SAMSUNG
announced its new flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone range on Wednesday earlier than expected, including new artificial intelligence features, as the company looks to start 2024 with a bang.
As is now standard across Samsung’s flagship range, the S24 range comes in three versions: S24, S24+ and S24 Ultra. The S24 Ultra price starts at $1,300, the S24+ will cost $1,000, and the S24 will cost $800.
Ahead of the announcement, the South Korean electronics giant showed off the new gadgets at its King’s Cross offices in London earlier this week. In a briefing with journalists, Samsung talked about the AI capabilities of the phone and showed how it is able to edit pictures and find objects using AI.
For Samsung’s top-tier S24 Ultra, which is the largest of the company’s three devices and comes with better specs and features, Samsung is using a version from Qualcomm.
Optimized for the latest Snapdragon Series 8 Gen 3 Galaxy. The company is using a mix of Qualcomm system-on-chips (SoCs) and its own Exynos chipsets for its S24 and S24+ models.
“The Galaxy S24 series of devices, along with Google’s Pixel range, mark the beginning of the consumerization of AI in smartphones,” Ben Wood, principal analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC. “This is a trend that will be replicated by all smartphone manufacturers, including Apple, as they increasingly add an increasing number of AI-powered capabilities to their new devices.”
“This launch sees Samsung betting on artificial intelligence-powered features to rekindle consumer interest in smartphones at a time when sales have slowed due to incremental hardware updates. Google is moving forward with its Pixel devices and there is no doubt that this is going to be a recurring theme not only for smartphones but for all consumer electronics.
AI is the name of the game
The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra is the main event for most tech gadget enthusiasts – and, for the most part, it looks indistinguishable from the Galaxy S23 Ultra.
This is because Samsung is not making too many changes with the hardware. It still comes in the same size as its predecessor – the display is 6.8 inches, measured diagonally, although this time the phone is flat. The S23 Ultra had more curvature.
The big upgrade to the external hardware of this model is that it is covered with titanium, so it is stronger than the S23 Ultra.
The main difference this time is what’s inside: Samsung is working big on artificial intelligence. Like other smartphone makers, Samsung’s main focus now is on “on-demand” AI – or, the ability to move AI workloads directly to the device rather than to the cloud.
Samsung said its new Galaxy S24 Ultra will come with a number of new AI features, many of which will be powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset for mobiles, which is tailor-made for AI devices.
This points to something that many smartphone makers have been focusing on recently. Consumers aren’t as excited about new smartphone upgrades as they used to be. So phone manufacturers have had to come up with new ideas to attract people’s attention again and create excitement in the market.
One feature that Samsung is loading onto the Galaxy S24 range is the ability to circle locations or objects that the user is pointing their camera at, or at a photo they’ve taken, and then based the results on those things. can see. Look
So, for example, if you see a landmark or a shoe you want to buy, you can draw a circle around that item and then the AI shows you the appropriate results on Google.
Another feature promoted by Samsung is the ability to use AI to edit photos. So users can edit the reflections of the photos they take, for example if you took a photo of yourself in front of a window. Or you can move a person from one side of the room to the other by dragging them from left to right.
Samsung also demonstrated live transcription features with its latest smartphones.
For example, when calling someone who speaks in French, the user can pull up a transcription that is being fed to them in real time. You can also record a conversation between two people and transcribe it, while the AI assigns a label to each person speaking, similar to transcription products like Otter AI.
PP Foresight’s Paolo Pescatore told CNBC that Samsung should “focus efforts on maintaining its core loyal premium base.”
“With this in mind, Samsung needs to entice users with a range of competitive offers suitable for all; This also includes older Samsung owners who are essentially
ing AI to create images and other creative media and pass it off as their own work — even when, in some cases, it’s derivative from or even looks identical to artists’ work.
So when a Galaxy S24 user uses AI to modify a photo, Samsung will keep a log of what was changed with AI and store it in the metadata. It’ll also have an icon in the bottom left corner to show that teh image has been edited using AI, kind of like a watermark.
At the Samsung briefing in King’s Cross, some analysts and reporters were able to crop this icon out just by using Samsung’s in-app cropping feature — though the icon is still kept in the metadata.
“AI-powered image and video manipulation raises some ethical questions, particularly given the recent media attention around deep fake content,” Wood told CNBC. “The addition of a watermark and updated metadata for altered content is a constructive step by Samsung and I’m sure others will follow.”
“The success of Samsung’s AI-based features will largely depend on Samsung’s ability to raise consumer awareness and engagement via its marketing for the Galaxy S24 portfolio,” he added. “Success will require crisp communication of the benefits and continued expansion of the use cases.”