digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: The Samsung Galaxy S24 series is worth a look mainly for its software and AI features rather than its redesign, which Marques Brownlee describes as a near-identical update. The most useful additions he highlights are the Instant Visual Search, the phone app's live translation, and the photo editor's Magic Editor-style tools, though he says he still needs to test performance, camera quality, and screen quality for a full review.
Key Points
- Hardware changes are modest: the S24 and S24+ keep last year's dimensions and button layout, with new matte colors and slightly thinner bezels, while the S24 Ultra switches to titanium side rails and a fully flat display.
- Display and battery upgrades are the main non-AI gains, including 2,600-nit peak brightness on the S24 and S24+, a Quad HD upgrade on the S24+, and larger batteries (4,000 mAh on the S24, 4,900 mAh on the S24+).
- The S24 Ultra's camera lineup changes: it keeps the 200 MP main camera and 3x telephoto, but replaces the 10x telephoto (10 MP) with a 5x telephoto at 50 MP, which Brownlee theorizes will give better-quality 10x crops.
- All three phones use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, and Brownlee notes Qualcomm has built AI processing features into this chip for manufacturers to use.
- Samsung's AI features are spread across apps, marked by small star icons, rather than concentrated in Bixby, which Brownlee says doesn't appear to have made major gains.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Instant Visual Search: press and hold the home button, or hold the gesture bar, then tap or circle anything on screen to Google search it. This also works on images in the gallery.
- Live call translation: before a call, open the phone app and download the language pack for the other person's language. Translation then runs offline using an on-device model of roughly 100 to 500 MB per language. You can choose to hear only the translated voice rather than the original speaker.
- Photo editing: open a photo, tap the star-marked info button to apply background blur, object erase, or automatic remastering. For generative edits, open the editor and use the star icon in the bottom-left corner, then circle or highlight objects to move or fill.
- Voice Recorder and Notes: look for the star icons to get AI speaker labels, transcription, recording summaries, handwriting straightening, bullet-point conversion, and note summaries.
- Brownlee says the Magic Editor-style tools are less restricted than Google Pixel's, but generated images carry a watermark in the bottom-left corner.
- Video can be converted to slow motion by AI generating frames between captured frames; Brownlee has not yet judged how well it works.
- The base S24 starts at 128 GB, which Brownlee wishes were 256 GB in 2024.
Bottom Line
The S24 series looks like an incremental hardware refresh, but its AI features across Google search, calls, notes, and photos are where the most practical day-to-day value appears to be, pending full testing.
