Samsung presented its new top-of-the-range smartphones – Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24 Plus e Galaxy S24 Ultra – in San Jose, a city in California located in Silicon Valley, the cradle of American innovation.
The choice of location for the Galaxy Unpacked – the annual event with which Samsung unveils its most powerful phones – is no coincidence. San Jose is located just 20 km from Mountain View, the city that houses the headquarters of Google.
And Google itself has given an extra edge to Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series smartphones, which exploit – for now exclusively – Gemini ProBig G’s most powerful generative artificial intelligence model.
The three models of the new Galaxy S24 series
The holy alliance with Google – which also embellished the Galaxy S24 with the new smart search function “Circle and search”which we’ll talk about later – allows the new Samsung smartphones to ride convincingly the great wave of generative AI, capable of understanding natural language and writing texts like a human being would. Samsung has announced that all the AI tools present on the Galaxy S24 will certainly be free until the end of 2025. What will happen next is difficult to say. The South Korean company claims that everything will depend on Google’s strategies: if the latter charges for certain services, some functions of the smartphones presented in California will consequently also become paid.
What’s inside the new Samsung Galaxy S24, the smartphone designed for those who use generative AI
Samsung calls it “Galaxy AI”a new era in which the South Korean company’s smartphones offer tools that until now were reserved for users of Bard (Google), ChatGpt (OpenAI) e Copilot (Microsoft)three of the most popular generative artificial intelligences.
This means, for example, that AI can suggest how to write a message. Just open the app dedicated to SMS – or any other instant messaging app such as WhatsApp or Instagram Direct Message – and type the text you intend to send without paying too much attention to the form. By clicking on the stars that symbolize generative AI, and then on “Writing style”, we will be able to choose the version that best suits the context and recipient of the message. In fact, AI declines our text making it more informal, more professional or more fun (in this case with emojis and hashtags included).
This is a classic example of generative artificial intelligence, capable of producing new content based on a certain context. A similar result can also be obtained with chatbots such as ChatGpt, Bard or Copilot – in fact – but in all these cases we must copy and paste the draft of our message onto the various interfaces (or apps) and then type a specific question – “How would you respond to this text in a formal/informal/fun way?” – to obtain the desired result.
On the new Samsung Galaxy S24, however, all this happens automatically, without having to open other apps, because generative AI “resides” in the Samsung keyboard that is used to type messages. This new feature is called “Chat Assistant” and is available on all three models of the Galaxy S24 series.
The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, the most powerful and expensive model with stylus included
Compared to last year’s Galaxy S23, the Galaxy S24, S24 Plus, and S24 Ultra (in ascending order of size, power, and price) they change slightly in shape. The Galaxy S24 Ultra, which for the first time has a titanium shell, it is thinner than its predecessor and has a slightly larger display due to the reduced edges. The Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus, however, have abandoned the curves on the sides for a more squared and attractive line.
Il Samsung galaxy S24 Plus
But it is the “substance” of the new top of the range that makes the difference this time.
Among the innovations regarding artificial intelligence there is another, very interesting one, which allows you to translate the phone call in real time to a person who does not speak the same language as us.
In the “Phone” app, after typing a number, a button called “Live Translator” appears. As soon as our interlocutor answers, an automatic message (pronounced in his language) warns him of the translation in progress. Every time a person speaks you have to wait a few seconds: the time it takes for the AI to transcribe the sentence and translate it into the other language. But the wait times seem reasonable and the result, in the end, justifies the slight delay. There is a need, however, for a certain “collaboration” on the part of those who respond: respecting the AI’s timing is in fact essential to make the most of a translation which is currently limited to 13 languages, including Italian.
It is important to underline that real-time translation – and its transcription – it is an operation that takes place “on device”. In short, the telephone conversation never leaves the device. As for all the other generative AI tools on the Galaxy S24 – from summaries to writing suggestions – the user can always make a choice: take advantage of Google’s cloud computing, and therefore the most powerful artificial intelligence model (Gemini Pro, in fact), or carry out operations directly on the phone. In this case the data remains on the device, but the performance is guaranteed by Gemini Nanothe model created by Google for mobile devices – are more limited.
Returning to translation and transcription, the progress of the app must be underlined Samsung voice recorder: AI recognizes the various participants in a meeting, for example, and differentiates the interventions of each one. Any recording can be transcribed and summarized in a few points.
It is evident from the first use that Productivity is one of the strong points of the new Galaxy S24.
If you use Samsung’s browser, for example, you can take advantage of generative AI to get the summary of a web page. We have tested this function on the major information sites and the result is excellent. You can choose to summarize the articles in a few points (“standard” summary) or with a greater amount of information (“detailed” summary). In a few cases we came across articles that could not be translated as the AI judged their content to be “inappropriate”. Furthermore, contents protected by paywalls cannot be summarized.
The “gift” of synthesis, on the new Galaxy S24, also concerns the app Samsung Notes. Any note, even the most disorganized and full of errors, becomes immediately usable thanks to AI: by pushing the “stars”, in fact, a menu appears that allows you to make a summary, a translation or to format the text and correct any spelling or grammatical errors.
All the AI tools we have described are integrated, for the most part, into Samsung’s native apps. But those who choose a Samsung Galaxy S24 – as we mentioned at the beginning – have an extra advantage: the power of Google search.
Only on the new Galaxy S24 series – and on the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro – it will be available from January 31st a new tool called “Circle to Search”, in Italian “Circle and search”, which allows – by holding down the “Home” button – to draw a circle on any screen (a web page or a frame of a video for example) and to obtain information on the object, item of clothing or monument that has been highlighted.
The Galaxy S24 also comes with very useful functions that Google has recently made available on its Magic Editorthe photo editing tool powered by generative artificial intelligence.
For the new top of the Samsung range, which already have a notable photographic sector, certainly among the best in the Android panorama, it is a notable turning point. To “traditional” photo editing, which allows you to apply filters or correct imperfections on a face, generative editing is added which allows, for example, to delete or even move objects and people present in a shot.
The example is that of a basketball player who jumps to the basket and who is immortalized when he has just taken the leap. If you want, you can surgically cut out the figure of the basketball player and get close to the basket: the AI will then generate the pixels necessary to restore the background that the player “covered” in the original shot.
Whenever a Galaxy S24 uses generative AI to edit an image, a watermark will appear on the image and in its metadata. In an era increasingly marked by fake photos generated by artificial intelligence, which can generate images in less than a minute starting from a textual description, the Samsung watermark it is a responsible stance.
Then there is a “basic” AI that makes suggestions to the user the most suitable changes for a shot. In this case Samsung took as an example the photo taken by the passenger of an airplane, characterized by the classic, annoying reflection due to the presence of the window. The AI recognizes the “defect” and works to remove it. The result is a dramatically improved image that looks like it was taken between clouds.
The photos, the real ones, in the Galaxy S24 series reach their maximum expression – in terms of zoom and quality – in Galaxy S24 Ultra. The Quad Tele system of this model, with the new lens equipped with 5x optical zoom, has a 50 MP sensor that allows optical quality performance at zoom levels with magnifications from 2x, 3x, 5x up to 10x thanks to the sensore Adaptive Pixel.
The processor that manages the efforts of the Galaxy S24 is new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3.
Il Samsung Glaxy S24 Plus
The new Samsung Galaxy S24 are available in four different colors: black, grey, yellow and purple. They can be ordered starting today, January 17, on the Samsung store. Deliveries starting next January 24th. Prices vary based on the models and technical characteristics of each: starting from 929 euros for the “base” Galaxy S24 and reaching 1,499 euros for the Galaxy S24 Ultra (12GB Ram + 256GB memory). The latter increases in price as the memory available increases.