Sorry to be that guy. The innovation of smartphones has allowed the use of artificial intelligence. Samsung, Google, and Apple have made AI the main marketing focus of each flagship phone by 2024. It wasn’t about svelte hardware or a smartphone’s ability to function as a solid everyday computing device. It was about preparing users for an AI attack that will inevitably force them to update their phones to avoid being locked out.
This year has been spoiled by amazing feature additions and the reason you’ll need a new smartphone to keep up with what’s coming if you want to be on the same page as everyone else. Design-wise, that has produced a number of phones that haven’t moved the needle. The Galaxy S24 Ultra looks like the Galaxy S23 Ultra but has more square edges. Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro doesn’t look that different from the iPhone 15 Pro—you can’t tell them apart except for the back. As for the Google Pixel 9 Pro, it has an improved camera bar on the back. Still, it now looks like an iPhone before, and everything else about the Pixel lineup puts the Gemini ahead of anything else.
I’m under the impression that the AI has come in handy, whether I’m trying to open an app to do a task or disappear into a scroll of doom. But what will be the cost of prioritizing AI-enhanced performance above all else? Can smartphones stay slim if power consumption is a priority? Won’t they have to make allowances for bigger batteries and other extras as AI becomes a bigger power driver? These are all questions swirling around as we move out of the year and into 2025.
The Meteoric Rise of AI
Samsung started 2024 right out of the gate with Galaxy AI. It has already done some of what Google’s Gemini said it would do, except this time, and has a unique new feature to start with: Circle Search, which has been the best thing to happen to Android this year, even before Android 15 entered the developer. preview. Samsung and Google combined the power of the Galaxy S24 launch event to keep the message respected, saying that Android will be the vessel for everything that happens with AI behind the scenes.
Google followed, rounding out the year with powerful Pixel Drops that enabled features like Circle to Search, Call Screen, and, most recently, Gemini extensions. When its developer conference kicked off in the spring, it became apparent that the Android platform’s trajectory was heavily focused on AI. Android was no longer the main event; instead, it focused on explaining how Gemini could improve the user experience. The most important indication of this for me was when I started the Gemini beta and set it as my phone’s default assistant. It broke some of my Google Assistant hardware, like the Roav Bolt, which I use to command my phone hands-free while driving. Thankfully, whatever Google has done in the background since then has fixed it, although I had to wait half a year for Gemini to fully release. It was a chilling reminder of what happens when the company behind your smartphone platform suddenly takes a left turn toward something new.
Some of us were hoping that Apple would be the one to hold on to AI. Usually, Apple will take what Google does and “ignore” it, and explain how it can’t be done because it would damage the integrity of its product. But Cupertino surprised us with Apple Intelligence at WWDC, announcing that it is adding AI to its platforms and doing it in a very Apple way: completely reinventing what everyone else is doing and presenting it as something new, fresh. technology, but still needs some help from ChatGPT to deal with complex commands. At least the company is still being honest about it. As a result of the term “Apple Intelligence,” the style guide requires me to write it every time I mention it, which helps me avoid overuse of “AI.” That’s not the case artificial intelligence; it’s Apple’s wisdom.
Image Production Costs
Now, it is months after all the new smartphones have been released in the latest generation. We’re still stuck with a wealth of premium devices from Samsung, Google, and Apple, all focused on selling us this new form of predictive computing. Each platform also has an image rendering app for image production: Image Playground on iOS and Pixel Studio on Pixel devices. Thank you, I guessbut this is not what people had in mind when they asked for help with pictures. Instead, I was hoping for better lenses to be added to the back of these devices as they are already priced on the upper end of a mid-range digital camera. I was even willing to run away from the minimum, knowing that the hardware had to be bigger if I wanted a bigger screen. Instead, I found a productive AI suite that makes my photos look like a Hallmark movie poster.
I’m not saying that cameras haven’t improved on Samsung, Google, and Apple devices. That happens every year with every new smartphone; everything gets a slowly slightly better. But this time, all three seem to be completely dependent on the AI doing the magic to create the image. The entire Pixel camera system is based on the premise that AI can automatically do what you would try to program. Apple uses algorithms to ensure that whenever you press the new iPhone 16 camera control button, the image does not blur.
Here’s the Catch-22 of phone photography in this AI-forward era. While AI and algorithms can help with battery management, such as reducing background processes and automatically optimizing settings based on what’s happening on the screen, producing images within apps takes those same resources, even if you outsource the cloud. A smartphone also needs a large amount of memory to perform these functions. That’s why we’re now seeing phones bundled with 16GB of RAM as standard, including the Pixel 9 Pro. All that extra hardware to power the AI will eventually drive up production costs. We’re already seeing higher price tags on iPhones and Android devices. It’s not just the economy.
That doesn’t mean that next year’s phones will be bulbous and cumbersome. They will probably still come with the same glass chassis they came with this year. All will have large, bright displays with high refresh rates and full colors. They will still fit into men’s pockets. They may be smaller than next year, at least according to rumors about the iPhone 17 and the Galaxy S25 Ultra. There is also talk that Samsung’s folders may be larger to cater to a different crowd. What will be interesting to see is how each manufacturer handles the demands of balancing what the industry says is important for competition and what consumers want for utility. It doesn’t make AI worth it when it comes to hot smartphones that come out during the day.
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