Samsung’s $1,300 phone might someday have fees for AI usage::Samsung says Galaxy S24 AI features are “free until the end of 2025.”
Up until the S9, I considered the Galaxy series of phones to be basically worth their weight in gold, as they were the one holdout with things like headphone jacks and expandable storage. Sure, they preloaded cloud crap, but they were throwing everything at the wall at once.
From the S20 onward, they were the lesser evil, having abandoned those things, and seeming to charge more for extra storage with each generation. But they were still smooth, their camera still put out pictures that impressed me, and using Gboard didn’t result in the swipe jitter I’d always experience on a comparable Pixel device.
Sounds like when my S23 dies, I’ll be shopping around more seriously. AI is not a feature. The cloud is not a feature. It’s an anti-feature, giving the manufacturer the ability to alter your bargain with them at any time, with the only limit being the law.
AI is not a feature. The cloud is not a feature.
I’m with you on the cloud, but non-cloud AI would be a killer feature if anybody actually offered it. But instead, everything just sends all your data to OpenAI. Yawn. I can do that myself in any web browser.
Samsung talks about on-device AI, but if you look through their footnotes almost everything requires a Samsung account and an active internet connection. It’s all cloud shit. Probably OpenAI, but as far as I can tell they don’t actually say who their providers are. Perhaps the details are (or will be) buried in a privacy policy somewhere.
Google has Gemini Nano, Microsoft has Phi-2, and on the open-source side there are plenty of 3B or 7B models that can run on a laptop or phone (e.g. Mistral, Falcon, Wizard). Whisper is great for on-device multi-lingual voice-to-text, and there are tons of Stable Diffusion implementations that could run on a high-end smartphone. A Snapdragon 8 gen 3 should be able to run this stuff, unless Qualcomm seriously dropped the ball (remains to be seen).
Kind of like what Google did with the Pixel 8 (Pro). “Hey look at our cool Tensor 3 chip, it does AI.” … “Oh but almost everything we showed you with object removal and most other stuff works in the cloud.”
That’s some bs.
Will be interesting to see what Apple does. They’ll at least try to get some form of chat bot running on-device, all of their AI features run locally so far.
I still wish there was a Pixel phone with the kind of camera (software) you would get on a Samsung, and have a keyboard that doesn’t act like your finger is jittering all over the place. Seriously, I don’t know how Samsung pulled this off with a Google product, but somehow Google has not.
Maybe with the next Pixel.
Or maybe I should look into Sony phones, which are almost never talked about, but still have that beloved SD card and headphone jack.
What’s the issue with the Pixel cameras? I thought they were typically one of the selling points of the phone? Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention to recent reviews (been on iOS for a few years now, but want to switch back to Android).
100%. Seems like phones continually get worse under the guise of “progress”. No more headphone jack or removable battery, more bloated software, anti-privacy assistants/AI. Switched to a Sony Xperia for the headphone jack alone and it’s been great, I hope they don’t follow this AI trend or else I’m out.
Gotta build in the opportunity for rent seeking.
Man, I was considering an upgrade, but I absolutely don’t want anything to do with AI on my phone.
I want the hardware and some usable software to make my phone work the way I like.
Why does every damn company these days feel like enshitification is the only way forward?
Everyone is shitting on Apple for barely any upgrades except the camera over the past few years.
And really what we need is to stop it as a society that you need the latest things all the time.
And really what we need is to stop it as a society that you need the latest things all the time.
I completely agree, and I don’t think as many people are buying phones as often as they once did.
But if I’m going to replace a 4-5 year-old phone, the replacement should be significantly better after that long.
I don’t see anything compelling in the last 5 generations of phones, other than the camera. And even those are simply OK. Nothing justifies the prices we’re seeing.
My perfect phone would be something like a Fairphone with a good camera. Reparability these days means way more to me than gimmicky crap.
No, people shit on Apple because they release the same phone every year at an absurdly high price point.
If their phones were affordable, I think everyone would nearly universally love them. They sell standard at premium prices with lofty advertising that promises you the world, yet delivers the baseline, or just below it.
Yeah definitely, can someone suggest a phone like that. I am planning to get one.
There’s not much about what features these are. I understand AI costs a lot to run and they’re at least being upfront before they enshittify. That being said, I never liked Bixby and I hated that cursed button and every time I accidentally pressed it. I also gave up on Galaxy phones after removing the headphone jack, SD card and stuff.
Nope
