The ‘Smart Key’ is one of the phone’s unique features. It refers to its multifunctional power/lock key on the side. That is not only a power/lock key, but it also includes a fingerprint scanner, and a touch panel on it. On top of that, you can assign double-tap and long-press functions to it. So, it’s truly versatile, and if you want, you can become immensely more productive on the ZenFone 9 if you use its ‘Smart Key’. We’ll talk more about it below, to give you a full picture.
How to set up the ‘Smart Key’ on your ASUS ZenFone 9 handset
We’ll show you how to do this one step at a time. We’ll also include screenshots below, for each of those steps, so that you can follow along on your phone. So, let’s get started, and show you one of ZenFone 9’s most unique features. The first thing you’ll need to do is open your phone’s Settings. You can do this by opening your app drawer, and tracking down the ‘Settings’ app, or lowering your notification shade and tapping on the gear icon. It’s up to you. In the screenshot below, though, we’re going the app drawer route.
Once you’re in the ZenFone 9 Settings, there are two ways to access the ‘Smart Key’. You can either use the search bar at the top, and simply type in ‘smart key’, or do it the manual way. We’ll show you the manual way, for the sake of this tutorial. That way includes finding the ‘Advanced’ menu in the ‘Settings’.
Once you enter the ‘Advanced’ menu, you’ll see the ‘Smart key’ submenu in there. Tap it.
The ‘Smart key’ is very versatile
Now we’re getting to the fun part. As mentioned at the beginning, this feature is quite versatile. You’ll see different sections in this menu, including ‘Press twice’, ‘Press and hold’, and ‘Swipe’. We’ll talk about all three, separately.
The first thing you’ll need to do is enable the ‘Press twice’ switch, if it’s not enabled already. This will enable the double-tap action for the power key. You can set it to a number of things, ranging from opening Google Assistant and activating voice input, to opening an app of your choice, or a quick access action. I, personally, have set it to open the phone’s Camera app. That gives me an immensely fast way to access the camera at all times, even when the display is off.
The ‘Press and hold’ option allows you to set an action to pressing and holding the power key. Once again, you can choose Google Assistant, Voice input, a customization option of your choice, or powering off the device. I use it to power off the device the old way, but you can set it to whatever you want.
The ‘Swipe’ 0ption stands apart
The ‘Swipe’ option is the most interesting one, and makes this button kind of unique. We’ve seen something similar on the Pixel 4a and Galaxy S10e. Considering that this button has a touch panel on the inside, you can swipe across it (top-to-down) in order to trigger an action. There are a number of options you can choose here. It can be used to refresh a page, fast scroll to the beginning or end of a webpage, scroll through your media content, or play/pause media. The last option is for lowering the notification shade, which is what I use it for. You can simply swipe across it to access the notification shade regardless of what you’re doing on your device at the time. Needless to say, this is immensely useful, and it minimizes hand gymnastics.
There you have it. The ‘Smart Key’ truly is an interesting feature, and one of the most interesting ones on the device itself. I got so used to it on this phone, that I constantly swipe across power keys on other devices, to no avail. So, be warned, the same may happen to you.
