4 Cool Ways to Use the Samsung S Pen Button

A phone or tablet stylus, when used correctly, can add many additional and convenient features to a device. Take Samsung’s titular S Pen, the somewhat exclusive stylus designed for its Galaxy phones and tablets. Initially popularized by the first Samsung Galaxy Note in 2011, it has been continuously upgraded and bundled with various devices over the years. Samsung offers one of the best tablets for note taking, the Galaxy Tab S9 FE, among some of its other models. Most recently, it was made available with the Galaxy S25 Ultra and Galaxy S26 Ultra smartphones.

Perhaps one of the coolest features is that supported devices instantly recognize when you eject the S Pen. If you’ve never used one, it fits into a port on the device. This alone makes it very useful, because the stylus goes wherever your phone goes and you don’t need to carry anything extra.

To detach the S-Pen, gently press down on the rear tip; once removed, the device vibrates. The phone automatically recognizes that it’s detached and opens either a note-taking app or a small menu with S-Pen-specific tools. You can also customize what happens with the S Pen in the device settings. Even if you have a Samsung device that came with one, there are some very useful features of the S-Pen that you may not be aware of, especially those added by the pen buttons. The stylus has a dedicated button on the body and the rear tip also serves as a click-style button.

If you remove the S Pen, the device will automatically recognize it, yes, but it may happen that you are already holding the pen while the screen is off. For example, if you are in class or in a meeting and time expires while you are paying attention to the speaker. In this case, you can use the S Pen to quickly take notes without ever touching the phone or the phone’s buttons.

Granted, you have to lower the S Pen close to the screen, as there’s no Bluetooth connection, so keep that in mind. With the screen off, hover the S Pen over the device and press the dedicated button. You’ll see a small ripple-like animation at the tip of the S Pen, and while the screen remains dark, you should now see icons at the top for adjusting the ink or pen functions and a record button at the bottom. Just start writing a note and make sure to hit “Save” when you’re done, otherwise you risk losing all your work. The note will be saved in the Samsung Notes app if you need to find it later.

If you use the S Pen to draw or take notes in a compatible app, like Samsung Notes, you can also use the button to instantly access an eraser. This saves you a bit of time because you don’t need to go to the app menu and fiddle with controls if you made a mistake. Keep in mind that it’s very easy to erase everything at once with this method, since the default eraser is the line eraser. Be careful how you interact if you don’t want to get rid of the entire room.

Activating it is quite simple. When an app is open, like Samsung Notes, make sure the pen is close to the screen. If you’re already drawing or writing, you’re probably already doing that, then hold down the button. The icon should change to an eraser. Hold the button and move the cursor or toggle the last contiguous line you want to erase.

You can adjust the eraser settings in the app before using the pen. For example, in Samsung Notes, you can use an area eraser, which erases the selected cursor area, rather than a stroke eraser, which deletes an entire stroke or line at a time.

Let’s say you’re doing something on your phone and want to quickly open a blank note. You can do this even if another current work note is open and you can use your stylus to do it. From any app or screen, hold down the S Pen button, then double-tap the screen with the tip. This will instantly open Samsung Notes and create a new note that you can draw, write, or edit.

This feature should be enabled by default on devices equipped with an S Pen. But if you want to disable it, for whatever reason, you can. Go to Settings > Advanced Features > S Pen and you’ll see the Quick Notes option, which is exactly this feature. Turn off the toggle to disable the feature. You can also disable screen off memos here if you don’t want the device to create notes when the screen is off.

When you remove the S Pen from its port, Samsung Galaxy devices will also display a small pop-up menu on the screen for apps compatible with the pen. By default this appears as a pencil icon on the side and tap it to open the submenu. You can customize how it all works and looks in Samsung Settings.

But hidden within these settings is also an option to open this submenu with the S Pen button. This way, when you press the button, the menu opens and is a quick and neat way to access your apps rather than manually tapping the icon.

To enable it, go to Settings > Advanced Features > S Pen > Air Command and tap the button next to Open Air Command with Pen Button. Once activated, all you have to do is remove your S Pen, unless it’s already in your hand, hold it close to the screen, and press the button to open the Air Command menu.

Starting with the release of the Galaxy S25 Ultra in 2025, Samsung removed the Bluetooth functionality from the S Pen, mainly because, as it claims, people weren’t using it much. This is a controversial point, as many S Pen fans tend to disagree and voiced their opinions when the feature was removed. But the feature removal is relevant because it changes some of the unique ways you can use the S Pen on newer models.

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) enabled a more robust feature set, such as the ability to navigate a browser and various apps using only the S Pen. You could even take a photo with the stylus – removing it was a shock to me when I moved from the S22 Ultra to the S25 Ultra. Samsung now recommends using a paired Galaxy Watch or Galaxy Ring to perform some of these actions, as they can recognize hand gestures and allow you to interact with the phone(s) that way.

Regardless, all of the ways to use the S Pen buttons listed here are available on newer versions of the S Pen, with Bluetooth functions omitted to make way for the latest versions. While the community was hoping that Bluetooth would return to the S Pen, Samsung has now launched two generations, the S25 and S26 Ultra, without Bluetooth, so it could disappear for good.