Matisyahu's Blog

I was watching the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event – after all the excitement had died down. I may be interested in technology but I’m not going to get up at some ungodly hour of the morning (yeah, I’ve stopped doing it for Apple events as well). Side note, I really do wish that Samsung would create an Android TV set top box with a decent SoC inside it rather than the tyranny of choice between Google selling a woefully underpowered dongle or an nVidia Shield that is practically ancient with no sign that nVidia are going to sort themselves out and update it any time soon. Anyway, getting back to the video in question:

What I thought was interesting is the much closer relationship that Samsung has with Google these days when compared to a few years ago where they appeared to be getting a lot more chummy with Microsoft (see Samsung preloading Microsoft apps, Microsoft selling Samsung devices through Microsoft stores etc). I’m having a guess that part of rebuilding of the relationship between Google and Samsung has been probably the sharing of revenue when cloud based AI starts to become a paid for service at the end of 2025. Part of Samsung’s goal has been to sell more higher end devices but I think another part their long term strategy is to also have more revenue streams to smooth out the product release cycles which is where the revenue sharing comes in – see Google Play revenue sharing which was recently disclosed (link).

Another interesting observation has been the downplaying of Bixby which makes me wonder whether in the long term that we’re eventually going to see Bixby is moved to the Google developed AI model for both on device and cloud based processing. AI will become one of those areas of technology where you either have to ‘go big or go home’ because as more people use AI the better the models become which then forces businesses to rationalise whether ‘going it alone’ is a viable business model or whether teaming up with a major player to share the burden of product development which ends up benefiting both parties. I could imagine that Bixby ends up being a Samsung branded frontend to Google’s AI along with gluing the ‘internet of things’ ecosystem that Samsung has developed which will use Bixby as the mediator.

One of the announcements regarding the use of AI was mentioned in the documentation that after 2025 that certain AI functionality won’t be free of charge. Although I have no evidence for this I am guessing that they will keep the local AI free however charge for cloud based AI (it is mentioned in this article that some AI features will come to older devices (link) but I have an inkling that it’ll be purely cloud based as older devices probably lack the hardware required to do local AI processing) due to the cloud potentially being faster with the latest AI models – I could imagine the AI model on the phone being updated maybe on a quarterly basis but the cloud will always have the latest model being used. It’ll be interesting to see how many people end up signing up for it or whether Google will revamp their Google One subscription product to include AI functionality along side cloud storage, YouTube and YouTube Music subscription etc. etc. but we’ll need to wait until 2025 to see what Samsung and Google have instore. For me, I’m currently paying a subscription for Google Workspace but it’ll be interesting to see whether in the future when AI hardware becomes optimised enough that the cost drops close enough to that of a web search query that Google decides to bundle as part of their Workspace service and bump up the plans a couple of dollars to offset the additional cost.

I haven’t had any hands on experience with the Samsung S24 series of smartphones but when they make their way to the stores I’ll pop in to see what they’re like but my main concern is the amount of crapware that Samsung seem to be hell bent on ramming down end users throats. What do I mean by crapware? the insistence by Samsung to duplicate functionality even though Google already provides said functionality, for example Samsung insisting on having it’s own bespoke mobile phone app (to make calls with), contacts, calendering etc even though Google themselves already provide such apps which integrate into Google services a lot better. Something Samsung doesn’t seem to realise is that at least for me is this: an Android phone is a means to an end and that end is to access Google services so anything that gets in the way of me achieving that end goal isn’t particularly all good as so far as what I wish to accomplish with my phone.