t enough, Samsung sticks them on the back of its devices to make them even harder to hear.

If you have the new Galaxy Note Edge, however, you can perform a simple trick that’ll turn your handset’s earpiece into an additional, front-facing speaker, that doesn’t just increase the volume of your device, but also delivers a surround sound-like effect. What’s more, installation is as simple as flashing a ZIP file with a custom recovery.

There are three different variants of this tweak to choose from: One delivers default volume levels, one delivers “medium” volume levels, and the third promises loud volume levels — much higher than those you would typically expect from your Galaxy S5. All three variants offer the surround sound effect.

There’s also a fourth ZIP that will restore your speaker settings to stock.

Your Note Edge will need to be rooted for this tweak to work, and experiences may vary depending on which Note Edge model you have. If you’d like to try it out for yourself, you’ll find all the ZIP files you’ll need along with detailed instructions in the original XDA Developers thread.