Phones, phones, phones.
Oh my God, phones. Samsung unveiled some new ones
at their unpacked this morning. You'd be forgiven for missing them though,
given how much the presentation focused on AI features
like ask about this video on YouTube, which you wouldn't use for tech link videos
because they'd miss that whole phones bit at the start. You can't.
Samsung's new flagship lineup is the $800 Galaxy S25, $1,000 S25 Plus
and $1,300 S25 Ultra in brand new colors,
including a few shades of blue that Samsung says are inspired by the brilliance of AI.
Which everyone knows is blue. All three phones sport 12 gigabytes of RAM
and Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite SOCs under the hood,
which have apparently been customized to make their battery life so good,
Samsung instructed viewers to watch videos up to 31 hours.
Do it. Unfortunately, although the Ultra gets upgraded cameras,
it's included S Pen has been downgraded
and no longer includes any Bluetooth functionality,
which allowed owners of previous Galaxy Ultra phones to use it as a remote camera shutter
and many other so-called air actions. Samsung told Android police
that not many people were using the Bluetooth functionality
and people also just use Galaxy Ring and Galaxy Watch for hands-free photo capture.
And I have to admit, making your customers buy another product
to keep using a feature they like is much simpler than Samsung just leaving the S Pen alone.
But tell you what, Samsung's gonna make it up to you with their new health feature
that somehow measures your antioxidant index.
Although I think a microplastics index would be more useful at this point.
What, still not happy? Have you seen the Crocs inspired case yet?
Nothing? Okay. Well, the one thing that is for sure
a cool announcement is the new kids features for the Galaxy Watch 7 LTE,
turning it into a standalone kids watch so parents can call, message and track their little babies.
You know, making sure they're not pre-ordering things.
If you must though, it seems like Samsung's own website is the place to do it
or maybe wait a bit because Samsung also teased the Galaxy S25 Edge,
which will soon arrive to challenge this year's other phones that will be super thin for a good reason.
Google was kind of Samsung's co-presenter today.
As another detail about the Galaxy S25 series is that Google's Gemini will be the default assistant now.
Even though at any given moment, I would much rather prefer to speak with Bixby.
Well, if that's true for you, good news. Samsung told Android authority
that Gemini or Bixby could be activated
depending on the situation, which I think is cool because I like the idea that whichever assistant
pops up in my phone is the one that just beat the other in a wrestling match
down there somewhere. Galaxy S25 and Pixel 9 users will also gain the ability
to share images, files and YouTube videos to the real-time voice mode, Gemini Live,
which will apparently be crucial for finding out if you just took a good photo.
I think my dog looks cute, but AI help.
Hmm, is this a good photo? Just look at it.
But Gemini is also getting a pretty big upgrade with the ability to complete multi-app tasks
like find activities that conform to certain criteria
and text them to my friend. Which friend?
Surprise me. Some performance data for NVIDIA's RTX 5090
has leaked courtesy of video cards with a Z,
showing that in various 3D mark tests, the upcoming flagship achieves a roughly 30% lead
over the RTX 4090 and more like a 40-ish percent
versus the Radeon RX 7900 XTX.
And I'm telling you this because it felt kind of weird to leave it out today,
but it sounds like proper reviews of the 5090
will be starting to go live at 6 a.m. tomorrow morning. So you might as well ignore what I just said
and cross your fingers that NVIDIA isn't lying when they promise anyone looking to buy the new RTX 5090
that it won't melt power plugs this time. Although watching all that go down was fun
to watch for the rest of us. Yeah, you know what? We're gonna go for those mid-range cards from AMD,
which should be dropping any day now. And by that, I mean two months from now.
Yeah, AMD exec David McAfee announced on Twitter
that the RX 9070 and 9070 XT will go on sale in March,
even though retailers already have the cards in stores.
Hmm, waiting until all the RTX 50 series cards get scalped
is a bold strategy. Let's see if it pays off for them. An even better strategy would be to check out our sponsor.
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah, I think now the vibe's right for quick bits.
OpenAI has announced the Stargate Project,
a new company that will build $500 billion worth
of AI infrastructure in the U.S. It was also announced at a White House press conference
with President Trump, even though the government isn't funding it.
The money's coming from a number of other firms including MGX, Oracle, OpenAI, of course, and SoftBank.
Although Elon Musk has his doubts, replying to OpenAI's announcement tweet to interject,
they don't actually have the money. And also, OpenAI is not really open.
Has anyone noticed that? Oh, you gonna take that, Sam Alman?
Hit him back. I genuinely respect your accomplishments
and think you are the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time.
Oh, man, you got him good.
Speaking of Elon, hundreds of subreddits are discussing
whether to ban all links to Twitter slash X,
and some dozens have already done so over Musk performing what really looked
like a Nazi salute two times at Trump's inauguration.
Was it a Nazi salute? I don't know.
But the Nazis liked it. Unlike the last major Reddit-wide protest
of the site's updated API rules back in September,
Reddit, the company, is apparently going to let things be,
telling ours that banning links to certain sites is up to the subreddits.
And I didn't write a last sentence for that one.
YouTube has announced new features for premium subscribers,
including high-quality 256 kilobits per second audio
on music videos, and faster playback speeds on mobile.
We're talking up to four times. But at that point, you might as well ask
the AI what's going on. There's also a new YouTube premium
plus Google One subscription bundle that lets you save a bit of money,
but it's in the US only, so what do I care? Apple has enabled Apple Intelligence by default
in the newest builds of macOS 15.3 and iOS 18.3,
which is just meant to be helpful. I mean, users must not know about the new features,
and that's why they're not using them. And anyways, Apple paused to those AI notification summaries
that were telling people that Sharknado was real, so this is fine.
And have you been practicing piano, but you're just not getting any better?
Let a robot spider massage your fingies. This is a robot exoskeleton developed by Japanese researchers
as a way to help those with fine-tuned motor skills,
like musicians, who have experienced a ceiling effect.
They're just so good, they can't get any better,
until they allow an electronic face hugger to yank their fingers around.
I feel better already. And you'll feel better if you come back on Friday
for more tech news, or at least I will.