Galaxy Unpacked Leaves Us Hanging - DTNS 4940  ## Metadata - Author: [[Daily Tech News Show]] - Full Title: Galaxy Unpacked Leaves Us Hanging - DTNS 4940 - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/84467c78-2de8-4c52-b16a-f8b051b321af ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Lackluster Unpacked** - Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event was described as lackluster. - It featured incremental phone upgrades and a confusing S25 Edge tease. Transcript: Tom Merritt Let's start with what you need to know with the big story. And the big story is that Samsung held its Galaxy Unpacked event Wednesday. Time to go, TM. Speaker 4 Everything's set. Ready? Activating unpacked stage protocols. Good luck. Tom Merritt I've seen it described as lackluster, Jen. Let's go through what they announced. They started with some Gemini announcements. And the good news for Android fans is that these are available across Android. They're not specific to Samsung Galaxy devices, but they're coming there first. Google Gemini will work across multiple apps at once on the S25 and will be the default. So you can say, find a restaurant and then text the details to my friend, Jen, and it'll do that. It'll open the apps that need to do that. Or you can take a photo of a refrigerator and ask for a recipe. The side button on the S25 will launch Gemini. There's some fun stuff you can do with a long press on that. They always get circled to search features first on Galaxy devices. It can now identify songs even by you humming into the device. It can recognize phone numbers. It can recognize website addresses and more. Bixby's still there. If you're like, oh, Gemini replaced Bixby. Ah, no. It uses LLMs now, so it's even improved. But they're positioning it to be the thing that handles your phone settings, your device level stuff. Whereas Gemini is for internet-facing stuff, web-facing stuff. New S25s will come with six months of Gemini Advanced for free. So that's a nice little perk. Before we get into the phones themselves, any of this trip your boat? Molly Wood Well, as an AI skeptic, I'm a little worried about stuff like the ask for a recipe because we all know the uh the legendary how many rocks and glue on your pizza but yeah i know they are fixing That hopefully it's not in there yeah yeah we will find out but especially if people put weird stuff on their in their fridge to trip it up, then that's not the AI's fault. Tom Merritt No, definitely not. The Galaxy S25 range is three phones. A 6.2 Galaxy S25, that starts at $799. A 6.7 Galaxy S25 Plus, that starts at $999. And a 6.9 Galaxy S25 Ultra, 6.9 inches, but still the same size as it was before because smaller bezels that starts at $1,299. Phones are available for pre-order right now and start shipping on February 7th. All three phones have rounded edges, but they are a little flattened from before. So they are supposedly easier to grip. Qualcomm's three nanometer tuned Snapdragon 8 Elite, tuned for Galaxy, is in all of these. No Exynos models. It used to be like, oh, it was Qualcomm in the US, but it might be Exynos somewhere else. Everything is Snapdragon 8 Elite. Samsung says 37% CPU upgrade, 30% graphics boost, 40% improved neural processing unit, and 12 gigabytes of RAM standard. S25 phones are Qi2 ready for wireless charging. And what that means is they don't have the magnets. So Qi2 works like Apple's MagSafe, where it can click to the charger and give you a really solid connection. The S25 will not have the magnets, but it will have the Qi2 protocol. So it can charge wirelessly on a Qi2 charger. It just won't snap to it. And also videos are captured at 10-bit HDR. There's a feature called Galaxy Log that does logging for color control on video in your post-processing. Pro Visual Engine gives you a virtual aperture. These are very creator-specific tools, but again, these are available across the devices. Before we get to the S25 Ultra-specific stuff, how do you feel about the S25 line in general? Molly Wood I will say they're very pretty, though there aren't many ugly phones these days. And, oh my gosh, the cameras. I remember when people complained about cameras sticking out. And now there's just more each phone. Yeah. Tom Merritt The S25 Ultra, even more camera. It's, like I said, 6.9 screen with a smaller bezel. All of them have smaller bezels. Bluetooth and motion gestures gone from the S Pen on the Ultra. So it's just a stylus now. Samsung said nobody used the remote camera shutter function. Nobody used the motion gestures. So we just took it out to save some money. The S25 Ultra has Gorilla Armor 2 glass, a little more durable. The battery can do video playback up to 31 hours, good for those long flights. And the ultra wide camera on the ultra goes from 12 megapixels to 50 megapixels. But again, none of these specs really, you know, they're nice, they're good improvements, but none of them are really like huge advances. Molly Wood Yeah, they're not world changing, but I think we're in the era of incremental upgrades. But battery life, I think, is going to be the big thing for the future. Can you play all the games they say that you can play without setting your hands on fire? Yeah. Tom Merritt What do you think of the games? They always demonstrate games whenever anybody shows off a phone. And most of us do play games, but I think most of us play like you know candy crush style games yeah like i play like the animal crossing pocket camp on my phone but i don't really want to use Molly Wood My phone to bust out like at arkham asylum or woman's time or anything like that it's cool that you can and it looks impressive in a demo but oh they're so pretty but i'm thinking like if I'm at home and have to plug it in, I'm going to play a console. Tom Merritt Yeah, yeah. Also, weirdly, at the very end of the announcement, they put up an image of the S25 Edge and showed kind of a reverse teardown video of it coming together and looking slim and gave us no Details. Not a tease of when it would come out or how much it would be or anything else. In fact, the keynote just kind of ended on that. We weren't sure if it was over yet. Molly Wood I thought it hung. I thought my feed was like, oh, no, my Internet. ([Time 0:03:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/cd11c3ec-1757-4e7a-9745-7daca079fbb8)) - **Gemini on Android** - Gemini, Samsung's AI assistant, will be default on the S25, working across multiple apps. - It will also be available on other Android devices. Transcript: Tom Merritt Luck. I've seen it described as lackluster, Jen. Let's go through what they announced. They started with some Gemini announcements. And the good news for Android fans is that these are available across Android. They're not specific to Samsung Galaxy devices, but they're coming there first. Google Gemini will work across multiple apps at once on the S25 and will be the default. So you can say, find a restaurant and then text the details to my friend, Jen, and it'll do that. It'll open the apps that need to do that. Or you can take a photo of a refrigerator and ask for a recipe. The side button on the S25 will launch Gemini. There's some fun stuff you can do with a long press on that. They always get circled to search features first on Galaxy devices. It can now identify songs even by you humming into the device. It can recognize phone numbers. It can recognize website addresses and more. Bixby's still there. If you're like, oh, Gemini replaced Bixby. Ah, no. It uses LLMs now, so it's even improved. But they're positioning it to be the thing that handles your phone settings, your device level stuff. Whereas Gemini is for internet-facing stuff, web-facing stuff. New S25s will come with six months of Gemini Advanced for free. So that's a nice little perk. ([Time 0:03:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df44bff4-835e-498a-be1d-693310d3f7e3)) - **Phone Battery Life** - Consider battery life as a key factor when choosing a new phone. - High-performance gaming on phones may be less practical than on consoles. Transcript: Tom Merritt But again, none of these specs really, you know, they're nice, they're good improvements, but none of them are really like huge advances. Molly Wood Yeah, they're not world changing, but I think we're in the era of incremental upgrades. But battery life, I think, is going to be the big thing for the future. Can you play all the games they say that you can play without setting your hands on fire? Yeah. Tom Merritt What do you think of the games? They always demonstrate games whenever anybody shows off a phone. And most of us do play games, but I think most of us play like you know candy crush style games yeah like i play like the animal crossing pocket camp on my phone but i don't really want to use Molly Wood My phone to bust out like at arkham asylum or woman's time or anything like that it's cool that you can and it looks impressive in a demo but oh they're so pretty but i'm thinking like if I'm at home and have to plug it in, I'm going to play a console. ([Time 0:08:05](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6c4e06f-1498-4321-9d5a-43289fcd01b5)) - **Google in Education** - Google has been steadily increasing its dominance in educational technology. - New Google Classroom features solidify this trend. Transcript: Molly Wood There's captions. Notebook LM lets a teacher collect readings and notes together so students can generate summaries and study guides and lesson plans. Tom Merritt I mean, these are good announcements, and there's a lot of them, a lot of them that we didn't mention here. So if you're in the industry, you might want to go check these out closer. But Google dominating in the classroom. That is kind of a silent story that has been happening slowly over the past years. They have taken over the education market for technology around the world, not just in the United States. ([Time 0:16:43](https://share.snipd.com/snip/de561303-66fc-401f-848d-96c538d407d0)) - **Netflix Growth** - Netflix added a record 18.9 million subscribers in Q4, driven by popular content. - Despite some users claiming to leave, Netflix's numbers tell a different story. Transcript: Tom Merritt Netflix added 18.9 million customers in Q4. That is its largest quarterly gain ever, bringing it to a total of 301.63 million subscribers worldwide. So yeah, I know there's like 24 of you in the audience who are immediately right now commenting on our subreddit. That's it. No one uses Netflix anymore. We're done with them. But apparently, there's more of the other people than you or you're lying and you haven't actually quit Netflix. Squid Game and the NFL, of course, drove part of the increase. But the fight between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson drove a record day of signups. This is the last time the company is going to report subscribers, though. It is switching to focusing on profitability versus growth. So they're not going to focus with their investors on how much are we growing subscribers. They're going to talk about how much we're making money. They're going to talk about revenue and which aspects of the business are bringing in the money. The company announced it will raise prices of its plans in Argentina, Canada, Portugal, and the United States. Prices in the U.S. Are going up by anywhere from $1 to $2 per plan. It's pretty much equivalent in the other markets as well. Are you going to keep Netflix or do you even have it actually? ([Time 0:17:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/834f6365-1c84-49db-a508-ec9874c94025)) - **Data Center Power** - Data centers are using increasing amounts of power, raising environmental concerns. - Molly Wood investigates how big tech companies plan to mitigate this impact in her 'Feeding the Matrix' series. Transcript: Molly Wood Centers use tremendous amounts of power and they're only going to consume more in the future. Molly Wood is launching a series of episodes of Everybody in the Pool talking to the big tech companies about how they plan to reduce the impact of this power usage on the climate. Tom sat down with Molly about some of the things she learned while doing these episodes. Tom Merritt Molly Wood, thanks for joining me. Let's talk about feeding the Matrix. Tell me a little bit about what this mini-series within your show is and how it got named and everything. Jenn Cutter Yes, I'm excited. I'm excited to do my first mini series on everybody in the pool, a themed set of four episodes. So there has just been this very interesting crossover between my tech journalism life, where all I talk about is AI, and my climate journalism life, where increasingly all I talk about Is AI, these two things are coming together primarily around the question of energy and electricity consumption, right? We're hearing more and more and more about how training AI models consumes more electricity than traditional compute. Answering your questions and writing your emails consumes a lot more electricity than we would have imagined. And the kind of increase in demand for more AI means more data center construction, which was already happening. And so here you have these data centers, which already consume somewhere between one and 4% of global electricity, according to, you know, depending on who is doing the measuring. And those, you know, there are estimates that by 2030, just in the United States, data centers could consume as much electricity as like New Jersey, California, and Florida combined. Tom Merritt I like the way you are setting up these comparisons, because a lot of times I hear like, the increase in energy is the same as the Netherlands. And I'm like, okay, is that a lot? Like, it sounds like a lot, but cause it's a country, but you know, but, but putting it in, in, in percentages and, and putting it in comparisons to, to combinations, I think helps people Know like, yes, it's a lot. Uh, it's not like half the world a lot. Let's not overestimate it, but it's a lot. So tell me a little bit about some of the interesting things you learned in talking to NVIDIA, talking to Microsoft, the people who are actually doing this. Jenn Cutter Yeah. So I set out to I'm calling the series Beating the Matrix because, of course, I know the kids may not be as familiar with the great American classic, our, our prophecy, the matrix, but The premise there is spoiler alert from like the nineties is that, you know, as, as the need for power to power AI has grown, they literally got to the point where they just started using Humans as batteries. And so I'm using humans in the movie. Not yet here. Not yet here. Hoping to avoid that future and also hoping to avoid – I'm using, in this case, humans as batteries as an allegory for like a massive amount of increased emissions, right? Like we went through this with cryptocurrency where it was a power-hung process to create Bitcoin, to mine Ethereum, to write. And I know Ethereum has gone to a less emissions intensive technology, et cetera, et cetera. Proof of stake, not proof of work. But it is reasonable now as I see these hyperscalers, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, you know, cutting deals to reopen parts of nuclear reactors, desperately seeking more power. It's an important question to say, is this going to set back our emissions goals? Are these companies going to abandon their sustainability goals? And is the rush for AI going to eventually cook us all and turn us into the literal or metaphorical equivalent of these batteries? So I started this series I'm calling Feeding the Matrix. I spoke with the head of sustainability at NVIDIA, which of course is the chip maker that powers so much of this, the head of sustainability for AWS, Amazon's big data center business. I'm speaking about what can be done within the existing technology framework to make this more efficient. ([Time 0:24:07](https://share.snipd.com/snip/057b51d2-f4bb-4147-a26e-571b3d93681c)) - **Data Center Efficiency** - Focus on current, implementable solutions for data center efficiency. - Explore both existing infrastructure improvements and innovative new construction. Transcript: Tom Merritt Right. And that avoids them saying like, well, we just need to develop or we just need to perfect. You're saying, what can we do now? What are you doing now? Exactly. Jenn Cutter And those and some of the learnings that came out of that are really interesting. For example, NVIDIA, every chip architecture that NVIDIA has released has been up to 98% more efficient than the architecture that came before it. Okay, that's good. And those releases are happening every two years. This is not like a 10-year increment, right? So the efficiency gains with just the processing are significant. In the case of AWS, they have put a ton of energy into, no pun intended, into just literal nuts and bolts things that make their existing data centers that much more efficient. Like shortening, like locating servers closer to the wall or closer to the wires, right? Or just like sealing the air ducts. Things that you could be doing in your house that make things more energy efficient, but then can have an exponential effect. Because so much of the innovation we talk about is related to new construction of data centers. But there's actually a ton of work that they can do on the inside to make sure that they're not using as much water or that electricity isn't being wasted or that, you know, data isn't traveling Farther than it needs to. Tom Merritt Stuff that might not have mattered in the past when the data, when the energy usage was low, but now makes a big difference. Yeah. Jenn Cutter Yeah, absolutely. And more importantly, that they have a business incentive to do it. It meets their sustainability goals, but also they don't pay so much for power. Yeah. ([Time 0:28:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/202578f4-1adf-4b85-9005-3423c10a75f2)) - **Island Data Centers** - Island design, where data centers have dedicated power sources like fusion plants, is uncommon. - This approach could improve efficiency and community relations by reducing reliance on shared grids. Transcript: Jenn Cutter And then in the back half of this series, I'm talking about innovation. So the data centers of the future, how do we make those as energy efficient as possible? Again, so that as we construct more, we don't cook. So I spoke with Reelta Fusion, which is a fusion energy company that is developing fusion with the goal of their go-to as we call it, is not to build power plants that plug into the grid. Their goal is to create power plants next to new data centers so that they will be what is known as island construction, island design. And so instead of dealing with interconnection or generating clean electricity that nobody really benefits from, even though it's plugged into the grid that we all pay for, their Goal is just put a fusion energy plant here, power this data center, maybe recycle the heat that comes out into more power and be net positive as opposed to a drain. Tom Merritt It reminds me of how you make a chip more power efficient. You put the things closer to each other on the die, right? Like put the power source right next to the data center. That makes perfect sense. Jenn Cutter And I was surprised to learn that hardly any data centers right now are power islands in this way. Most of them are plugged into the grid, even if they have some backup. And then finally, I spoke with this amazing woman who was an an executive at Microsoft in charge of their regenerative data center design project. So I learned that even years ago, Microsoft was trying to figure out how to make data centers more sustainable and efficient, but also welcome in the community. Because what this all comes down to is that increasingly, for example, Singapore, a moratorium. Singapore is a huge market for data centers. Straight up put a moratorium on building anymore. Said, you know what? No, they're ugly. They're power hogs. They use up our water. They don't contribute to the community and they don't generate as many jobs as you said. So what are you going to do about it? And so companies, again, back to the imperative, companies have a reason to try to figure this out. I'm I'm heartened to hear that there are lots of reasons for them not to throw out their sustainability goals and just build, you know, next to a coal plant in China. ([Time 0:29:59](https://share.snipd.com/snip/dc70ff14-0173-4c9e-90d3-5e67cdc17429))