Samsung Unpacked 2024 - Galaxy S24 Announcement

[LAwLz]

 

It's that time again!

Samsung is holding its annual Unpacked event where it will present its new products. Samsung has slowly been moving the event forward every year and this is probably the first time they are holding it in January.

 

Last year they announced the Galaxy S23 lineup as well as some new laptops. 

 

We already know that they will announce the S24 lineup because Samsung accidentally listed it on their website earlier today (and took it down), but we don't know if they will announce something else.

It seems like Samsung will put a lot of focus on AI this year. We will see what that actually means during the event, but so far it seems to be photo editing and live translation.

 

 

Quotes

Quote

 

 

 

 

 

Sources

https://www.samsung.com/unpacked/

 

 

 

This spoiler is for the stuff written during the keynote. Please ignore it and read the stuff below the spoiler for proper writing:

Spoiler

I will add things as they get announced.

 

 

 

It seems like we will be getting some AI features in the camera, phone app and the note-taking app, based on the animations on the screen right now.

 

The event starts now!

 

 

 

So far during the keynotes:

AI AI AI AI AI

In before someone does a supercut of all the times they mention "AI".

 

 

 

 

The Galaxy S24 line will get 7 years of security updates and 7 generations of OS updates.

 

Live translation in phone calls (and messages) are confirmed!

It supports 13 languages, and everything happens on-device. 

• Chinese
• English
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Thai
• Spanish
• Vietnamese

 

 

The S24 is using Google's Gemini Nano, Google's answer to OpenAI's GPT model, except it's a miniature model designed to run locally on phones.

The model can be used to do things such as stylize and change the tone of a message you wrote. For example if you notice that you used a very casual tone while writing a message to your boss, you can have the phone stylize it so that it becomes more professional sounding.

The styling feature will come to the Samsung keyboard as well, so it will work in any app if you use that.

 

 

The recording app will be able to transcribe conversations and even label who said what using voice recognition. So if two people are talking the transcript might look like this:

Person A: That was really good.

Person B: It sure was.

Person C: What did you like about it?

Person A: I liked the ending the most.

 

 

 

The note-taking app will be able to stylize notes and summarize things for you. If you have a lot of notes you might want it to make a bullet-point list with just the key information.

 

 

Google is up on the stage now. It seems like Samsung and Google will be working together on these things, mostly leveraging Google's Gemini models.

I was a bit worried Samsung would try and do its own things Bixby-style, but it seems like they won't.

 

 

 

"Circle to search" is a new feature from Google that I assume will come to other phones as well.

What does it do and how does it work? You trigger a search by pressing the home button, and then you draw around the thing you want to search for on the screen. So if you see something in let's say a Youtube video (or even a video stored locally) that you think seems interesting, you can trigger the search and then with your finger circle in the thing you want to search for. You can also circle for example text and it will search for it.

Edit: Google has confirmed on Twitter that this feature will be coming to the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro on January 31.

 

 

There will be a setting to enable or disable "local only" data processing for these AI features. So if you are worried about these features leaking a bunch of private information, you can make sure only the locally processed functions are enabled.

 

 

The photo app can suggest and apply edits to pictures. It will use generative AI to fill in if necessary. This is similar to the features Google showed off a few months ago.

 

The gallery app can also turn regular videos into slo-mo videos by generating new in-between frames.

 

 

Now a video of Mr Beast is playing where he shows off the phone and a bunch of features.

 

 

The new phones have beefed up cooling.

 

2600 nits peak brightness on all S24 phones.

 

 

Now Pokimane is on stage. I wonder how much Samsung paid to have these influencers be in their presentation.

Lol, she was on stage like 20 seconds.

 

 

The S24 Ultra will have a titanium body, even bezels on all sides and a flat screen.

The S24 Ultra will also have "Corning Gorilla Armor" glass on it. It seems to be Corning's latest and greatest glass. It's stronger, harder to scratch, and less reflective than their last gorilla glass.

 

 

 

 

Well this was unexpected...

Samsung just announced the "Galaxy Ring". A smart ring that can be used to track fitness and health data.

... and now it's over?

They just showed the ring and said its name, but didn't mention anything else about it. No price, no launch date, nothing about what it can do... What the hell was that?

 

 

 

Some of these AI features will come to some older Galaxy S devices like the S23 series later this year.

Samsung also said in the fine print that the Galaxy AI features will be free until the end of 2025. Not sure what that means. Will some features start needing a monthly subscription fee? I guess we'll have to wait 2 years before we find out.

 

 

 

Hardware:

Here are some comparisons for those who want to see the specs:

Galaxy S22 vs S23 vs S24

Galaxy S22+ vs S23+ vs S24+

Galaxy S22 Ultra vs S23 Ultra vs S24 Ultra

 

Galaxy S24 vs S24+ vs S24 Ultra

 

Overall, I'd say the S24 is the smallest upgrade over the S23.

Then the S24+ is a more significant upgrade over the S23+.

The S24 Ultra also gets some big bumps, but it actually seems like the S24+ is the big "winner" this generation. 

 

 

Some highlights and things worth noting:

• It seems like all phones will keep the camera sensors as the year before, except the Ultra model which seems to have gotten a new, larger sensor in the periscope telephoto camera. The pixels are 1.6x times larger than the previous model.
• There are some changes to the lenses of the phones. All phones have their telephoto lens (x3) slightly altered. They are going from a 70mm equivalent lens to a 67mm equivalent lens. The Ultra also has its x10 zoom lens (230mm equivalent) replaced with a x5 (111mm equivalent) zoom lens. This might seem like a downgrade, but according to Samsung and rumors, the larger sensor and more software tweaking will be able to provide similar if not better pictures even at 10x zoom levels, despite the lens providing less optical zoom. If that's true or not remains to be seen.
• The Ultra model also has better optical image stabilization in the 5x telephoto camera, making things more stable.
• The Ultra phone gets a new type of Corning glass called "Gorilla Armor" which is said to be stronger, more scratch-resistant, and less reflective than Gorilla Glass Victus 2. The S24 and S24+ still get the same Victus 2 glass found on the S23 lineup.
• All phones now have LTPO displays, which used to be something exclusive to the Ultra model. This lets them dynamically change the refresh rate from 1Hz to 120Hz.
• All phones can now boost up to 2600 nits of peak brightness. The S23 lineup had a peak brightness of 1750.
• All phones now have a flat display. A lot of people seem to really like this change as it allows screen protectors to be easier to install. It also avoids the slight distortions at the rounded part of the screen.
• All bezels are now uniform all around the phones. On the older phones some sides had slightly larger bezels, like the bottom bezel being maybe a millimeter larger. Doesn't matter to me but it's a nice touch.
• The S24+ had its resolution upgraded from 1080x2340 to 1440x3088. The S24 and S24 ultra retain their old resolutions of 1080x2340 and 1440x3088 respectively.
• In the US all models will get the new Snapdragon 8 gen 3 (for Galaxy) chip. In Europe and some other parts of the world the S24 and S24+ will get the Exynos 2400 and the Ultra will get the Snapdragon 8 gen 3. Not sure how I feel about this, but I will keep an open mind until benchmarks and power testing from people like Geekerwan is out. Maybe the Exynos 2400 is competitive with the S8g3? 
• The S24 Ultra gets Wi-Fi 7 support, but the other phones will "only" have Wi-FI 6E support.
• The S24 Ultra also gets a titanium frame although judging by the weights it doesn't seem like it will be any lighter than the S23 Ultra.
• The RAM has been bumped up on the S24+ and S24 Ultra on the 256GB storage models. They used to get 8GB of RAM and now they got 12GB of RAM, just like the higher storage tiers.
• The S24 and S24+ have gotten a slight bump in battery capacity. 100mAh and 200mAh bumps respectively.
• The rest of the designs are more or less the same as the previous year. Just slight differences here and there.
• The Ultra (and presumably non-ultra as well) have a much upgraded thermal management system. Among the changes, they have increased the size of the vapor chamber by 90%.
• The S24 lineup seems to be the first non-Pixel Android phone that supports having multiple eSIMs active at the same time.  Not sure how much that will actually matter to people but it's a nice bonus.

 

 

Here are the starting prices:

 

Galaxy S24:

• US - $799
• Europe - €899
• UK - £799

 

Galaxy S24+:

• US - $999
• Europe - €1149 
• UK - £999

 

Galaxy S24 Ultra:

• US - $1299
• Europe - €1449 
• UK - £1249

 

This seems to be slightly cheaper than the S23 lineup at launch.

Samsung also has a promo right now that if you order before January 30 you can get the higher storage model for the same price. So the 256GB model costs like the 128GB model, the 512GB model costs like the 256GB model, and so on.

 

 

Software:

 

First thing first, all of these new devices get a promised 7 years of security updates and 7 generations of OS upgrades. So if Samsung delivers on this promise the S24 that launches today with Android 14 will get upgraded to Android 21 in the year 2031.

I personally don't think this is a huge deal since so much in Android get updated outside of "OS updates", but it's still nice to have. I'd rather have 7 years of promised updates than 5 years of promised updates, even if I think people in general puts too much focus on it. Android is not like iOS. Updates aren't as important in general because we have other ways of updating stuff. iOS generally don't. 

 

Samsung is also adding "Super HDR" to their camera and gallery app. This has been confirmed to be the "HDR Ultra" feature that Google has created. Personally I would have liked to just see JPEG XL get adopted instead, but it seems like Google really don't like that format for some reason and will do everything they can go not support it...

 

We can now also add widgets to the home screen (again). 

 

A big focus of this event was "Galaxy AI". The amount of times Samsung brought up AI was quite insane. 

 

Samsung has partnered with Google to integrate AI into several services. A lot of these services are based on Gemini Mini, a slimmed-down version of Google's Gemini model that can run locally on your device. 

Some features will require connecting to the Internet (will use Gemini Pro), but Samsung has added an option to disable these features if you want to. If you choose to disable them, you will still have access to all the AI features that can run locally, like live translation. But more on that later. Anyway, I think it's a nice addition to be able to disable these potentially privacy-intrusive features for those who just want everything processed locally.

 

Here are some of the AI-powered features that you can use:

AI wallpaper - You can have your wallpaper be an AI-generated one. Seems to be powered by Imagen 2 (Google's answer to DALL-E 2).

 

Live translation - These features let you translate voice and text in real-time on-device. If you for example speak to a Japanese speaker and only know English, it will take your English words, translate them to Japanese, and send that to the one you're calling using a generated voice, and vice versa. It can also translate text. Some apps will have this feature built in like the Messages app, but if you want to use the text translation feature in other apps it will be available through the Samsung keyboard. 

 

 

The Samsung keyboard (and presumably some apps like Messages) will also support stylizing and changing the tone of your text too. So for example, if you notice that you used a very casual tone while writing a message to your boss, you can have the phone stylize it so that it becomes more professional sounding.

 

 

The voice recorder can transcribe audio, and label who said what. It will be able to differentiate between multiple people and label who said what in the transcript. It can also summarize the recording into a list of bullet points. I am kind of tempted to use this during some presentations and see how well it works.

At launch, it will support these 13 languages at launch:

Chinese, English, French, German

Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean

Polish, Portuguese, Thai, Spanish, Vietnamese

 

The note-taking app gets a few different Ai-powered features.

It can summarize notes you have taken into a pullet-point list similar to the audio recorder app.

If you use the handwriting feature it will be able to straighten out your handwriting.

 

 

The camera software is also getting an AI-injection, to make images better. This seems to be mostly more of the same as Samsung already does.

What is new however is that Instagram and Snapchat have added in support for taking better advantage of the phones cameras. Things like night mode and HDR are now supported inside these apps. On most (all?) other Android phones you will get far better images from the native camera app than the camera modes inside these apps. That is not the case on these new Samsung phones (and some old ones as well).

 

The gallery app gets a bunch of AI features too that relies on generative image creation. What it can do is things like:

• Suggest things to "fix" in an image, like removing reflections and shadows.
• Move objects around, and it automatically fills in the gaps.
• If you rotate an image it will automatically fill in the edges that would otherwise be empty.

If you use these images the gallery app will add a watermark in the corner and in the metadata, so that it is detected.

 

The gallery app can also turn normal speed video into slo-mo video by generating new in-between frames to fill out the video.

 

 

Google was also on stage talking about two new features that will presumably come to more Android-devices later, but seem to be launching on the S24 lineup first.

Circle to Search - If you have this feature enabled and press down on the home button, you will trigger a view where you can draw on the screen. If you circle something (or tap on a specific thing), let's say a hat inside a video, then an AI will identify the object and then search for it. It can also do things like highlight text and search for that. This will work with anything you see on the screen and won't be limited to a few select apps. See a nice handbag in a TikTok? It will work on that. See the Eifel tower in a locally stored video? You can tap on that and search for it. Have something written down in your Notes app? It will work on that. You get the point.

 

Android Auto will be able to summarize messages and conversations for you, and also suggest responses. So if someone sends you a a long message that basically boils down to "when will you arrive", it will just tell you something along the lines of "person X wonders when you will arrive, should I tell them you will arrive in 5 minutes?".

 

Some of these AI features will be coming to older Samsung devices too such as the S23 series as well. Which ones and how well they will will remain to be seen.

The same fine print also suggested that some of these features will cost money in the future. The slide stated that Galaxy AI is free to use until the next of 2025. What happens after that date will remain to be seen. But considering some features are using Google's Gemini Pro AI model chances are it will require a subscription to use that, and Samsung and Google have partnered to give Galaxy phone users access to it for free in a limited time. 

 

 

 

Surprise teaser:

Samsung also teased their "Galaxy Ring", which seems to be a fitness-oriented ring. However, they didn't say anything about it other than show a tease that was a few seconds long, and say the name "Galaxy Ring". No price, no date, no feature set, nothing.

[Levent]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

The Galaxy S24 line will get 7 years of security updates and 7 generations of OS updates.

Finally.

[Lightwreather]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Japanese

'd be very interested in how they'll manage with this one. afaik, it is a heavily context dependant language

[Fasterthannothing]

7 years is actually insane props to them actually really considering it just for that 

[Brooksie359]

The changing a message to formal from casual seems a bit interesting. I think most would only use that as a starting point because I can't imagine trusting AI to edit a message you are sending to your boss. 

[TetraSky]

7 years of support is great.

They say live voice translation?
...
Now if Samsung(and Google) could stop pretending like Canada is part of the US and give us phone call recording again, that'd be great. Especially considering they would need to be recording calls in some manner for this live translation to even work.

[LAwLz]

25 minutes ago, Lightwreather JfromN said:

'd be very interested in how they'll manage with this one. afaik, it is a heavily context dependant language

I have been using ChatGPT to help me with translating manga, and it is really good with picking up context clues in Japanese.

If the live translation feature uses on-device Gemini mini then hopefully it will at least be somewhat decent at it.

[TVwazhere]

I was curios to the camera stackup compared to the S23U I have...

Quote

The S24 Ultra, meanwhile, gets a 200MP wide-angle camera, a 12MP ultra-wide angle camera, and a 10MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom as well as a 50MP telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom.

That’s actually a step down from the 10x optical zoom Samsung used in the S23 Ultra, but in reality, it will likely prove more useful, considering that at 10x zoom, trying to get your subject into the frame becomes rather difficult when even the slightest twitch of your hand throws off the framing.

Having used the 10x up to 100X a few times, they have good built in  stabilization, so this isn't a strong counterargument to a reduced telephoto option. But I wonder if it's a better implementation (less pixilation at higher zooms)

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/samsung-debuts-generative-ai-focused-galaxy-s24-smartphone-lineup-180147417.html

[suicidalfranco]

mmmmmhhhhhhhhhh

 

tempted of making the ultra my next decade old phone

 

It's been 12 years the last time i used a note, a trying the 23U in the store yesterday reminded me how amazing the spen was.  Specially now that it even has a coloring book app xD

[tim0901]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

Samsung is holding its annual Unpacked event where it will present its new products formally announces some products that we already know everything about because they've been leaked all over the internet for the last month.

FTFY.

[bcredeur97]

New Phone better than old Phone

I'm so jaded with phones now. Don't even care anymore xD 

[dizmo]

I found the changes in 23U to 24U some of the weakest tbh. I was expecting a lot more. The S24+ some substantial changes. 

 

I'd like to see Samsung put out a phone where they push the norms. They play too safe. 

 

OnePlus has caught my eye a lot more this year. Pushed the battery capacity up, and apparently their camera system this year is superb. Guess we'll find out next week, but I have a feeling my upgrade this year will be a OnePlus 12.

[Thaldor]

1 hour ago, dizmo said:

OnePlus has caught my eye a lot more this year. Pushed the battery capacity up, and apparently their camera system this year is superb. Guess we'll find out next week, but I have a feeling my upgrade this year will be a OnePlus 12.

Depending on what OPPO decides to do, I would probably wait a year or two until buying OPPO phone. Not that they would be any general level worse but getting the fast charging is going to be PIA unless they already next week release that they have abandoned the VOOC and jumped in PD/QC train that they pretty much need to jump within couple years especially with the OnePlus branding being used in EU.

 

Personally, that S24+ is probably the most interesting one but I would be probably still looking at the redmagic 9 Pro or S23U, if S23U's prices drop into some mortal price levels, I still cannot fathom paying over 1000€ for a phone, maybe over some more halo phone like the flips and flops but your every day plain normal phone that really doesn't even push out of the grey mass of phones with anything and if my old S10 Lite would give up (doesn't seem like that, battery has seen better days but otherwise it's still pressing on like a tank).

[Quackers101]

samsung is more interesting in some more stuff than google but both can be lacking at times and worse with control.

now that they want AI/tools to handle things too or invade your privacy which is likely? got so many privacy concerns and how we lose the "control" of our devices, and more so with what we send out or data that we no longer has an "voice" against. A lot of bad services and data collection tools they use now, and android having more OS native data and usage collectors, some for ads?

 

cooling might not make that much of a difference, or if its big enough and doesnt burn your hands. do wonder when one is getting more "semi-active" cooling.

 

One sad part about these digital devices/wallets is how they still dont know where to be in some features, and digital wallets and currency to be taken as something google have been on the topic for years, but apple might reach it sooner?

 

the recycling part was neat if true, maybe something actually "greener" for once? + 7 years support?

 

And they got pokemon to speak about gaming, catch them all?

Edited January 18 by Quackers101

[ahuckphin]

S20+ previously had 1440p display.

[Quackers101]

wasnt able to post, but health apps and how it could be more native and more global and public data support for people in general.

like food stores, food items, food stats and how it impacts you and if you cant eat it. as seen with the "deadly lemonade" or other products, or warn drunk drivers. etc, as other data points that might be used or what "apple did" with an tag tracking.

[Origami Cactus]

11 hours ago, TVwazhere said:

I was curios to the camera stackup compared to the S23U I have...

Having used the 10x up to 100X a few times, they have good built in  stabilization, so this isn't a strong counterargument to a reduced telephoto option. But I wonder if it's a better implementation (less pixilation at higher zooms)

 

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/samsung-debuts-generative-ai-focused-galaxy-s24-smartphone-lineup-180147417.html

The 5x camera on the S24 ultra is 50Mp, pixel size 0.7µm, F3.4, 115mm eq (real focal length 18.6mm), sensor size 1/2.52 (sony IMX854, 5.75 x 4.32 mm).

The 10x camera on the S23 ultra is 10mp, pixel size 1.12µm, F4.9, 230mm equiv (real focal length 27.2mm), sensor size is 1/3.52 (Sony IMX754, 4.3mm x 3.22mm)

 

The new S24 ultra at 10x will be 5.75 x 4.32 mm / 2 = 2.8mm x 2.16mm.

So the sensor area is about 2x smaller, 13.8cm2 vs 6cm2. But it will be 50/2/2 = 12.5mpix vs 10mpix on the old sensor.

 

The new lens is exactly 1 EV brighter, F3.4 vs F4.9, so it lets in exactly 2x more light, effectively counteracting the fact that the sensor collects about 2x less light due to size. So image quality at 10x should be about the same, if not a bit sharper due to more megapixels, and it can use a 2x higher shutterspeed in all situations, so it should give better results in lower light.

 

As far as higher zooms go, the extra few megapixels will help, but more difference should come from the new ISP and the better frame stacking methods the new phone can use.

 

All the other cameras are the same, so no need to do any calculations, they will just benefit from the new ISP and better AI processing, so images should look better, how much is a different question. I like the 4k 120fps option on the main lens too, and that you can use all lenses at 4k 60fps, instead of being locked into the single lens when starting to record.

[Sauron]

14 hours ago, LAwLz said:

The S24 Ultra will have a titanium body

I guess we can't help ourselves but copy every stupid idea Apple has

 

The AI stuff seems to be... little more than yet another marketing gimmick. Voice transcripts aren't new, tone change may be somewhat useful in some scenarios but it almost sounds like they expect you to be illiterate. The selection search is, well, just a slightly better reverse image search and OCR... likely with some baked in "sponsored" templates to better recognize products from brands that worked with samsung/google.

14 hours ago, LAwLz said:

A big focus of this event was "Galaxy AI". The amount of times Samsung brought up AI was quite insane. 

Getting xbone "TV" vibes lmao

[LAwLz]

51 minutes ago, Sauron said:

I guess we can't help ourselves but copy every stupid idea Apple has

Why is using titanium stupid?

It's a lighter and stronger material.

I guess you could argue that it's unnecessary since it doesn't make things much lighter or much stronger when looking at the whole package, but I wouldn't say it's stupid to use it anyway. It's still just objectively better, unless I am missing something.

 

 

52 minutes ago, Sauron said:

Voice transcripts aren't new

No, but the identification of who says things, and summarizing what was said are new things.

Of course it won't be impressive or anything new if you only look at the old features and ignore the new ones.

 

 

54 minutes ago, Sauron said:

tone change may be somewhat useful in some scenarios but it almost sounds like they expect you to be illiterate.

What makes you say that? Honestly, this sounds like another example of "fultolkning" from you.

When Apple improved their spell checking, was your reaction "so they don't think I can spell correctly now? What do they think I am, some kind of idiot?". It's almost like you want to be offended and choose to interpret things in a way where you can be offended by it.

 

It's just a tool that you can use if you want to and find it helpful. Samsung don't think you are illiterate.

[RejZoR]

Galaxy S24 release is one of the biggest "fuck you" to the existing customers I've seen in years. 7 years of software support. Samsung couldn't say "and we're gonna offer it to S23 customers too". Because reasons and literally saying "fuck you" because you bought it last year. If there is 2 years difference and I had S22 I'd say fuck it, it is what it is, but to buy it last year and be excluded from it, it's shitty as hell. And of all things because I grabbed S23 Ultra as it was first chance to get Snapdragon instead of inferior Exynos in many many years and was already saying why only 4+1 software support and then year later they do this...

 

And I'll have same opinion if all this "Ai" magic doesn't come to S23. Samsung and Qualcomm were bragging how their neural processing is so much faster in Gen 2 compared to Gen 1 and now they are saying it's entirely incapable of all this Ai stuff just a year later? Come on, who are you all fooling here.

 

The way Samsung is doing things, it's hard to be a loyal customer. I've had one iPhone among many Android phones and it provided the most consistent, reliable no nonsense experience despite Apple's usual nonsense and made up limitations. And none were this dumb and arbitrary as with Samsung. I guess I'll just go back to random midrangers and literally throwing them away after a year or two. because this is ridiculous.

[Sauron]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Why is using titanium stupid?

It's a lighter and stronger material.

I guess you could argue that it's unnecessary since it doesn't make things much lighter or much stronger when looking at the whole package, but I wouldn't say it's stupid to use it anyway. It's still just objectively better, unless I am missing something.

iirc apple's titanium version was actually more prone to bending than the aluminium one due to the titanium being too thin... might not be the case here but at the very least it's more expensive without a real reason.

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

No, but the identification of who says things, and summarizing what was said are new things.

Of course it won't be impressive or anything new if you only look at the old features and ignore the new ones.

Speaker recognition is also not new, it has existed for a long time without "AI"; it was just never integrated into widespread voice recorders (afaik) and I suspect the reason is that it's not that useful. Summaries probably benefit more from being done with generative AI, although personally I wouldn't take my chances and risk completely misunderstanding what someone wanted to tell me due to the AI messing up.

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

When Apple improved their spell checking, was your reaction "so they don't think I can spell correctly now? What do they think I am, some kind of idiot?".

I mean, yes... sort of. I don't use spell checking. It's not even that I always expect my spelling to be perfect, but I hate it when a system changes my input - I know what I'm trying to type, thank you very much.

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

It's almost like you want to be offended and choose to interpret things in a way where you can be offended by it.

I don't know why you'd take what I said to mean I find these features offensive... I just don't find them very useful.

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Honestly, this sounds like another example of "fultolkning" from you.

I won't pretend my opinions aren't biased... they're opinions after all. I don't think it's inherently a problem to be more or less cynical in your opinion of something, as long as you're not demonstrably incorrect. Maybe to you these features seem quite handy and I'm certainly not going to call you wrong for that, it's not an objective parameter. I look at this and my impression is that someone in a board room said something like "we need more AI in our products" and the engineers had to come up with a use case that didn't arise organically, but of course I can't know that for certain.

[srcds0706]

Personally I'm very interested in the Exynos 2400. Rumors and older geekbench results indicate slightly worse single core performance and equal multicore performance against the 8G3, with decent power consumption and efficiency.

 

I know Exynos has been doing quite poorly for a while now, but Samsung has lately been putting a lot of work into their fabs and SoCs - and so far the results have been promising. I'm curious to see just how much their processes have stabilized & improved.

 

(edit) So far, looking at early benchmark data from hands-on reviews, this seems to be the general result:

Single-core: 5~10% behind 8G3

Multi-core: 5~10% behind 8G3

GPU: Better than 8G2/A17 Pro, worse than 8G3

 

Of course, we do need to wait for actual benchmark results from professional reviews to make a final judgement, but so far Exynos isn't doing too bad.

[Erioch]

Preordered my S24 Ultra yesterday!

[LAwLz]

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Galaxy S24 release is one of the biggest "fuck you" to the existing customers I've seen in years. 7 years of software support. Samsung couldn't say "and we're gonna offer it to S23 customers too". Because reasons and literally saying "fuck you" because you bought it last year.

There is no need to be salty.

You bought the S23 with the promise of 5 years of security updates and 4 generations of OS updates. That's what you signed up and paid for.

 

Someone else buying a different product and getting something better should not be seen as a "fuck you" to you. I think it is a very bad mentality to get mad at others who buy later products getting a better thing than what you got. I see this with things like CPUs and GPUs as well and it never made any sense to me. You almost always get something better if you wait and buy the next generation. 

It's not like your purchase got worse just because someone else got something better. It just comes across as someone being salty and whiney because someone else got something better for waiting.

 

 

4 hours ago, RejZoR said:

And I'll have same opinion if all this "Ai" magic doesn't come to S23. Samsung and Qualcomm were bragging how their neural processing is so much faster in Gen 2 compared to Gen 1 and now they are saying it's entirely incapable of all this Ai stuff just a year later? Come on, who are you all fooling here.

Some of the AI features will come to the S23 too. It remains to be see which ones will come and which ones won't. My guess is that all the ones that use Gemini Pro will be available since that's done on Google's servers. When it comes to the on-device AI features I think it will a mixed bag. If I had to guess I'll say that the detection of different speakers will arrive on the S23 too, but the generative fill-in images and videos won't. They require a lot of processing and even if the s8gen2 is capable of doing it, it would be pretty slow and probably not a good experience.

When Qualcomm demoed Stable Diffusion on the Snapdragon 8 gen 2 it took them "less than 15 seconds" to generate a 512x512 image.

When they demoed it on the Snapdragon 8 gen 3 they did it in under 1 second.

 

Just because the s8gen2 was faster than the s8gen1 does not mean it is fast enough to do all the things the s8gen3 can do.

Again, you bought what you bought. Don't be mad at Samsung and others just because their latest product is better than the previous one, and you happen to own the model from last year.

 

Just to be clear, Samsung never said the S23 was incapable of AI. They expressively said the exact opposite because they said they would bring some features to the S23 too.

 

 

 

5 hours ago, RejZoR said:

The way Samsung is doing things, it's hard to be a loyal customer.

Yeah, how dare they improve their products year after year! They should just stop making phones better so that the ones who own the previous generation phones won't feel like they don't have the best anymore.

[LAwLz]

50 minutes ago, srcds0706 said:

Personally I'm very interested in the Exynos 2400. Rumors and older geekbench results indicate slightly worse single core performance and equal multicore performance against the 8G3, with decent power consumption and efficiency.

 

I know Exynos has been doing quite poorly for a while now, but Samsung has lately been putting a lot of work into their fabs and SoCs - and so far the results have been promising. I'm curious to see just how much their processes have stabilized & improved.

 

(edit) So far, looking at early benchmark data from hands-on reviews, this seems to be the general result:

Single-core: 5~10% behind 8G3

Multi-core: 5~10% behind 8G3

GPU: Better than 8G2/A17 Pro, worse than 8G3

 

Of course, we do need to wait for actual benchmark results from professional reviews to make a final judgement, but so far Exynos isn't doing too bad.

I think the most important and interesting thing to look for is energy efficiency.

Samsung's node has been quite a bit worse than TSMC's and as a result the last few Exynos chip has gotten good performance but bad efficiency numbers. Their implementation of the various cores also seem to have been weaker in terms of efficiency than Qualcomms. Let's hope both of these things have improved.

 

On the GPU side of things, I think the biggest issue has been AMD's drivers. The lack of OpenGL ES support has been a massive issue.

For those who don't know, the RDNA2-based GPU in the Exynos 2200 does not seem to support OpenGL ES, the framework used by a lot of Android apps. As a result, Samsung had to implement ANGLE, a translation layer that converts OpenGL ES to Vulkan in order to even run these apps at all. 

 

As a result, the performance in OpenGL ES applications is quite poor. Even big games like Genshin run using OpenGL ES so it is very important to have good performance in that framework. If more apps used Vulkan then this wouldn't be an issue because the Vulkan performance is excellent, but we're not there yet.

 

 

Oh, and rumors have it that the Exynos 2400 will use "Fan-out wafer-level packaging" (FOWLP) in the Exynos 2400. It's a new packaging technology that will hopefully result in thinner chips that generate less heat.