August 8, 2014

How to stop the Samsung Galaxy from vibrating

By Mike Lewis

One of the things I dislike about my new Samsung Galaxy tablet is the way it vibrates at every opportunity – whether I want it to or not. It does this when I switch the device on, press the Home button, press and hold the Power button, and at several other times too.

This is irritating, not least because it’s unnecessary. I could understand it if the vibrations alerted me to an important event, such as an incoming message. But there is no reason to have this kind of haptic feedback every time I press certain buttons. (It’s also adds to the drain on the battery.)


Figure 1: The built-in
Settings menu
On other Android devices, you can disable haptic feedback from the Settings menu. The setting is typically called “Vibrate on touch”, and it can usually be found under either Sounds or Language & Input. If you can find that setting, simply switching it off will solve the problem.

But in the case of my Galaxy, the setting isn’t there – as you can see from Figure 1. It’s true that there is a “Device vibration” setting, but that only lets you change the pattern of the vibration, not to disable it completely. There is also an option labeled “Vibrate when ringing”, but this is grayed out on the tablet and therefore has no effect – presumably because the device is not a phone.

The solution

I finally found a solution – albeit one that involves installing a third-party app. In fact, there are several apps available that can solve the problem. The one I chose was the All-in-One Toolbox, from iMobLife Inc. (I didn’t evaluate any of the others.)

So, if you too would like to banish vibrations from your device, here’s what to do:
  1. Download and install All-in-One Toolbox from the Google Play store (it’s free).
  2. Still in the store, download and install the (free) Quick Settings plugin for All-in-One Toolbox.
  3. Launch the All-in-One Toolbox.
  4. From its Home screen, select Toolbox, then Quick Settings Plugin (which is in the Plugins section of the Toolbox menu).
  5. You should now see a setting for Haptic Feedback (Figure 2). Turn this off.

Figure 2: The additional settings
in the Toolbox menu
And that’s all there is to it. As soon as you adjust the setting, those unwanted vibrations will be gone for good (or, at least, until you reverse the process, which you can do at any time).

Other tricks

As its name suggests, the All-in-One Toolbox can perform many other tricks. It can liberate memory by deleting temporary and cached files; it can improve performance (and perhaps save power) by killing unnecessary running apps; it has a full-blown file manager; and the above-mentioned Quick Settings plugin exposes a bunch of other settings that will help you customize your device.

But for me, getting rid of that infernal vibrating was enough to justify the small amount of effort needed to download and install this useful tool.

My thanks to Javier P, a member of the Android Central forum for pointing me towards the All-in-One Toolbox. For the record, my device is a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, running Android 4.1.2.


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