Samsung leans into AI power for S24 series smartphones

Samsung has announced its latest flagship handsets overnight, the S24 series, while also revealing a bunch of AI-powered tools designed to help users with photos and videos, communication, online search and more.

Leading the flagship charge is the S24 Ultra, which Samsung has treated to a titanium frame – for improved durability over the aluminum of its predecessor – and a flatter screen, though there is an ever-so-slight curve to the edges.

That 6.8-inch AMOLED display is topped by reflection-reducing, optically-enhanced and durable Corning Gorilla Armor, features 120-Hz adaptive refresh, and boasts 2,600 nits of peak brightness. Better outdoor visibility is promised thanks to something called Vision Booster, up top is a 12-MP hole-punch selfiecam, and the handset comes with an embedded S Pen.

Inside, the flagship is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chipset, which includes game-enhancing ray-tracing graphics. The phone comes with 12 GB of RAM and up to 1 TB of storage, and boasts a larger vapor chamber than its predecessor for optimized performance. The Ultra gets its juice from a 5,000-mAh battery with support for wired and wireless top-ups plus wireless powershare.

"AI amplifies nearly every experience on Galaxy S24 series, from enabling barrier-free communication with intelligent text and call translations, to maximizing creative freedom with Galaxy’s ProVisual Engine, to setting a new standard for search that will change how Galaxy users discover the world around them," said the company in a press statement.

We haven't mentioned the rear cameras yet, and on the face of it there would appear to be little to report. The only hardware change from last year's flagship is the telephoto system now works with a 50-MP sensor and comes with 5x optical zoom.

But the injection of AI brains brings powerful new image and video editing tools to the party, including suggesting touch ups, filling in parts of a background, adjusting the position of an object within a shot, and the technology can even slot in additional frames to create smooth a slow-motion epic, whatever the original frame rate was.

Beyond visual content creation, the S24 series is one of the first to come with gesture-driven search, where users can circle, highlight, tap or draw on anything that's shown onscreen using a finger or stylus and Google's Circle to Search feature will look it up.

AI smarts also offer "real-time voice and text translations of phone calls" for smoother comms without needing to fire up third-party apps, and for those occasions when you need directions while on holiday abroad, another feature translates what's said in split-screen view – even without mobile internet or Wi-Fi. The Samsung Keyboard offers real-time translation of 13 languages, speech-to-text transcriptions are available too, and Samsung Notes gains summarization chops along with auto template creation.

Pricing has increased by a hundred bucks on the S23 Ultra model, to start at US$1,299. The pre-order books are open now, ahead of shipping from January 31.

The Galaxy S24 series is completed by the S24+ with a 6.7-inch curved-edge display and maxes out at 512 GB of storage for a starting price of $999, and the S24 – with a 6.2-inch curved-edge display, 8 GB of RAM and up to 256 GB of storage – that starts at $799. All handsets benefit from at least seven Android OS upgrades, as well as seven years of security updates.

Source: Samsung