Galaxy Z Fold & Z Flip 6, Watch Ultra, and New Ring Are Samsung's AI Carriers

At its Galaxy Unpacked event today, Samsung unveiled a slew of new devices ushering in the "Next Frontier of Mobile AI." With "cross-device intelligence," each device has its own set of AI features that Samsung said will be personalized for users, good for humanity, and empowering for creators. Ars Technica's Kevin Purdy reports: Aiming to put its Galaxy AI onto your wrist and fingers, Samsung announced a seventh version of its Galaxy Watch, a rugged and larger Galaxy Watch Ultra, and the first version of a Galaxy Ring. [...] The Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra are strikingly similar to their inspirations: the Apple Watch Ultra and the previous Galaxy Watch, respectively. [...] The Galaxy Z Fold 6 ($1,900) and Z Flip 6 ($1,100) have the kinds of boosts from their prior models you might expect. There's a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip inside. The folding glass on both is supposedly stronger and now rated for IP48, which means dust resistance went from "X" (good luck) to "4" (1 mm and greater particles), which is still unfortunate at these price points, but that's life on the folding edge.

The outward-facing screen on the Z Fold 6 got a smidge bigger (6.2 to 6.3 inches), though it has the same inner display. Its cameras are much the same (50 megapixel main, 10 megapixel telephoto, 12 megapixel ultrawide), though the ultrawide claims better low-light performance. The Z Flip 6's most notable upgrade is its 4,000 mAh battery and a vapor cooling chamber inside. The base model gets 12GB of RAM instead of 8GB and 512GB of storage instead of 256GB on the base model.

There are other products not mentioned here announced by Samsung today, including its Galaxy Buds3 and Buds3 Pro, which are wireless earbuds that will remind you of certain other very popular wireless earbuds. What Samsung really had to pitch today was how its own Galaxy AI was the connective tissue between all of them. The screens on the Fold and Flip models are ideal for circling things to search them. The cameras can auto-zoom, the notes can be summarized, and translations, in particular, are everywhere. The watches and rings can track your health and suggest ways to make it better in all kinds of ways that merit a lot of disclosure about where all that data is going. Rick Osterloh, Google's devices and services chief, showed up to give a kind of Gemini blessing to Samsung's efforts.

Good for Humanity

[Disco Ninja]

I am so inspired that corporations continue to make products for the good of humanity. I certainly never would have never realized an entity who has stated goals of maximizing profits and shareholder values benefited humanity. Silly me I must have a different definition of humanity that includes more than the company and their shareholders. Sarcastic twit signing off.

Re:

[GoTeam]

Exactly. If they want to help the environment they can stop releasing new versions of products every year. Wait 5 years. Unless it has nothing to do with the environment.

Same Stupid on the Z Flip 6

[dbialac]

The Z Flip line was a great phone. I've owned all of them. However, the external screen done as it was on the 5 was a terrible idea inspired by reviewers, not by people who actually use the phone day to day. The external screen is huge. Drop the phone and you're back to the problem you have with a standard phone: the screen breaks. Except now, if you want a case, the phone gets really thick when it's folded. When my 5 was stolen, I didn't bother replacing it with another 5. I bought a 4. So how does this all come into play? I was in the hospital for 5 weeks recovering from a severe injury. Nurses moved the tray table over and over. The original Flip I had fell over and over and over. The external case cracked, but the screen remained (and to this day remains) uncracked and completely usable. I still use it today for other purposes. Try doing that with a 5 or a 6.

Re:

[dbialac]

Well you can go with flow of the fanboi or buy something that is a technical leap forward. Even with the terrible implementation of the front screen, it's still a huge leap forward from having another camera lens thrown on the back or a slightly thinner phone where nobody will notice the difference. This leap forward is why people still ask me about it all of the time, even though Samsung just announced their 5th edition of the phone (there was no "2"). People are now interested in it.

Shameless

[shilly]

"Strikingly similar" is quite the euphemism for "blatant fucking knock off"

https://x.com/snazzylabs/statu... [x.com]

Re:

[thegarbz]

Oh no it has rounded corners!

The earbuds are a knock-off, but on the watch side, there's only so many designs you can have with a square screen.

But Are They #GSOD Carrier Too ?

[AncalagonTotof]

These models wouldn't be complete if they were not featuring the #GSOD [youtube.com]

Market-speak Overkill.

[nightflameauto]

I had to stop reading so I could puke in my wastebasket after this sentence:

With "cross-device intelligence," each device has its own set of AI features that Samsung said will be personalized for users, good for humanity, and empowering for creators.

Personalized for Users
TRANSLATION: We will track every single thing you do with your phone. We will track everywhere you go with your phone. We will aggregate all of your data into our data. We will use you to train the AIs that will hopefully make you irrelevant while continuing to grow our profits.

Good for Humanity
TRANSLATION: The best possible thing for humanity is to replace all humans with AI. You're helping us train what will come after we decide we no longer need human consumers.

Empowering for Creators
TRANSLATION: We pray hard that creators will use our platforms to create so that our AI can aggregate all their creations and steal the best parts for creations that we can then sell to someone else.

I honestly don't know how the people that write this drivel can live with themselves. If I wrote that kind of nonsense I'd see myself in a mirror and have a guttural need to punch myself in the face. Marketing has shifted from outright lies to literal opposites of the truth. These people could stab you in the heart with a knife while smiling and saying, "You'll be so much happier now." Fuck that entire job sector. They're helping powerfuck our livable biosphere into an unlivable hell-hole, while being giddy about it.

sphere without AI

[GarryIr]

Is there at least one area left that AI has NOT touched? It feels like no. It’s being pushed literally everywhere, it’s just a new trend. No, I use it myself, but mainly for texts. Especially such as https://chatgpt.com/g/g-a0ULgFcuZ-essay-helper [chatgpt.com] where they reworked them for academic needs. But it seems to me that there is no need to push this into absolutely all areas of life.