Short rant and then I get to the solution, you may want to skip this part if you simply want your Samsung Note 20 phone to give a sound notice when you receive a new text. I’m going to start out with my almost total disgust regarding Samsung’s flagship phone. In a word, it “sucks” and I can’t believe after watching so many YouTube videos talk about how great it is, that the reviewers both gave the phone enough testing and provided an honest review.
Keep in mind, I don’t think all Samsung phones are bad, and I don’t have an axe to grind with Samsung. In fact, my phone before was a Samsung S9+ and I really liked it a lot. I switched from Tmobile and sold my soul to ATT for 30 months (which was a whole different time-consuming unmitigated disaster of misery I don’t wish on anyone), in part, to appease family members who wanted the latest and greatest iPhones (that lasted about a week until the Iphone 12 was released, still another story).
Truly what we have here is a perfect example of why you “shouldn’t fix it if it’s not broken.”
Back full circle, out of the blue, my Note 20 stopped providing sound notifications when I receive a text message. If the same issue is happening to you, this solution solved it for me and you may want to give it a go. Keep in mind, if this does work, you’re likely going to want to through your phone across the room when you realize how simple, yet simultaneously frustrating the solution is because if you don’t actually know the “secret solution” you’re not likely to ever figure it out on your own.
Steps:
1 Open text messages settings
2 Click/touch NOTIFICATIONS
*Here’s the crazy frustrating part*
3 Press and hold (about 3 seconds, albeit I didn’t time it) NEW MESSAGES. when you RELEASE, a new menu will appear with more options to choose from
4. Confirm that BOTH ALERT is active and (this was my problem, or should I say my Note 20’s problem) make sure SOUND isn’t set to “silent.”
5. If sound is set to silent, when you attempt to change it, you’ll have options (at least my Samsung phone did) to choose what sound manager to use to select the limited selections of computer-type beeping sounds. Select one, and you’re good to go.
I hope this helps you and saves you some of my frustration in finding the solution to one more Samsung Note 20 phone problem. So many problems and frustrations that I’m not going to write about each so I have an easy resource to come back to (it’s not like I’ll likely remember each and every solution to this phone’s issues). Now for my next fix, I need to figure out how to keep the phone from going dark when talking on speaker phone. If you know the solution, please let me know in the comments.