Samsung has unveiled its new range of Premium smartphones, the Galaxy S24, which will hit the market on January 31. The Korean manufacturer – relegated for the first time in 2023 by Apple to second place in the world rankings in number of smartphones sold – is counting on this range to regain the advantage.
Published
Update
Reading time: 3 min
:quality(50)/2024/01/19/007-handson-galaxy-s24ultra-titaniumgray-note-assist-65aa9264a701f963356948.jpg)
The cat and mouse game continues between Samsung and Apple. It has even started again with three new models of Galaxy smartphones presented on January 17: S24, S24+ and especially S24 Ultra, designed to dethrone the iPhone 15 Pro Max from the Californian manufacturer. Always with the same question: who copies who? Ultimately, all that matters is the comparison, the face-to-face between the phones, at a “T” time, with a now well-known seasonality: the new iPhones at the end of September, the new Galaxy at the end of January. We therefore now know the advantages and faults of the two competitors, who look at each other like iron dogs.
Galaxy AI: with help from Google
With these S24s and especially the S24 Ultra, Samsung is going even further than Google with its Pixel 8 and 8 Pro, launched in October, which can almost play the role of secretary for you. The revolution is obviously artificial intelligence, integrated by Samsung into the heart of the system under the name “Galaxy AI”, with – as a result – native access to services which until now required a lot of on-board power and the downloading of third-party applications, often for a fee.
Example: automatic transcription of meetings in real time. Concretely, you place the S24 Ultra on the table, it listens to what everyone says, transforms the voices into written text which gradually appears on the screen, attributing to each person their words: all locally, on the phone, without connection Internet, thanks to Gemini, Google’s new AI. You can even ask the AI for a summary of the meeting in a few points. There, you will have to go through the Cloud. Artificial intelligence will even indicate who was for and who was against each of the topics on the agenda.
Generative AI for image rotations
AI, on these new smartphones, also benefits photos, image improvement and rotation. For example, if you took a photo skewed and want to restore the horizontal, rotating it – even a few degrees – will create missing bits of the image. In one click, the S24 Ultra will fill these empty spaces by generating portions of images that do not exist. It’s generative AI well used and it’s quite clever. AI also benefits zoom by improving the quality of digital zoom, which is still less precise than optical zoom.
Among the other arguments of this S24 Ultra: autonomy which gains more than four hours according to Samsung thanks to a more powerful battery; the screen, now flat, slightly larger (6.8 inches) and 60% brighter; the choice of titanium for the edge of the phone as on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max (titanium is 50% more resistant than aluminum); Wifi 7 is the very first smartphone compatible with the new standard; finally, the price which “only” increases by €50, from €1469 with 256 GB of storage. The S24 Ultra therefore maintains the advantage, by a hair, in terms of price, by being €10 cheaper than its competitor, the iPhone 15 Pro Max.