AI prepares to rule in a new Galaxy
Artificial intelligence is pushed to the fore in Samsung’s next generation phones... but what will it mean for users?
WOULD it surprise you too much to learn that Samsung’s new flagship Galaxy phone launch featured two words rather heavily? And that those two words can be abbreviated to two letters.
Of course, you know I’m talking about artificial intelligence – the S24 series of smartphones is riddled with it… and Samsung says it’s the dawning of a “new era”.
Before we get into that, while it’s true to say the hardware this year isn’t the main event, there are still upgrades to be noted.
The S24 series comes in three flavours, the standard S24 has a 6.2in screen, the S24+ with a 6.7in screen, and the S24 Ultra at 6.8in.
The Ultra also has a titanium frame, which should offer strength and weight boosts. The two other phones stick to aluminium.
The S24 and S24+ are more or less the same phones, apart from screen size and resolution – the larger phone tops out at 1440p while the smaller is just 1080p.
The cameras on the S24 and S24+ are the same spec as last year’s S23 series: three cameras – a 50MP main camera, a 12MP ultrawide, and a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom.
The S24 Ultra ups the ante on the main camera, which sports a 200MP sensor, and the optical zoom on the telephoto is up to 5x.
All three devices will run Android 14, and boast powerful chips – the Ultra will have the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Samsung chip. Those chips are what makes the various AI features possible, and it is in the addition of AI that Samsung is trying to mark these new S series phones as different.
The big idea, says the South Korean giant, is to bring AI into play wherever and whenever it makes the users’ lives easier.
Tellingly, AI appears in many places in the software that it hasn’t appeared before:
Live Translate will translate texts and two-way phone calls for you in real time and supports 13 different languages at launch.
Transcript Assist will, as you might expect, transcript voice recordings into text, as well as summarising them and even translating them.
Tone Tweak will offer suggestions for you to edit your text so that it best matches the tone of the place you plan to use it – so it’ll suggest less formal language for social media posts than it does for work-based email. Notes Assist attempts to summarise your notes library into handy bullet points.
In photos there’s a new editing tool which allows you to isolate elements of an image and move it around, as well as manipulating it in other ways, much like Google’s Magic Editor features.
In addition to all that, the other headline news is the ability to take HDR photos has been extended to third-party apps and the S24 series become the first phones to upload HRD images to Instagram.
So there we have it – what seems like a solid upgrade and a decent line-up, although it is worth noting that the AI features are also coming to Samsung’s own S23 lineup, the Z Flip 5, and the Z Fold 5 some time towards the middle of the year.
If the AI features work well they may prove to be useful – I’m not exactly on board with the crazy image manipulation going on across many platforms these days. There comes a point when a photo ceases to be a photo and becomes some kind of new art form.
And manipulating text, too, seems like an opportunity for humans to lose their own colourful voice and defer to technology… which would be a shame.
All three S24 models will launch on January 31, with pre-orders open now.
On S24 Ultra, colours include: Titanium Grey, Titanium Black, Titanium Violet and Titanium Yellow. On S24+ and S24 colours include: Onyx Black, Marble Grey, Cobalt Violet and Amber Yellow.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra starts at £,1249, the Galaxy S24+ at £999, and the standard Galaxy S24 at £799.