For more than a decade, smartphones have been the default option for our personal communications and portable computing.
But the days of comparing camera capabilities and seeing how they get thinner and lighter every year are over: today, they’re all pretty much the same.
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Considering my personal view that we have essentially reached the peak of the smartphone market as it exists today, I asked Roh how consumers will differentiate devices in the future given the saturation of the market and whether we will in fact judge more on software and AI than physical hardware attributes.
“When you just think about ordinary usage scenarios or the experience of traditional smartphones, our current hardware can satisfy those scenarios quite sufficiently,” he said.
“On this point, hardware performance may have reached its peak, but at the same time, in this new era of mobile AI, mobile AI demands new hardware requirements, new performance, new telephony factors, opening up new possibilities for mobile AI to be better exploited with new requirements and new hardware.”
Essentially, instead of hearing about huge increases in the megapixel count of new smartphones, we’ll likely hear more about hardware advancements that benefit AI in future smartphones.
“Mobile AI will also drive new applications, new usage scenarios, and along with that, hardware can also develop and advance further, and as a precursor to these, new developments and new hardware requirements can also emerge.”
This term “mobile AI” is a term that Samsung seems to want to appropriate.
Even within Samsung, the company is moving away from the traditional way of looking at its business.
“Last year, I proclaimed internally to the entire MX (mobile experience) business that we were no longer a smartphone company,” Roh said.
“We are an AI phone company, so we are going to focus all our efforts around AI and its implementation.”
Samsung launched Galaxy AI – its artificial intelligence offering – with great fanfare in January on the Galaxy S24 series and has already rolled it out to other models, including the S23.
However, the company has ambitious goals for the number of Galaxy AI-enabled devices.
“It is this philosophy that has allowed us to commit to making Galaxy AI available not only on the S24, but also on other S series launched after 2022 and on other Z series foldables, these would be updated to have access to Galaxy AI features,” Roh said.
“In doing so, we will enable 200 million units to be equipped with Galaxy AI features, and this is how we democratize technology.”
Looking at the short six-month window of Galaxy AI usage so far, and keeping in mind the concerns some have raised about AI happening on the device and commands being sent to the cloud for AI processing, Roh said, “Search Circle is the most commonly used future of AI, but it’s search – so if we exclude that, when you look at all the other AI features, the numbers are 55% on-device and 45% cloud-based AI – that’s the consumer trend.”
When thinking about a potential goal of 100% on-device AI, Roh was much more reserved, explaining that it depends on what features users want.
“All use cases that are more sensitive to privacy and latency, and require faster responsiveness, will be handled on the device,” he said.
“AI use cases that require powerful and superior performance or execution that will be done by cloud-based AI, but at the same time with cloud-based AI, there might be some that can be implemented on on-device AI will be converted to on-device AI and cloud-based AI will also load new areas and explore new possibilities in the future.”
He speculated that “in two to five years, I think the ratio could be similar (50/50) and on the question of 100% on-device AI only, that’s up to the consumer to decide, so if because of privacy concerns a consumer is not currently using any cloud-based AI, you may also already be 100% on-device AI, so we’re giving consumers the choice.”
Samsung’s foldable smartphone lineup got an update this week, with the new Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 now featuring Galaxy AI capabilities.
These devices are priced starting at $1,799 and $2,749, respectively. So when asked if more affordable foldable smartphones are on the way, Roh didn’t rule it out, saying that “at Samsung Mobile, our main focus area is to provide an even more premium experience to foldable users, and secondly, we are also doing our R&D in collaboration with partner companies to see the possibility of more affordable foldables.”
“When these efforts bear fruit, we will be able to share more information and bring more affordable foldable models to market.”
And if Apple’s reluctance to go foldable made anyone wonder whether the market segment was even worth creating, Roh was clear.
“When we launched the first foldables in 2019, there were concerns that it was just a niche product that wouldn’t really make it to the mainstream, but when we look at our current status and the growth of foldables, we can confidently say that we were on the right track.”
I asked Samsung’s mobile chief directly: did he think Apple would release a foldable phone?
His answer was inevitable: “I can’t really speak for other companies, but our main strength is listening to the voices of consumers and the demands and needs of the market.
“So we will continue to develop our technology and we will also engage in open collaboration based on philosophy or openness.
“We are always looking to deliver the best possible experience and ease of use to consumers before anyone else in the market and to democratize technology so that as many people as possible can have access to it.”
It seems pretty clear: foldable devices are here to stay, and the new benchmark for smartphones will be AI, the new battlefield.
Trevor Long visited Paris as a guest of Samsung Australia.