Foldables and AI ramp up smartphone wars
Samsung joined battle on multiple fronts this week as it waged a war for leadership of the smart device market. It chose Paris, a city in the throes of preparation for the Olympic Games, as the setting for its most wide-ranging launch of the year this week, under the Galaxy Unpacked banner.
The main event was the unveiling of the next generation of its foldable phones, incorporating new AI features. It is in a race against Honor, Huawei and Oppo for leadership in foldables, and against Apple, Huawei and Honor for leadership in smartphone AI. As a result, the launch helped set the agenda for the next phase of the smartphone wars.
The Galaxy AI ecosystem, first unveiled in conjunction with the Galaxy S24 smartphone series in January, spurred Honor, Oppo and Apple into aggressive responses. The iPhone maker in June announced that it would introduce its own version of AI standing for Apple Intelligence on its new devices. Here, Samsung has a significant headstart, and the new foldable devices benefit from the experience of integrating AI into the S24.
Now, Galaxy AI is available on more smartphones and tablets, making powerful AI accessible to everyone. It includes ondevice and cloud-based AI, ensuring privacy and offering flexibility, said Justin Hume, Samsung South Africa vice-president for mobile.
While the Galaxy AI features were rolled out to older devices via software updates earlier in 2024, including 2023’s Galaxy Z Fold5 and Z Flip5, the new Galaxy Fold6 and Flip6 were better able to showcase such functionality, said Hume.
“One of the hallmarks of particularly the Galaxy Z Fold is the ability for users to view
Samsung unveiled the 2024 Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition smartphone in Paris this week, under the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked banner.
video content and read, which are much easier in this format,” he said.
“Galaxy AI now has a bigger canvas from which to do these things. The AI overlay that we saw with Gemini (Google) that is coming in this device means that we’ll be able to search content or read from the screen much more effectively.”
A fundamental difference between this week’s launch and those that went before, said Hume, was that it came at a time when the entire industry was moving to the next generation of foldable phones.
“Great strides have been made by all in the industry as we are seeing reductions in the weight and size of devices
thinner with bigger screens. At Samsung we’ve been increasing the screen size by reducing the bezel around the device.
“Those, however, are superficial ... we’ve looked at the screen and reduced the number of layers in the screen and introduced more durable screen technologies into the device.”
Hume agrees that the devices set a new benchmark and agenda for smartphone evolution particularly in terms of AI deployment.
“The clear indication is that simply having [AI] on the device is great but insufficient. Samsung is demonstrating that it has to be across the handset, the wearable, and the hearable product and then integrated back to the applications.”
For example, with the Samsung Health App, which has over 65-million active monthly users, AI now pulls together the readings that are coming from the handset, “from [my] sleep-tracking to blood pressure and the like, and give me scores such as my sleep patterns, my energy score, which empowers me to do things that allow me to modify my lifestyle and live well,” said Hume.
Since introducing Galaxy AI in January, “Samsung now has over 420,000 AI-ready devices in the hands of South Africans, switched on and operational”.
As a result, expectations are high for the new Galaxy devices, “as they are ready to give the market a clear reason to upgrade to these really powerful handsets”.
According to Counterpoint Research, global foldable smartphone shipments were expected to pass 100-million by 2027. Samsung was fully committed to the category, said Hume, and was preparing for a significant increase in demand this year.
It had ramped up manufacturing capabilities. “They [foldable phones] deliver the next-level experiences that make users more productive and creative. We’ve been improving and refining the foldable experience over six generations of devices, learning from, and implementing the feedback we’ve received from millions of users around the world, making Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip6 our best foldables yet.”
At the launch, Samsung also gave notice that it remained a formidable competitor in the smartwatch category, that it was keeping up with the earbud discipline, and that it was even able to crack new codes in the smart device Olympics, in the shape of the Galaxy Ring. The latter is Samsung’s entry into the newest category of wearable devices, the smart ring, led by Finnish health technology company Oura.
Samsung hopes to leverage the functionality and market penetration of the existing Samsung Health app, with more than a decade of institutional memory and investment behind it, to take an instant lead in this nascent event.
However, the first generation of the Galaxy Ring will not be released in South Africa for the foreseeable future, as Samsung will first test its viability in a few major markets. The emphasis in this country, Hume told Business Times, was on the Galaxy AI ecosystem.