Gadget Review: A pusher of boundaries among mobile phones

If you’ve not been living under a rock, you would know that Samsung recently launched its flagship mobile phone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, with great fanfare worldwide. And the buzz around the new device is that it is AI-enabled, something that Samsung has unfailingly cried from every rooftop, highway-side hoarding, social media advertisement and promotional event, until everyone and his uncle knows about it.

So what does this vaunted AI do is the question doing the rounds in the gadget world. More to the point, people are asking whether this tom-tomming of the inclusion of AI is a marketing gimmick — Samsung’s way of milking a fad or a real improvement in its well-loved flagship product. And, does AI here in the S24 Ultra stand for Artificial Intelligence or Artificially Inflated, as in the price?

Let's examine what the AI claims entail.

The device’s keyboard has various AI tools built in, such as advanced grammar and spelling, and even language translation. If you’re the sort that is awkward at writing appropriately toned emails and messages, then there is AI support that rewrites your words in various ways, such as polite, casual or professional, so writing that email to your boss need not be a task of such great consternation anymore.

If you are not the patient sort when it comes to reading long documents and articles, there is AI help for that, too. The Notes app can summarise documents of up to 1,500 words and Samsung’s browser can summarise even very long online articles quite accurately.

There are useful audio AI tools as well: The voice recorder app can transcribe text and the phone can even do real-time voice translations, so you can attempt to have conversations with people speaking different languages. We tried out Hindi and found that while it worked well enough with the formal version, casual conversations, regional accents and slang were all struggles. Also, Arabic is sadly not yet among the 13 languages supported, but future software updates should take care of that, especially with Samsung’s promise of software updates for seven years from release.

Another useful AI-enabled feature is ‘Circle to Search’, where you use Samsung’s S-Pen stylus or your fingers to circle what you’re looking for on the screen and Google takes over to do the rest. Whether it’s an actor you want to know more about when watching a movie or a sports personality — or even a highlighted text — this is a fast, intuitive and efficient process of obtaining more information right when you need it.

The AI tools extend to Generative Edit in the photo gallery app, resizing, reframing, erasing or moving objects and other edits, using AI to regenerate the image each time. A great tool for quick edits without booting up Photoshop, it also has a drawback: A little watermark appears at the bottom left of any images edited with AI, a tell-tale sign that the picture isn’t fully authentic.

AI also allows converting any video into slow motion, with pleasing results, even though some minute details may be compromised.

Speaking of photos and videos, the S24 Ultra sports perhaps the most capable camera system of any smartphone. There are four lenses at the back and a 12MP one up front. The main camera is 200MP, supported by a 12MP ultrawide and 10MP 3x telephoto. New on the S24 Ultra is a 50MP 5x telephoto, which can also do in-sensor zoom for 10x magnification. The package rivals anything that Apple offers.

That package also includes a great 6.8-inch AMOLED screen and up to 1TB of storage, along with a 5,000mAh battery that keeps on running like the Energiser bunny. Even with the several apps that we kept running, juicing it up once in three days was enough.

However, while the S24 Ultra’s AI wizardry and features are extremely impressive, even the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and 12GB RAM cannot stop it from slowing when the AI features are used. Besides, the Dh6,599 price for the range-topping model is also unnecessarily steep given what it offers is only marginally better than the comparable iPhone.

At the beginning of this review we asked whether AI stand for Artificial Intelligence or Artificially Inflated price in the context of the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. The answer is both.

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Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra mobile phone

Hits:

- Great camera system

- Long battery life

- AI-enabled features

Misses:

- Slow when used with AI

- Too pricey

Price:

Dh6,599

Rating: 4.5 stars

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