Commentary on Samsung Galaxy Unpacked January 2024

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Anything But Idle is currently on hiatus but Ray Sidney-Smith (🌐 https://twominuterule.com) and Augusto Pinaud (🌐 https://productivityvoice.com/) are occasionally doing episodes for commentary on major news/events in the world of personal productivity and related technologies.

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In this Cast | Commentary on Samsung Galaxy Unpacked January 2024

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Art Gelwicks

Art Gelwicks, a productivity and collaboration consultant, blogger at Gelwicks Tech, and host of the Being Productive podcast, CrossPlatform podcast, as well as a collaborator on ProductivityCast Podcast.

Headlines & Show Notes | Commentary on Samsung Galaxy Unpacked January 2024

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Summary (Auto-Generated)

• Samsung Galaxy Unpacked initial impressions.
  • Art Gelwicks felt the Samsung Galaxy unpacked show had an “awkward” start but improved with a live audience.
  • Art Gelwicks found the presentation to be lacking in energy and enthusiasm, with a few notable exceptions.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith contrasted the pre-recorded and live elements of the presentation, finding the latter to be less engaging.
• Samsung’s commitment to security updates and AI-powered call features. (4:25)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung’s commitment to 7 years of security updates and 7 operating system updates for flagship devices shows their dedication to customer satisfaction.
  • Art Gelwicks: Samsung’s decision to make updates backward compatible for 7 years highlights the power and longevity of their hardware.
  • Art Gelwicks highlights the on-device AI component in Samsung’s new phones, which processes language translation and live calls without relying on the cloud.
• AI-powered real-time language translation technology. (9:14)
  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the benefits of real-time language translation technology, including smooth and accurate translations, and the ability to choose between speaking and listening to translations in different languages.
  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the potential of AI in making communication more efficient, with examples of language translation features in Samsung Keyboard app.
  • The speakers highlight the benefits of seeing both languages side by side during conversations, rather than relying on post-typing translations.
• Samsung’s AI-powered note-taking features. (13:35)
  • Art Gelwicks: Samsung notes getting AI functionality, handwriting realignment, and note summarization.
  • Gelwicks: Samsung’s focus on making phone the “do all be all” for productivity and photo editing.
  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the limitations of Samsung Notes, a feature that uses AI to clean up handwriting and typing.
  • They agree that while the feature is useful for some users, it’s not a practical solution for most people due to the limitations of the Samsung ecosystem and the inefficiency of using the app on a phone.
• AI-powered note-taking features on Samsung devices. (19:20)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Photomoji capabilities in Google Messages are powerful and seamless, but RCS availability is crucial for full functionality.
  • Art Gelwicks: RCS standardization across backends makes this feature more useful, but personal interest is low due to limited use case.
  • Samsung Notes is designed to be a competitor to Apple Notes or Google Keep, not OneNote, with S Pen integration for handwriting recognition and text conversion.
• AI-powered features in Samsung phones and Google partnership. (23:55)
  • Art Gelwicks highlights the usefulness of Android Auto’s one-button reroute feature and ability to send an ETA with a single button press.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith agrees, emphasizing the importance of keeping eyes on the road and facilitating a seamless driving experience.
  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the Voice Recorder app on Samsung phones, which can transcribe speech in real-time and synchronize with the recording.
  • Samsung partners with Google on “circle to search” feature, allowing users to quickly search for objects circled on the screen using Google Search/Lens.
• Google’s new visual search feature. (29:00)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith highlights the potential of Google’s new visual search feature, Circle to Search, to improve search experiences and solidify Google’s position in the future.
  • Art Gelwicks notes the privacy and security benefits of the feature, which only sends the specific part of the image being searched, rather than the entire image.
  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss the new visual search feature on Android devices, which can identify objects in images and provide related information.
  • They praise Google for continuing to improve search functionality and make it more accessible, especially through voice search and visual search on mobile devices.
• Android’s quick share feature and its potential impact on file sharing. (33:42)
  • Google and Samsung are standardizing Quick Share for Android devices, making it a universal transfer tool.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung and Google’s collaboration on quick share flattens the playing field for Android, providing an olive branch to Microsoft and an opportunity to improve file sharing across ecosystems.
  • Art Gelwicks: Quick Share will likely come in the form of multiple third-party apps tying together all the pieces, providing a more seamless experience for users.
• Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 series with AI-powered photo editing capabilities. (38:09)
  • Art Gelwicks and Ray Sidney-Smith discuss Samsung’s new AI-powered photo editing capabilities, including the ability to remove unwanted objects or reflections from images and the addition of watermarks to indicate AI editing.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith likens the AI editing watermark to Microsoft’s CoPilot logo, with two small stars representing that AI was involved.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith and Art Gelwicks discuss the design of Samsung’s new phones, including their similarity to Apple’s iPhone.
  • Ray and Art praise the flat design of the S 24 Ultra and the use of titanium edges, but note that the curved screen of former models with the S Pen was a mistake.
• Samsung Galaxy S23 camera features and improvements. (43:37)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Sizes of screens increase from 6.2 to 6.8 inches, with battery sizes also increasing.
  • Art Gelwicks: Improved glass technology reduces screen reflections by up to 75%, and AI processing is used to optimize battery usage.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith explains that Samsung has optimized their camera system for the average user, dropping the 10x telephoto lens in favor of a 5x 50 megapixel lens for better image quality.
  • Art Gelwicks agrees, highlighting how the camera’s ability to switch between lenses based on the user’s distance from the subject creates a more seamless and high-quality zoom experience.
• Samsung’s new phones, including specs and pricing. (49:31)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith highlights Samsung’s focus on user feedback and improvements in camera capabilities, while Art Gelwicks notes the significant differences between the standard and ultra models, including storage and RAM.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung’s Knox Matrix offers synchronized, encrypted data across devices, while Knox provides separate, encrypted partitions on individual devices.
  • Art Gelwicks: Knox Matrix synchronizes encrypted data to the cloud and to other devices, while Nox requires separate authentication for each device.
• Samsung’s Knox security platform and health features. (54:54)
  • Art Gelwicks highlights Knox Matrix’s potential to securely store sensitive information across multiple devices without risk of breach.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith and Art Gelwicks discuss Samsung health and its new AI capabilities, with Art expressing reservations about the My Vitality score but hoping for improved insight and learning.
  • Samsung health users like Art Gelwicks use the app daily, with potential benefits including better data analysis and new sensor sets for feeding data.
• Samsung’s upcoming health tracking device, the Galaxy ring. (1:00:14)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: Samsung Galaxy ring is a competitor to the Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch, tracking health data and feeding it into Samsung Health.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith: The ring navigates the small place between non-watch wearables, solving a problem for those not compatible with the aura ring or brand.
  • Ray Sidney-Smith mentions the ring’s ability to capture data without needing to charge the watch, which solves the problem of waking up with an indentation on the face from sleeping on the watch.
  • Art Gelwicks suggests that the ring could be improved by adding a temperature sensor and EKG reading capabilities, and if it could measure blood sugar, it would be a game-changer.
• Samsung’s new Galaxy ring and its potential features. (1:06:35)
  • Ray Sidney-Smith and Art Gelwicks discuss the potential of smart rings for measuring health data, including heart rate, sleep apnea, and blood oxygen levels.
  • They speculate that smart rings could be a complementary device to watches or other wearables, rather than a competitor, and may be used intermittently for specific purposes.

Raw Text Transcript

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Ray Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello, personal productivity enthusiast and community Welcome to Anything But Idle the productivity news podcast. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith. And unfortunately, Agusta pronounced is not joining us today as he normally would. He’s dealing with some family issues. And so I’m going to be solo today for hosting purposes. But either way, this is episode 124. And we’re recording this on January 17 2024. Today was Samsung Galaxy unpacked. And they announced the new Samsung S 24. Series phones. So we’re doing this special episode, mostly because we wanted to geek out about all the technology and possibly productivity embedded in these new devices. Also, I have on the show today, art Gelwicks, our Samsung aficionado and our blogger podcaster. extraordinaire, over at Gelwicks tech. Welcome to the end, but idle art.

Art Gelwicks 0:52
Hey, thanks, Greg, I appreciate you for having me on. For this. As always, I’d love to talk Samsung. So

Ray Sidney-Smith 0:59
absolutely. And I just love to talk productivity in tech. So this is a really great opportunity for us to bring this special episode of Anything But Idle online. And so hopefully folks who are inside of personal productivity club and those of you who are watching on YouTube will join along with us as we get into our first kind of impressions of Galaxy unpacked here as we start 2024. What did you think about the show itself?

Art Gelwicks 1:25
It started off with that big stadium feel. I mean, definitely back in front of a live audience, that kind of thing. They’ve been building back to that since post pandemic that had a good opening. But the overall show itself. It felt I want to say awkward at times, not negatively. It just it didn’t feel like it had the positive energy. That other you know, big hardware releases, we’ve got this thing that everybody’s crazy stoked about. It just had this underlying feel that they know they have something that I hate to use the phrase game changer, they know they have something that is a game changer. They’re just not quite sure how to convince everybody else to that fact yet. And you could see it to me, you could see it in the handoffs between people, you could hear it in their voices. They were trying really hard, but sometimes almost a little too hard to get that message across. But from if I had to give it an A rating, you know, we normally give it like a grading, I’d give it a solid B, I’d probably give it a solid B. They did well, they did a little extra effort, but certainly nothing to put them at the top of the class of their other presentations.

Ray Sidney-Smith 2:56
I really found the pre recorded material against the live speaking pieces of it very contrasted. And that created a real, I don’t know, it just it created the deleterious effect for me that I felt that the whole model of Galaxy unpacked seems stayed at this point, it seems a little bit boring. And the the big screen actually, quite honestly, it was the most thing I was interested most in the curved, you know, display they had on on the stage. That was the most interesting thing I found about really the presentation.

Art Gelwicks 3:28
There was a point where I actually found myself going, I missed the pandemic presentations, I missed the pandemic unpacked, because you know, they were put together a little bit differently. They had an opportunity to mess it up and come back and things like that. I did have to chuckle a little bit though, I watched the entire presentation live off of Samsung site. And they had closed captioning running. Their closed captioning was I struggled a little bit with some of the people they didn’t feed it the script, they they let it go off of the audio. And there’s a couple of them where the accents were just like, yeah, that’s not quite what he was saying. Or she was saying but you know, all in all, like I said, I’ll give them a good solid B. And they started the whole thing off, which with I think is probably the biggest thing across the entire line. And that’s the updates.

Ray Sidney-Smith 4:24
Right? So seven OS seven operating generations and seven years of security updates, starting with the S 24 series will be supported now. And I feel like that that’s a fantastic way to kick off the show and a real testament to Samsung standing behind their products for especially their flagship product. So yeah, that was a great, that was a great start to the show.

Art Gelwicks 4:49
That just floored me because I had to think how many people are actually holding on to their device for seven years. You are they are literal We committing to you being secure on your device and having the operating system updates for the life of your ownership of the device. Because honestly, nobody keeps it that long, unless it’s a flip phone, and my mom still has it. Nobody else is keeping their devices that long. So to me, that’s a, that’s a spectacular commitment. But it’s also, I think there’s a little bit of a different or a deeper layer to that to what they’re recognizing is that all of their updates coming forward for that next seven year period, have to be backward compatible on those previous devices. So I think it’s a great indicator that the hardware has gotten so powerful, that it is worth using for up to that period of time, it will support it, it will continue to run, you’re not going to be looking at diminishing returns on hardware. B just because you can’t get a software update. So I thought that was a great way for them to start. I was revved up at that point. I’m like, Oh, this

Ray Sidney-Smith 6:04
is great. Yeah, the cynic in me, of course, understands that people typically in especially in these flagship phones are keeping their phones for 18, you know, longest, probably 24 months. And so they know that people are already doing that. But that means that these phones are being handed down a second hand devices to, you know, whether that be spouses, partners, sisters, siblings, and of course, children. And so these devices need to live longer, because they are being passed down to other folks. And this gives a little bit more longevity to those devices. And I think you’re right, the hardware is good enough that especially with these new SOC s, that are really stellar, even after they burn for you know, several years, they’re still going to have enough oomph left in them that it’s going to be good enough for, you know, your daughter or son or otherwise, to kind of use for a couple more years before you have to kind of turn it in and hand it along. Alright, so that

Art Gelwicks 6:58
that hand, that’s a great point, I jumped in there that the hand me down factor, I didn’t even think about that. But that’s now you’ve got a device that is worth handing down. Okay.

Ray Sidney-Smith 7:11
Yeah. And, of course, I’m very much concerned about giving a hand me down, that’s not going to get security updates, right. And that kept being the prime. Right. So I don’t even care about the OS generation updates, I really care about the security updates. And but I’m really glad to have the seven and seven, so that you really have strong support there. Alright. So I mean,

Art Gelwicks 7:32
this is just to jump in there. This is a this is a kind of an underpinning of multiple times throughout the entire event, security was raised, security was raised as a feature as a factor and as a requirement, which again, made me feel pretty good.

Ray Sidney-Smith 7:46
Absolutely. So they kind of segue us into really the the flashiest piece of the of the show. You know, I think, and that is, you know, all of these new call functions that allow to to utilize AI on the device, so that you’re able to do things like live calls where you have real time translation happening. They call it call assist, there are 13 languages that it currently supports out of the box. And they also provide text translations using the Samsung keyboard. So what did you think about the live call demo that they did on screen?

Art Gelwicks 8:25
I think that the demo is a great indication of where AI will make its difference in these devices. For a couple of factors. One, the demonstration itself was, it was interesting, but it’s similar to other demonstrations we’ve seen, such as when Google initially released their earbuds, you know, it’s that live transact or translation back and forth. That’s great. But there are some factors in this that I think really differentiate one. All of that is being done on device. It’s using Gemini nano from Google to do that AI component within the device itself, which means that only one device in the equation needs to be able to do that language processing. So and as they called out, it’ll work even all the way if the other person is using a landline, which makes perfect sense. The second thing is it looks very smooth. Previous translation mechanisms have been kind of jerky, you know, a little Herky jerky, there’s delay. You weren’t totally sure. This gave you a sense of confidence that the translation was happening. And it was accurate. So I have to say I do like it. I don’t really have an opportunity to use it. But I I really can see for somebody who needs this kind of functionality. This could be a significant feature for them. Yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 9:56
I’m currently using this feature inside of Google. it’ll translate in meetings currently. And, and so it’s very similar except that that’s all happening on the chip. It’s happening, you know, in this kind of sandbox environment. And as you said, you don’t have that latency issue of having to worry about translation, going up to the cloud being translated coming back down from the cloud, and then being spoken. But the idea is, is that you have the choice of speaking, it then does the translation and speaks it to the person on the other side, or turning off your voice and their voice altogether. And all you hear is the translations between the two. So they’re hearing the translation in the language of their preference, and you’re hearing the language in your preference. And so it gives you a real powerful capability, there even remembers which languages you used with that person in the past. So when you call them back, it basically picks up where you left off.

Art Gelwicks 10:54
Those are the little things that I think make a huge difference with this kind of thing, when that when they start to tie that to a contact record, so that the system knows when you start talking to that person, or you call that person, it needs to do that translation in real time from that language. That’s huge, because it becomes more transparent. And I think, across the board, that’s our expectation, or should be our expectation of AI. Not that it’s going to stand up in the middle of everything. But it’s the grease on the wheels, it’s what makes everything just kind of happen. And I think this is a perfect example of how that can function.

Ray Sidney-Smith 11:33
Right. And I know that right now, everything is going to have the word AI in it. Once upon a time we called AI, programming languages, we called it code. So it’s just basically a new iteration, utilizing some of these large language models and other other models that are coming online. It’s just code. And so we are we are seeing a lot of this being done because it can process such a large amount of data, and also start to do some interpretation that is novel in a lot of ways. And so I liked the idea of being able to transact in multiple languages, I really enjoy the text translation features built into Samsung keyboard. So you can type in one language, you see it in your native language below it, and you’re just typing, you know, and you’re just having that conversation. Again, I use something similar currently in the Google keyboard. So folks who don’t don’t know, if you’re using G board, which is an application you can install on Android and iOS, the G board application itself has a Google translate function built into it, you just click on the little, you know, on the little bar icon, there’s a little for widget icon, and then you’ll see the little translate button, you click on it type in whatever language you’d like. And then you type in it automatically translated, translates into the language that you want to. But what I liked about the Samsung keyboard demonstration was that they had that kind of layer, right, so you’re seeing both languages side by side, kind of the way in which Facebook and other social networks have applied that level of like clicking on a button and you can see the translation, and then you just are kind of continuing the conversation without really a lot of, of slowing down of things. Whereas with this, you’re you’re you’re only seeing the translation, you just typed in not both your language and there’s so you have to remember what you typed, which can be difficult if you’re typing in a language that you’re not comfortable in like it for me that’s Russian or, or you know, Japanese or something like that you’re typing to somebody and you don’t know what you just typed, because you typed it in English. And now it’s only showing you the kanji. You know, that’s a real problem. Exactly.

Art Gelwicks 13:34
I was just thinking about that with English to Korean. I mean, you’ve got a language there that doesn’t use the same letter structure. So you have no context whatsoever, you don’t have that feedback. So yeah, it’s it’s definitely worthwhile, I think. And you’re right, I liked the fact that they called out that it’s now built into the Samsung keyboard. That’s not the only time that Samsung pushed one of their own apps as part of this presentation, which I thought was interesting, because as of late, they haven’t really done that they haven’t really showcased their own stuff. They’ve always been showcasing everybody else’s. But there were two other times that they took apps that are just built in and kind of elevated them to a higher platform. And I’m like, Well, okay, that’s good. Yeah.

Ray Sidney-Smith 14:21
I’m going to skip to one of those, which was when they talked about speech to text, and also their note assist capabilities, because they really talked about the flavor of Samsung notes and how it really shines. Now. Talk to me about what you thought were kind of the key points of them talking about the speech to text and the note assist capabilities. So

Art Gelwicks 14:39
I have to admit, I was watching the opening rolling graphic that they always have, you know, in the like the hour before, and you’re always looking for those little visual cues as the giveaways and part of the image was the Samsung notes logo and I’m like, No, they’re not going to talk about stuff. No Yeah, sure enough they brought up. And what they brought up about Samsung notes is the fact that one, it can do handwriting realignment, it can summarize the notes that you’ve taken. It’s, they’re building that functionality into this tool. And I think that’s fascinating. Because they’ve been so much the last time we went around, they were touting about how we’re integrated into one note, and, you know, we have this, they’ve never really given Samsung notes, its own place on the stage. And now it’s one of the first apps to get this kind of AI functionality. And I think it, it’ll be interesting to see if this just happens to be an app that had a use case, or are they planning to make it bigger and better and more important as part of this overall platform equation, and there was an undertone within the presentation about how your phone should almost be able to be considered the do all be all for all things, you should be able to do everything there, do your photo editing, do your productivity, that should be the center of your world, because for most people it is. So it was interesting to see that I do like the handwriting cleanup. I know a lot of people struggle with that. Even with the new S Pen configurations, no, that’s still still an iffy thing. The note assist, I liked the functionality, I like its capability. Unfortunately, it happens to be one of those showcase features, that doesn’t offset some of the other weaknesses of the application. So I think they’re gonna have to kind of kick the application in his pants to really bring it up. But I think this was a good place for them to be able to take this and showcase functionality. So yeah, it’s a harmless app if they don’t do it. Yeah.

Ray Sidney-Smith 16:53
And I always take it from the perspective that I mean, I still use Notepad for taking some notes in meetings, right, and then it’s a copy and paste into my my note taking application of choice, right. So whereas I believe Samsung would have probably showcased to OneNote, in the past, maybe even a partnership with Evernote, while many, many moons ago, you know, those things are going to happen. Now, like you said they had a use case, I think that the the, the real concern for me with regard to the AI in in the note cleanup sense, is just like with with Evernote note, Ai no cleanup tool, it’s useless to me, right. And if I take really good notes, I know how to structure notes, I know how to, you know what I mean? So it’s like, it seems kind of like, okay, if you’re really, really bad at capturing notes, then then great this, this helps you. But the the flip side to it is that I can see the genesis of something really powerful in the future, right, where this can actually do a lot more in the future. This is this is a building, this is a foundation for something that’s going to come that will be much more powerful in the future.

Art Gelwicks 18:02
Yeah. And this may be one of the cases where Samsung notes actually doesn’t do themselves a benefit. But for Samsung doesn’t do themselves a service by using Samsung notes as the case for this. Because I really can’t imagine anybody taking lengthy notes on Samsung notes, using anything around the shape of a phone, it would just take forever to type the keyboard interface. It’s just, it’s not a good experience. I’ll admit that. However, Samsung notes if you’re in the ecosystem, and they’ve made it, so it’s only in the ecosystem, you can get the notes on your tablet and on your Samsung laptop. So you do have that cross compatibility, but it’s still it’s still not perfect. So I think this is one of those cases where for people who maybe aren’t efficient at keeping notes, or maybe just capturing things on the fly during a discussion, or a better example is what they talked about with voice recorder. That is a good use of this functionality. I just think that it was a neat thing to see. But it was more of just an illustration of functionality than a practical solution.

Ray Sidney-Smith 19:15
Yeah, and I felt the same way with the speech to text functionalities. And it being able to provide summaries. These are things that we’ve seen now in chat GPT and Google Bard. We’ve seen that in anthropic Claude, and many other you know, kind of chatbot focused AI tools today. And one thing I wanted to step back and as they actually showed in the, in the demo, their photo Moji capabilities and again, this is just bringing that flavor of AI and and how they’re handling, photo editing and video editing and so on so forth. We’ll talk about that in a bit. But the idea was that you can now take kind of a, a section of a photo and turn it into a is a kind of a MIMO G style image that you can then post into the chat, utilizing Google messages is a really, really powerful tool takes a lot of work under the hood to make it happen. And it looks pretty seamless. And so I’m really looking forward to seeing folks with Samsung devices utilizing that and seeing how it works across device, whether it’s only going to be within the ecosystem, that it actually looks good. If it’s if it’s just going to text message be an image, you know, or is it going to actually give me any other flavor of what’s going on under the hood. On the other side, within Google messages I’ll be I’ll be curious how that will all work.

Art Gelwicks 20:37
This is a feature that could be very strongly supported by the RCS availability, through messaging. Without that, it’s going to be kind of useless. It’s just a flat image. But the fact that RCS is now standard across the back, that makes a huge difference for this kind of feature. I personally, I don’t see a lot of use for it, because I don’t really use that kind of capability of it. But I know a lot of people who would just live for that, I mean that every other thing would be that kind of thing coming through. And again, RCS is going to make that that really powerful.

Ray Sidney-Smith 21:14
Yeah, it’s not going to be supported by SMS or MMS. Anyway, it’s going to be supported by the RCS protocol. And I think that it would be really good. But I just wanted to make note of that, because I know, I know, it was kind of interesting how they pointed that out, back onto the note assist piece and taking notes by hand, I know that you and I would never do that it’s not a comfortable experience to do that on your phone. That is taking lengthy notes or, or, or copious amounts of notes on there. But I will say that there are a lot of people who do, and there are a lot of people who are of a younger generation where that is the only device they’re utilizing. And so therefore they are doing it there, I see it all the time in seminars, and I I’m baffled because I see them, you know, to fingering, like notes and, and it hurts my heart to watch them doing it. I’ll say this though, the the idea behind a something that can fundamentally capture audio, capture the various photos to say, you know, someone pulls up their camera takes a photograph of a slide that I’ve done, I might have up on screen, and is also taking some lightweight notes. This is the part that I think from a productivity perspective can be really powerful, because it can, it can, it knows all those three pieces of data have come into the phone in that time signature in that time period. And so it can then go ahead and bring those those pieces together and potentially provide me with more rich information than before. And I think that’s the real thing that I hope Samsung does.

Art Gelwicks 22:45
And if we keep Samsung notes in its proper context, it is not designed to be an Evernote, it’s not designed to be a OneNote. It’s not designed to be a notion or anything else. It is a very powerful competitor to like an apple notes or a Google Keep. And it’s designed. Remember, for the S Pen, that’s what they want you to use it with. That’s its base structure. So when you go to type with it typings. Okay, but that’s actually not the fastest way to enter information into Samsung notes. So when you start to see it doing things like cleaning up your handwriting, well, what they didn’t mention is when they clean up your handwriting, there’s a tap button that converts that handwriting from handwritten to text. And we’ll do it right on the page, and then you move on. Well, that’s a single tap. And that’s exists now. So if you’re able to have cleaner handwriting, you get better text or handwriting to text conversion. So this naturally dovetails into this process, what you do with that text, that’s completely up to you. It’s a good Passover tool, though. And I think it’s a good dynamic tool at the platform level. So I’m

Ray Sidney-Smith 24:02
just gonna make mention of this because they talked about it, Android Auto got some updates within the Samsung ecosystem, you know, they’re providing some message summaries, replies and some smart actions within the within the car ecosystem. I

Art Gelwicks 24:14
have to say as as an Android Auto user, I actually installed a third party heads up display in my in my car to connect to Android Auto, them showing the one button reroute based on a new address gets sent to you through a text message. That’s a nice feature. Being able to one button send your ETA. That’s a nice feature. Those are the kinds of things that when we talk about AI in quotes, that’s the type of artificial intelligence that is useful, because it’s just enhancing the experience. It’s not trying to out think me, it’s assisting me and that’s a perfect opportunity to have that as well. that and they didn’t they talked about it, but they didn’t show it, I want to see it the way to get a summary of a group chat. Okay. Now, as a person who has like seven people in his family in one group chat and can’t follow any of it, if you give me a feature that will give me a summary of that at any given app, just take my money, right there. So I like that idea. Yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 25:24
I think anything, keeping your your eyes up on the road and, and being able to facilitate a more seamless driving experience is really fantastic. And I appreciate both what Apple is doing and what Android Auto is doing. So CarPlay and Android Auto are both really doing great jobs there. It’s good to see Samsung, kind of add these new features. And I hope when it comes to across the board to all of the Android Auto vehicles. So before

Art Gelwicks 25:50
we move forward, I do want to highlight one thing they talked about with the voice recorder app, its ability using AI, to pick up different voices during a recording and create a text summary based on the different voices. So if you imagine having a meeting and you’re sitting there with five people, you can take the phone, hit record, throw it in the center of the desk, and at the end, get a summary from everybody, based on who was talking. That’s like zoom level functionality. That’s the kind of thing we expect through virtual meetings. But now you can have that in the meat space that you’re operating in, that I want to play with, I think I’m sure it’s gonna have some issues. It’s all based on mic quality and ambient sound and things like that. But just having that as an option. That’s a big step. Yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 26:44
be curious if you can, I’m not sure if on your Samsung Galaxy phone right now, you can sideload, the Google Recorder app. But basically, the Google Recorder app does exactly that. And I’ve had it for several years now. And it’s phenomenal. So if this voice recorder app is anything like what Google has already created, where it just it knows who the speakers are automatically, it’s, it’s Trent, it’s transcribing in real time. And then of course, it’s, it’s then synchronized to recorder.google.com within your account, so used to authenticate into your Google account. And now you have those synchronized, you can download the source file, you could download the transcript. And so the Google Recorder app is basically what Samsung has caught up to. And I was really glad to see them bring that to the Samsung S 24 series. And hopefully it becomes legacy compatible for prior S series phones. Because it is, as you said, it’s such a benefit to be able to take your mind off of notetaking so that you capturing every word and every concept, and you can just experience something and still capture what was being said. There’s something to be said about that. And I really find that to be useful. Oh, absolutely. So so moving right forward to what I thought was kind of the most important and most interesting piece was Samsung’s partnership with Google, kind of in two parts. So we have circle to search. And then we had the quick share for Android partnership. So obviously, Samsung and Google have partnered on many things over over over time, this one seemed to be fairly special to Samsung, they spent a lot of time and brought Google on stage to talk about it. And so circle to search just for everybody’s edification here is the idea that anywhere on the screen, you are now able to basically twit a small gesture from the bottom of the screen, trigger your Google lens, basically, you circle something on screen, and then it automatically and I mean, just you have to watch the video, the speed at which it is doing this is phenomenal. And of course that’s you know, internet connectivity, and you know, all kinds of other things going on. But but it was really fluid, you circled a pair of glasses, you circled a dress, you circled a car, and Google lens comes right up. And the Google search shows you what you searched by just circling the image. And so I can think of all of the the times in applications where this will just speed up the search experience for people and solidify, I think solidify Google’s place in search in the future. This is a really powerful piece.

Art Gelwicks 29:20
This is one of those fascinating things because we’ve talked about multiple times in the past. How does Google transition from text search to visual search primarily, or voice search primarily, because we’re moving away from heavy text search? I mean, we’ve got a device in our pockets that is eyeball based. So when you look at something like Google search or circle to search, this to me is fascinating because one it works with anything that is displayed on your phone, whether it’s a live image, whether it’s a video image that you paused, whether it’s a photo that you took now or in the past, doesn’t matter. And it’s a granular part of that image. And they stress this. From a privacy and security standpoint, if let’s say you have a family picture, and in that family picture, there’s an antique table, and you want to know more about that table, so you draw a little circle around that table or you scribble over it, you know, they’ve got like, four different gestures for it. Only that image of that table is sent for the search, it doesn’t send the whole image, it only uses what it absolutely has to as part of the security component. So it’s one of those things that I think, yes, it is an extremely interesting feature. It’s not limited to S Pen, because we say circle the search, we think, okay, maybe it requires the stylus know, if you watch some of the, because everything that was on waiting for the release, all the YouTubers have released all their stuff, and everybody’s demonstrating with their their finger finger searches. No, I just liked the fact that it doesn’t care what you’re searching for. Sometimes we’ve had the ones that are like product searches, like it’ll indentify the products in an image, or they know that I saw demonstrations today where somebody had vacation photos, and they were trying to identify a store in the vacation photo. So they circled it and it went and it looked it up and it found it, that would be arduous, trying to do it manually. Here, it’s almost second nature. So everything now becomes a link to more information, which is really where it needs to be.

Ray Sidney-Smith 31:40
That’s,

Art Gelwicks 31:41
that’s huge.

Ray Sidney-Smith 31:42
Yeah, I think I think the, the, the stage before, this was the ability for you to hum lyrics into Google and for it to go ahead and identify that and tell you the song, that kind of thing. Or tell you the you know, you recite a couple of lines of a particular book, it’s going to tell you the book. Now being able to add this to visual search in such a fluid way. I think it’s really, really the next generation of that kind of being able to search everything right. And if Google’s ultimate mission, right is to organize the world’s information and make it usable, and accessible. The idea here is to is to continue and extend with partners to make sure that happens, certainly on the Android brand devices. And I think this is a fantastic moment of Google doing that. And I don’t spend enough time lauding Google for things, you know, being a Google fan, right? Well told, but I criticize them more than I do anything else, because I want them to be better. And and this is one of those cases where I saw this demonstration, I saw what Samsung and Google did together. And circle, the search is a fantastic tool, I’m really pleased with them. It looks like it works. It works out of the box, it doesn’t seem like it requires you to really think too much about how to do it. And it just does its job. And and that’s what you want from search, you want search to get out of the way and give you what you are trying to navigate toward. And and so I’m looking forward to seeing more of that, especially in a home assistant search, where you might say, Hey, Big G, you know, and do a search and just a lot more fluid with regard to navigating between the mobile device and voice search. And then of course, visual search on top of that. So I can take a photograph of something, and for it to automatically just do what I need it to do without. And this is where AI can really be powerful here to make sure that we’re we’re getting moving forward on those pieces. All right, there’s

Art Gelwicks 33:42
there’s no question. You were talking about? The other one quick share.

Ray Sidney-Smith 33:47
Yeah, let’s do it.

Art Gelwicks 33:49
Google AirDrop. Yeah, that’s what it is. Okay, so let me let me just clarify to anybody who isn’t familiar with what quick share is, and I just kind of gave it away there. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, there’s a thing called AirDrop where you can send whatever a file media image over to another phone device, another iPad. Samsung has had quick share for a while. And you can share between Samsung devices. And I use it a lot. I use it quite a bit. And it works really well. It is consistent. It’s bulletproof. There isn’t a lot of configuration or anything. It just kind of works. In the middle of this. Microsoft tried to do something and it’s still doing something with a drop function in their Edge browser. So it’s like, oh, okay, wait, we have something now. That’s a second one. Well, Google and Samsung, supporting quick share as the standard for all Android devices, that meaning that Google is saying that we will use this to allow any Android to send to any other Android. That’s huge that gets rid of this whole issue. You Don’t have to text people images anymore, you don’t have to email the images anymore, you can use a tool that is basically bullet proof for that transfer. And it’s about time, but to see that kind of throwing behind it, honestly, did not see that one coming did not see that quick share would be one of those big things, but as an advocate, and as a user for it. Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s great that they’re doing that.

Ray Sidney-Smith 35:27
So it sounds to me and clarify me if I’m wrong there, they’re bringing, they’re bringing the nearby share features of Android underneath quick share, and quick shares, basically, coming to the all all encompassing tool for all of the pieces. Fantastic. Yeah, like, a lot of times, you’re just like, I just want to give you this file. Right. And, and all of the rigmarole that is required for you to be able to do so this really flattens the, the playing field on the Android side. And so I think, again, this goes to Samsung and Google understanding their competition, they understand the need for them to be able to continually collaborate, and it kind of is a it’s an olive branch, I’m, I might be reading too much into this, but it’s a it’s an olive branch to Microsoft. In a lot of ways, it’s Microsoft an opportunity now to embrace quick share, and kind of get rid of some of their legacy, you know, features on the windows 10. side. And, and, and Windows 11. side. So I’m hoping I’m hoping that they they see this as an opportunity to really help the entire ecosystem outside of the Mac OS, and iOS and iPad OS, to really have a strong function for being able to share files, again, securely, conveniently. And, and just seamlessly, right, you want it to be a seamless experience for people. So

Art Gelwicks 36:59
and here’s, here’s where I think the game changes significantly as because it’s not going to take long for somebody over on the Apple side of the fence to write an app that will allow you to receive and send based on this quick share. I don’t want to call it a protocol, but quick share standard, because you don’t have to follow the apple rules of sending and receiving through AirDrop. Now it’s basically like a messaging app. So I would expect in fairly short order to see somebody or multiple apps over on the Apple side, to start to tie all these pieces together. Now, to be able to send things through all of this now, there’s still, you know, there’s security and controls and file sizes and things like that. But just to give you a practical example, over the summer, I shot a video that was close to a gig, used quick share to send it to my tablet, edit it and send it back to my phone for then publishing out. It just never had to go to the cloud. Net didn’t have to worry about Wi Fi connectivity or anything else all happened locally. It is absolutely a great way to handle this kind of interchange. So yeah, it made me really happy to see that.

Ray Sidney-Smith 38:11
Yeah. And so I alluded to this earlier, when I talked about the photo emoji, but the whole idea now is that the Galaxy line of phones is bringing online in the s 24 series, photo editing and video editing, editing capabilities that are supposed to be professional level. And again, high level processing being done right there locally on the device. So that you can really have great images and great, you know, moving images video produced right there on the phone, akin to, again, you know, they’re competing with Apple’s notion of using your iPhone as a cinematic camera, in a lot of way, they want to really help bolster their opinion there. So they’re giving us new a quote unquote AI, photo editing capabilities, right, they showed that wonderful, you know, option of being able to circle a person and drag them up closer to the, to the basketball hoop, which again, is an outright lie. Clearly they weren’t that high. But you know, whatever. They’re making fake images. But you know, but but the actual the example that I liked was where the person was in the image, and they had kind of their own reflection behind them and you kind of wanted to get the reflection. And and it was really well done just that that’s a great example of just like you want to clean your image. You don’t need that reflection of the person behind them. And they kind of clean that image up and I think more of that is going to be really powerful and impressive. The two

Art Gelwicks 39:46
things that were interesting about that particular example is one the system who made the recommendation, do you want me to remove this it recognize that that was a clutter aspect of the photo. The second part is is something they mentioned across the board. At any time AI monkey’s around with an image, they are putting a watermark on the image. And they are putting a mark in the metadata of the image that it was aI edited. So, deep fakes are not going to be as easily accomplishable tampering with images, you know, is an image believable, well, it’s been retouched. And here at least there’s some clarity and they recognize upfront, we need to be honest about this. So I was happy to see that they were doing that it’s not perfect by any stretch, but at least it’s an effort. Now

Ray Sidney-Smith 40:33
I felt I felt like it was the right choice to be to apply it looks like two little stars, you know, larger star in a small kind of feels to me like Microsoft co pilots logo a little bit. And so that little superimposed image in the in any anything that has been AI altered, is is the right choice, I think it makes a lot of sense that they that they watermark it in that sense, and it just gives everybody a greater greater just feeling and feeling a sense of security there. With regard to what is real and what is not. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about the hardware itself, they have come out with a number of so they have three models of phone so that everybody is aware. So the s 24 line comes out with the s 24. The s 24 Plus, and the s 24. Ultra. And man, the s 24. And the s 24. Plus, they just they look familiar.

Art Gelwicks 41:31
Like I look familiar.

Ray Sidney-Smith 41:34
They, yeah, they’re basically iPhone bodies with.

Art Gelwicks 41:40
So there they are, there’s, there’s no, there’s no subtle way to state that there’s no way to hide that. I mean, they are identical in look and feel to the the Apple phones and honestly, I’m okay with that. I don’t have an issue with that. Because if that were a bad design choice on Apple side, and then Samsung imitated it, then yeah, I’d have a problem with it. But it’s a good design, it’s a solid design they’re using, if I recall correctly, those ones are using an aluminum outer border, it’s only the Ultra, that is using a titanium border as reinforcement, which again for that one make sense because the ultra doesn’t look like an apple, it is clearly the wreck. It is the monolith yet again. And it is a flat monolith, they’re finally getting rid of that lovely curved edge. And honestly, as a S Pen user, they can’t do that soon enough, because that just drives me nuts.

Ray Sidney-Smith 42:50
I don’t know why they ever have the curved screen with the S pen, it didn’t make much sense. I think it was just and so I’m glad to see it gone. I’m glad to see the flat design, I’m glad that the s 24 Ultra at that price point has the titanium edges, right, you’re going to have a little bit Jeopardy with the device, especially if you’re going to want to have that again just live on a little bit longer to have the the corners of your device be able to take a little bit of a beating that the corners of the s 24 and the S 24 Plus are not going to hold up up to as well. But you can clearly see Apple you know design elements in that we’re talking about a Snapdragon eighth Gen three processor inside of it. That’s across all three of them. The sizes of the screens go from 6.2 inch FHD to 6.7 Q HD, and then 6.8 Q HD on the Ultra. So we’re incrementing up in terms of the screen size, battery sizes are going from 4k Milla ampere hours to 40 905,000. So you’re not getting that much more battery out of the the plus to the Ultra. But hopefully there’s some

Art Gelwicks 44:04
Well, they did call out. Yeah, they did call out the fact that they’re going to leverage their AI processing to help optimize battery usage. So I would expect a bit more. I also expect a bit more of a drain on the battery because they’re talking about these displays going up to 2600 nits, we’d have crazy if they did that brightness in a dark room. You could read by the freakin thing. I mean, that’s just crazy brightness. But supposedly it’s smart enough through not only visual sensors, but three different tier layers of visual response to provide the correct display intensity in any given environment. So I’ll be curious to see what the real world battery life estimates are. I run an S 23 Ultra. And honestly, I’ve never had an issue with its battery. I mean, I can go full day and a half two days without having a problem and I live on the thing so I don’t think there’s really gonna be a problem. I did want to touch on little bit though on the glass, they highlighted an improvement in the glass on the ESP 23 Ultra, what they’re calling Corning Gorilla armor. It’s it’s an upgraded version of the gorilla glass that supposedly, and these are their estimates, it’s three times better than the latest version of the Gorilla Glass. And it has four times more scratch resistance, which I think is great. But the thing that they called out that I don’t remember them ever calling up before, is it’s supposed to reduce screen reflection, by up to 75%. That, to me is a big thing when you’re talking about, you know, again, the black slab of glass reflections around you are what really take away from it from that experience. But if it if it loses that reflectivity, now, it makes that screen look that much brighter, that much darker that much contrast here. So that’s to me, that’s a good thing. Yeah, I

Ray Sidney-Smith 45:55
think, you know, we saw this in at CES, you know, where they were, they were really touting the idea of having a glare free, you know, displays. So in the television space. So I think using the same kind of technology to be able to reduce glare is always going to be powerful. Let’s talk about these cameras. So they okay, they decided to go to a 12 mix a 12 megapixel ultra wide effect 50 pixel wide 10 mix, megapixel 3x telephoto and a 12 Mega megapixel front camera. So that’s standard across the s 24. And the s 24. Plus, when we when we move over to the s 24. Ultra, we get the extra 5x 50 mega pixel telephoto lens. And so somewhere along the way, they figured out that people weren’t using your your camera your phone has what’s your I think yours is 10x telephoto, and so they dropped.

Art Gelwicks 46:55
Well, and but they have a rationale for what they did. And this, this is the rationale. And it makes perfect sense when you play around with the zooms on these, that changed to a 5x 50 megapixel. What that allows them to do is to do a full zoom in at 50 megapixels, and then pull into just the center down to 12 megapixels without losing any image quality. So you pick up the equivalent of that 10x Zoom, without having that digital rendering version of the zoom. So that combination of lenses, combined with the system being smart enough to use the right lens at the right time. I think that’s an excellent combination. And they justify it, they said look, that mid range of people zooming into about 5x is usually where they’ll zoom into 10x, you got to be pretty far away from something to justify using 10x. A lot of times, what you would do is you would do a 5x and then, you know, pinch and expand. And that breaks up the image quality. But if you’re doing that five exit 50 megapixels rather than 12. Well, now I can instead of pinching to expand, I can crop to reduce and pull that forward, back to the 12 megapixels with what I had before. And I have a great quality of the image itself. So I think I mean, the s 23 Ultra and the S 23 line, their resume is just mind boggling. I’ve played with it in various locations. And it just floors me how good it is. And they use the obligatory Kpop concert demonstration to show how good it is. But they’re not kidding. I mean that is a that is a quality piece and they were focused around this is This is that kind of iterative growth of putting out the lenses putting out that functionality in the camera. And then listening to the user base and observing how the user base is using it and then modifying the camera structures in the hardware accordingly. Not trying to create this incredibly new different thing pop up lens, whatever. No, it’s just that iteration that makes it that much better. So I think this is an excellent step in the right direction for them. But if somebody is expecting to get like a 500 megapixel 30 times optical zoom on the back, yeah, that’s not there because 99.9% of the population doesn’t need that.

Ray Sidney-Smith 49:31
Yeah, I think I think I was just gonna underscore the thing that you said which is that they are paying attention to their users. And that’s really important for Samsung to both showcase. It’s good for people to be aware of the one change in the ultra from the other specs is that their megapixel, their their wide lens is 200 megapixel over the 50 megapixel wide lens is on the 24 and the 24 plus. So there you’re getting definitely a bump up in terms of capabilities on the number of of line CES and the megapixel density on those on that wide lens. And I think, you know, it’ll time will tell us whether or not that makes sense. But I think it makes sense that they paid attention. And they and they really watch what was happening on users devices and made those adjustments. Items. I

Art Gelwicks 50:19
think, just one last thing to call out, if you take the three devices and put them side by side. This is clearly another statement of Samsung saying s 23 s 23 plus s 23 Effies, s 24 s 24. Plus, those are the general population devices. The Ultras are just that those are the pro devices. Those are the high ends, we’re putting the big guns in there, putting the heavy duty stuff in there. And visually, they look like completely different phones. Functionally, they look like they’re different phones, even though they work the same. So to me, I think, again, as a longtime note user, and since I killed the note line, this again is another statement of saying, Hey, this is the big boy on the block. And everything else learns from this. So yeah,

Ray Sidney-Smith 51:12
so memory and storage wise, they’re starting out at 128 gigabytes going up to 256. It’s eight gigabytes in terms of of RAM on the devices. Curious on the s 20. Fours. What what that means, but I’m guessing that a lot of this is being pushed down to the different chips, and so doesn’t need as much on the primary. I’m not sure they’re

Art Gelwicks 51:39
the eight, the eight gig of RAM. I don’t think it’s an issue. I can’t see anybody who’s getting an ultra getting 128 gig of storage. If they do, they’re just asking for aggravation. If you’re gonna if you’re gonna buy the big, big joy, give him space to play. So

Ray Sidney-Smith 51:57
yeah, it starts at 256 for the plus and the end the ultra so they don’t even give you 128 there Yeah, you gotta go with the big 612 gigabytes of of of memory on the 24 Plus, and the ultra going up to a terabyte on the ultra half, half a terabyte on the plus. So you’re given quite a bit of storage space. Obviously you have the the KNOX cloud they’re calling it Noxon, Citrix. Now, let’s talk a little bit about I’ll actually cover pricing. So pricing, preorder started today, January 17 2024. It’ll be available June 31 2024. And that is across all of the three phones that they announced today. And of course, we’re going up in increments. So the es 23. Fe is coming out at 600. The s 23 is now 700, the s 2424 Plus and ultra 800 1013 $100 starting out, so it gives you lots of good reasons to enter the market. And I feel like for their flagship phones, this makes a lot of sense. And so And

Art Gelwicks 53:03
since we’re talking about things you could keep for seven years now, if you spread that price out, okay, you’re talking if you take an $800 phone, and I can make it run for seven years, well, technically, it’s $100 year phone, now we’ve got a different conversation. Right,

Ray Sidney-Smith 53:18
exactly that that s 24 you’re starting out on the baseline, that’s 800 you can spread that out, it’s 110 ish dollars over the course of that timeframe. So very, very reasonable people to be able to get a really nice phone that works for them. The I’m going to I’m gonna let’s let’s talk about Knox matrix, privacy and security dashboard issues. Because I think that’s for us to kind of circle back to then we could talk about this announcement around Samsung health, because I’m very skeptical. Let’s let’s talk about the KNOX matrix. Oh,

Art Gelwicks 53:56
did you so I’m, I’m a NOx user I have. And just to explain what NOx is. Nox isn’t a separate encrypted partition. I’m not going to do this justice. You can google for the details. But it’s a separate encrypted separate encrypted partition on your phone that allows you to store applications data, whatever and it requires separate authentication on the device to be able to access that now. Knox matrix, if I’m understanding this correctly, takes that encrypted data, synchronizes it to the cloud and then allows it to synchronize down to other devices. So for example, s 23 Ultra that I have and I’ve got an S eight or s eight plus tablet. Right now if I have Knox running on the two devices, if I put something in Knox on one, it’s not available on the other with not Knox matrix. It is. So think about a highly secured, encrypt Did storage that replicates across your devices? That’s really useful that takes Knox to the next level of making it a viable use platform, especially on these mobile things that can disappear that easily. I mean, it’s it’s a very simple thing with something like NOCs, if you take a picture of a receipt, you take a lot of times people like, for example, medical cards, or insurance cards or social security card, you don’t want to leave that in your gallery photo gallery. You don’t want to stored as a file, you don’t want to park it in Google Drive, you don’t want to. So where are you going to put it? Well, if you park it in something like Knox, in the device that you’re keeping, at this point, if you lose that device that’s gone. Because it’s a single device solution, Knox matrix makes it no longer a single device solution allows you to span across your devices. So I think it’s a it’s a good logical growth of how Knox works as a tool and as a platform. And I think, when we talk about these, this could be what kind of finally kicks knocks to the mainstream to get people to start using it and start using it more effectively. Because I really think they should. I mean, it’s a much better solution. I’ve started migrating a lot of the private information that I would park in secure cloud based services over to this, because you see how those secure cloud based services are struggling so much with breaches and things like that. There has never been to my knowledge, and please comment if I’m wrong, but there’s never been a Knox breach that I know of.

Ray Sidney-Smith 56:47
That’s fantastic. And hopefully there won’t be. Because, you know, really, Samsung’s reputation is on the line here as to their capabilities of security on the platform. And I do trust Samsung to be able to make that work. So, so that’s NOx matrix and this whole piece, and it’s just a kind of, unless you wanted to talk about anything else, they talked about Samsung health. And I wanted to close out the show, because they announced a new product, very vaguely. But they they talked about some interesting pieces about utilizing Galaxy AI on and with the Samsung health. And so I’m a former, you know, Galaxy watch where and I, of course, the pixel watch line, because I have a Pixel phone. And so it was interesting to see how Samsung kind of had their flavor of Samsung health. What are your thoughts being a Samsung health user? With these new features? I, I

Art Gelwicks 57:52
use Samsung health every day, all day long. I have it on my watch. I use it constantly. I do things like checking EKG, checking, heart rate, checking stress, water, all the all the things, check all the boxes. So does this help? I like the idea that AI in quotation marks will help with the interpretation and aggregation of that data. I like the fact that they’re talking about doing things like monitoring heart rate while you sleep, because currently it doesn’t do that. And that that’s a really useful thing. And they they brought up the point of sleep apnea and, and stress how much of a thing like yeah, good use good use case, they talked about a medication tracker, a reminder of, oh, that’s fine. That’s an app. And then they brought out this thing called My vitality score. Okay. I appreciate the fact of coming up with something like this, but unless you’re gonna have some really thick transparency on what this score is, how it’s composed, what it’s based out of what it impacts how you react to it, it’s just going to be another made up medical number. So I’m not sure how that’s going to come across. But I highly want to reserve judgment until I see this stuff in place in inaction. Samsung health seems to run just up to the edge of being useful. And then kind of trips over and over and over again, gets brutally close, but it’s not quite there. And they talked about things like booster cards with tips on better health. Okay, guys, you’re just filling in air now. If they are able to start using the AI capabilities in this to provide some better insight and some better learning, then it’s worthwhile, then I think it’s gonna be good. And again, I’m running a galaxy watch for the six has better sensors in it if they continue to build on those sensors, and we start to see new sensor sets for feeding data. And that’s really where all this, this benefits, more data we feed it, the more it has to work with. And then they highlighted the device and turn up the lights.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:00:14
Yeah, so they announced the Galaxy ring, which is basically a competitor, competitor to the aura, potentially even competitor to the whoop band that some app competitive athletes wear. And so this is a health tracking device, akin to the Apple Watch, or to your Samsung Galaxy, watch four or the pixel watch where it’s tracking health data is tracking metrics. And it’s capable of then feeding that into Samsung health. They gave virtually no information on its round.

Art Gelwicks 1:00:50
It’s round, it’s got a hole in the middle. I was always said, that

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:00:55
was baffled. They don’t tell us when it’s going to be released. They don’t tell us any details about what it’s going to what the what number of sensors are going to be in there, what it’s going to track. I’m, I’m almost, you know, convinced that they have a 5050 chance of putting the product out. Like it could it could happen. So,

Art Gelwicks 1:01:13
so I so I got a question. And in the pre show, I was chatting back and forth with a Gousto. And he goes, Why would you have a ring? If you have a galaxy watch? And it’s a very valid question, if you have the watch. Why? What would the ring provide for you not knowing anything about the sensors that are on the ring or anything like that it’s life anything like that? That’s what we have to find out? What where does the Venn diagram of the watch and the ring intersect? Because remember, with the ring, you can’t have things like oh, I don’t know, a display. There are only certain sensors that you can have available. So Now granted, it’s all the time consistent recording. So there’s a lot more data you can aggregate. And if you can move some of the data capture from the watch to the ring, so that it’s not an duplication, but they’re, they’re compatible. Now you may be able to provide a much better set and I know people who who can’t sleep with a watch on they don’t you know, they don’t do that I do. But I do for the sleep tracking. If I didn’t have to do that, well, maybe that’s not a bad thing. But since we only know it’s a round piece of jewelry, this is all speculation we have no idea timeline or anything else. I think this may be I think it’s gonna come out. And I think maybe 12 People will buy it. And I’m not gonna be one of them. Because I got the other stuff.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:02:49
I think I think this does this navigates the the very, very small place between non watch wares, right? If you’re, if you’re not a watch where then this solves that problem. And I can very much see this being a solution for those folks that are that are not aura ring, you know, compatible just because they don’t know, or a brand. Samsung is well known, they’re trusted. And it’s going to work, hopefully, both across Android and iOS, just utilizing an app, it’s probably not going to be as strong in terms of data collection. But really, the ring will still capture the data based on the sensors that it has, which means that it can do some really good stuff there. You’re right, there are opportunities where I’d like to take my watch off and go to sleep and wearing the ring for that problem. Also, it means that you know, some mornings I wake up and I have you know, kind of a watch shaped indent in part of my face. Because I will sleep on the wristband or I’ll sleep on the watch face that will drain the battery. And and Google has done really a good job of stopping as actually protects against that for the most part. But I still doesn’t stop me from having you know, sometimes an imprint of a face when I wake up and it takes it takes a little while for that to disappear. So you can’t really roll out of bed into it into a Zoom meeting with a with an imprint on your face. So I think that the ring solves for that problem, especially if you need to charge your watch overnight. Right? So there’s there’s that issue where oh gosh, I didn’t charge the watch, it’s not going to go ahead and capture the data. If you have the ring on, then it solves that problem because it’s going to last you over in that sense.

Art Gelwicks 1:04:38
And I would I would agree with you if it took that long to charge the watch. But thing is you can charge the watch in 45 minutes, not even you can get it back to 50% from almost dead and the time it takes to you know, shower, shave and brush your teeth done move on. So it’s not a difficult reason or it’s not a good act. Do you say, Well, you know, I can’t have it for an extended period of time. Like I said, some people just can’t wear watches. Some people haven’t, you know, there, there is an audience for the thing. I can’t help but think, though that they would be better served, releasing a device like their old Samsung Gear, fitness trackers, then putting in cars that you know, this thing is going to hit like a $299 price point, it probably, you know, I’ll speculate that I don’t know what an aura ring goes for. But I’m sure it’s, it’s in that neck of the woods. So now I got a device that is much easier to lose physically, then a watch, and it is much lower functionality. So I now here’s where I would like to see it do. And this is again, this is me just totally speculating. One, put a temperature sensor. And that actually works to have your O to sensor and three, have your EKG be able to do your EKG reading on it. If you can do those basic ones. Now you’ve got something that makes a lot of sense. Oh, and the one thing that none of them can do yet, when they figure out how to make it measure blood sugar gameover, if they can, if they can make that ring, measure blood sugar, and get FDA approval for it. Yeah, they’ll they’ll sell those things faster, and they can make them because that’s one of the perfect reasons to have it on all the time. Yeah, that’ll be heavier,

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:06:35
that’ll be Galaxy ring version 10,

Unknown Speaker 1:06:37
they can’t, it’s got to be a while,

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:06:40
you’d have to have very big ring to hold the battery to be able to do some of those to be able to power those sensors. That’s,

Art Gelwicks 1:06:48
that’s what I wonder. And again, somebody somebody who either has an aura, I don’t know, if you have an aura ring. I know somebody who actually just got one. So I’m going to talk to her about what her experiences with it. I have never worn one or used one. But I just can’t I can’t help but think it’s such a limited piece. So

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:07:09
yeah, don’t have an aura ring. I have contemplated it many times. But I’ve always felt as though my watch was capturing all the data that I needed to. And it was capturing more limited data, and therefore just didn’t really fit my use case. So but they’re getting better. I mean, the newest or rings are more and I’m hoping the Galaxy ring does well I honestly do, I hope that it does actually start to capture more data, if it can pull an HRV. If it can pull an SPO. Two, at the very least, then you’re given quite a bit of good information. You know, these devices are struggling to do continuous heart rate monitoring out the box, right. So this is this is a real problem, just because of battery life. So if we can figure out the battery problem, then we get a real opportunity to go ahead and expand upon the sensors and the capabilities of those pieces.

Art Gelwicks 1:08:04
So just out of curiosity, here I’m looking at. Let’s see, looking at the patent related to it. Supposed to, yeah, everything we talked about sleep apnea, blood, oxygen changes, maintaining heart rate, those are kind of nice things for for a ring type device. Because you could go if that’s all it’s going to measure, then yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it doesn’t have to be we think about a ring as something you’re wearing all the time. It may be an intermittent, intermittent device, it may be the thing you put on when you go to bed. Exactly, that’s and that does that measuring set, well, now you’ll have the watch to deal with or anything else. It’s like, okay, that may be and then you can let the watch sit in charge overnight. So it may be a very good, complementary device, rather than competing. So let’s

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:09:01
say so I also like complementary in the sense that like, if you get a weird reading on the watch, because there’s a malfunction, the ring can also reading and tell you, Hey, you’re not having a heart attack, you’re just working out. Right. You know, it’s, you know, there have been circumstances where people get weird readings from from a watch. And so having that other device to basically say, hey, no, that’s actually not the case. You know, that can be really, I think, comforting for people, especially, you know, you don’t want to distress somebody, you know that they’re having a medical event, even though it’s not ice telling you that you’re having some kind of medical event when you’re not. So it, I think there’s I think there’s a space here for this.

Art Gelwicks 1:09:38
And the more I think about it, it can actually be an extension set of sensors too. So if we think about for example, if you’re wearing the ring on your right hand, you had the watch on your left hand, well now you have a separation where you can do the body mass calculation without having to stand there with your two fingers on the watch. You can just say measure it, and it can measure it On its own, you can spread out the heart rate measure, and it can, you know, do water calculations, I think because it has an extra set of sensors to work with. And maybe that’s what this becomes, again, is an extension of the sensor set, rather than just a dedicated piece. I’d be curious to see.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:10:19
Yeah, we’ll only see once they get it out into the world, and we actually see it being used in a large scale population among the 12 people who buy it. So

Art Gelwicks 1:10:30
alright, we’re about that one.

Ray Sidney-Smith 1:10:31
I know I know. We are coming to a close for this commentary on the Samsung Galaxy unpacked January 2024. event. Thank you art for joining us here for my pleasure. Thank you very much. All right, everybody, we are going to close out. As you all know, you can follow us on socials. If you’re inside personal productivity club, you’re where you need to be, feel free to follow along with us there. We’re currently not putting out new episodes on a regular basis. But I think this is kind of fun for a Gousto. And I want to do so when I are available. And these large scale events are happening to kind of poke in and do these special episodes. We’re going to do that for now until we’re able to come back and have enough time to do Anything But Idle justice in a full time perspective. So you can follow us on social you can see the links and so on and so forth in the show notes once those are out, but either way, I want to thank you for listening and watching along for the Anything But Idle productivity news podcast. Until next time, here’s to your productive life.

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