When it comes to Android brands, it’s slim pickings in New Zealand these days. Google doesn’t sell its highly-regarded Pixel range here and Chinese phone maker Huawei has retreated from the market with US trade restrictions crippling its ability to offer the full Google suite of apps. Nokia clings on in budget phones, with Oppo, another Chinese phone maker, remaining as the only real rival to Samsung’s crown in the New Zealand Android market.
But what of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S line of smartphones? A new batch of them, the S24 family, has been released, complete with the cautious and well-crafted incremental changes we’ve come to expect from Apple and its Android rivals 17 years into the smartphone revolution.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra, which I’ve been test driving, is a big phone, packed with features, the obligatory S-Pen for taking notes on the screen, and a price tag to match - $2495 for the 256GB (gigabyte) model.
I won’t dwell on the basic phone specifications and functionality here; others have given a decent overview of the new device. Suffice to say that it felt like a big upgrade from the Oppo FindX Pro when it came to the performance of the camera, the quality and vibrancy of the S24′s screen, and the overall build quality and design, which makes a very big phone somehow look modest and low key.
Other than that, using it felt just as you would expect when you’ve got a new high-end phone. Everything’s more responsive, dazzlingly bright, the interface more intuitive.
Instead, I want to look at the aspects of the S24 that Samsung touted as new and revolutionary: the Galaxy AI features that embed generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in its smartphone line-up in a way that hasn’t been done before.
AI on the phone isn’t new in itself; these features have been employed for years, particularly to enhance camera functions. Apple’s mobile processors can process AI workloads directly on the phone. But from here on in, Android and Apple phones will have GenAI features on the phone, which lets them tap large language models (LLMs) to deliver sophisticated answers and undertake tasks in real-time.
Galaxy AI is the first iteration and comes with a handful of features that represent a relatively conservative first step into the world of GenAI.
Live translate
The most overtly flashy among them is the Live Translate feature, which lets you translate phone conversations in real-time, a potential godsend when you are in a foreign land and struggling to be understood.
Setting this up was surprisingly easy in the S24′s phone app. I just selected the voice I wanted to translate, the language I wanted to hear the translation in, called my contact and tapped the call assist icon as the call was connecting.
I called around my multilingual friends for snatches of conversation in French, Spanish, and Japanese. It worked surprisingly well, a little slower than a normal conversation and I had to remind people to speak clearly and loudly so the AI could hear every word.
On the screen, the live translation feature gave a useful transcript of the conversation as well. This is a neat feature and slickly executed. There’s also an Interpreter feature which does the exact same thing, but without it revolving around a phone call. It simply translates a conversation, with a split screen showing each side of the conversation translated. If you were in an Italian market and wanted to buy some vegetables, you could simply fire up Interpreter and have a quick conversation.
But I’ve already been doing this with the iFlytek Instant Voice Translator, a $170 device I picked up pre-Covid to help me have conversations when I was travelling in China. I used it again in Italy to great effect. Building live translation into your smartphone is the next logical step. You can also auto-translate a text message thread, saving you cutting and pasting the text into Google Translate. If you are travelling a lot and having conversations with people in multiple languages, this equates to a killer app for you. Alas, it’s rare that I’m needing a translation service in my pocket, so it’s really a niche use in New Zealand.
AI usefulness: 3/5
Generative editing
We’ve already gained the ability to do some sophisticated editing on the fly with our smartphone camera, even using AI to touch-up and repair our amateurish snaps. Samsung takes it a bit further using GenAI in its photo app. If you want to remove an object from an image, or reposition it, now it’s easy.
You tap the Galaxy AI stars button, which then allows you to draw around an object you want to move or erase. You reposition it where desired and Galaxy AI then tidies up after you, filling in the space as uniformly as possible. It does a fair job, with an edit taking up to 10 seconds depending on how extensive it is, and you’ll need an internet connection as the edit is done in the cloud.
The editing software will tell you it’s “adding missing pieces” and “sculpting new scenery” as it works on the edit. This feature, and the ability to instantly remove shadows from across faces, or annoying lights reflecting in windows, is familiar to users of high-end photo-editing software packages from the likes of Adobe. But it’s impressive how it is now available to the masses on the phone. Another feature lets you introduce a slow-mo element to a video clip just by pressing on the screen.
My smartphone camera gets a lot of use, so this is likely the key use of Galaxy AI I’d take advantage of.
AI usefulness: 4/5
Circle to Search
Fairly simple, self-explanatory and incredibly useful. How often are you browsing Instagram or a website and want to find out more about something in an image? You can either move to a new screen and do a Google search describing what’s in the image or click to another part of the website to find more information. Both pull you out of what you are doing.
With Circle to Search, you just do a long hold down on the S24′s home button. Then you can draw a circle around part of the image you want to find out more about. Google search will then bring you up some search results about what the AI has recognised in the image. The same goes for highlighting passages of text. It’s fairly simple, quick, and a great way to augment your web research.
AI usefulness: 3/5
Summarising notes and recordings
This one appeals to the journalist in me. I’m constantly recording interviews in the Recorder app on my phone, as well as jotting down notes or cutting and pasting text from websites as part of my research. Now, I can get Galaxy AI to automatically summarise the key points from both the notes and the recordings, a great alternative to having to listen back to a recording or wade through screeds of notes.
The translation quality is pretty good, on par with the Otter translation tool I use. You can also translate the transcript into another language.
AI usefulness: 3/5
Browsing Assist
Another useful feature lets you get a bullet-pointed summary of text on a webpage. You need to use the Samsung web app to do this, which is a bit annoying as I do my browsing via the Chrome browser. But the summary function is quick and useful. This is rapidly becoming an AI feature of many web browsers - Brave is the latest browser to build in an AI assistant to summarise search webpages and let you ask questions.
AI usefulness: 3/5
A cautious start
Galaxy AI represents a grab bag of intriguing functions, none of which are likely to become must-have features for me. The sense I get is that Samsung, perhaps stung by the failure of its Bixby AI voice assistant, is taking it slow and steady, testing the waters with GenAI to gauge appetite.
There’s nothing in Galaxy AI that seeks to majorly streamline how I interact with the phone’s operating system or the dozens of apps I use every week. There’s nothing as radical and visionary as the Rabbit R1, which is setting out to use AI to do away with swiping through apps entirely. Still, the S24 line-up has the hardware to support further AI features released as software updates. Samsung offers an opportunity to experiment and test out new features, and Apple’s iPhone 16 will likely have a suite of GenAI features when it debuts in September.
Galaxy AI won’t be available on Samsung smartphones from before 2023 and it appears that Samsung is considering offering a premium version of it from 2025. If Samsung is serious about offering a subscription version of Galaxy AI, it will need to produce some must-have AI features, rather than nice to have novelties.
Price: Galaxy S24 Ultra - $2449 for 256GB, $2699 for 512GB, and $3099 for 1TB.
