Samsung’s Upgrades Are More Iteration Than Innovation

On July 22, at an event in London, Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy lineup, the brand’s flagship hardware products. Or at least, its flagship consumer products. On Samsung’s own second-quarter figures, its semiconductor division accounted for about three-quarters of revenue and virtually all operating profit.But just as Nvidia continues to make gaming chips, Samsung still wants to sell phones and their connected accessories. At the event, the company unveiled two new book-style folding phones, which I have covered separately, along with a clamshell folding phone, two new watches, and its own competitor to Meta’s smart glasses.To start with the smallest phone in the lineup: the Galaxy Z Flip8. The most important point here is the price. It starts at $1,199.99 for the version with 12 gigabytes of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage, then rises to $1,399.99 if you want 512 gigabytes. It’s a great little phone — albeit one weirdly lacking built-in Qi2 magnets, Android’s closest equivalent to MagSafe — but I have seen more broken Flips than any other phone. Putting a flexing screen and hinge in a small frame doesn’t just make these phones pretty fragile; it also makes them more expensive to repair, so they stay broken.This is a marginal upgrade over the last generation. The Flip8 is 8 grams lighter and 0.4 millimeters thinner when open, with a thinner hinge, a new processor, and expanded cover-screen software. The displays, 4,300 mAh battery, and 50-megapixel main camera are unchanged. At the time of writing, Best Buy listed an unlocked 256-gigabyte Flip7 for $665.70. If you’re interested in a flip phone, buy that instead.Samsung’s watches get similarly iterative updates — but that’s not a bad thing. The new $699.99 Galaxy Watch Ultra2 is 12 percent thinner than the original Ultra, has a new Snapdragon Wear Elite chip, a display that peaks at 5,000 nits — up from 3,000 — and an 800 mAh battery, up 35 percent from the previous model. Its IP69K rating means it is dust-tight and tested against powerful water jets. Separate 10 ATM and EN13319 certifications support its use for diving, and Samsung says it will release a diving app, developed with Mares, later this year. The watch also offers a bunch of advanced health features, including sweat-loss estimates, and I would treat Samsung’s accuracy claims for them with many buckets of sweated-out salt.The standard Galaxy Watch9 — from $379.99 for the Bluetooth-only version and $429.99 for LTE — gets a smaller bump. The 40-millimeter model gets a 390 mAh battery, 20 percent larger than the Watch8’s; the 44-millimeter battery rises from 435 to 445 mAh, or about 2 percent. They’re relatively handsome watches, too. Samsung finished with its “Intelligent Eyewear,” a new line of smart glasses intended to take on Meta. This was an onstage introduction, not an adjacent rumor. Google says the first, display-free audio glasses will arrive this fall, with display-equipped models later. They run Android XR on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platform, pair with both Android and iOS phones, and will come in collections designed with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. They put cameras, over-ear speakers, and Gemini into otherwise conventional frames.Samsung claims up to nine hours per charge, plus up to seven full recharges from the case. I have serious doubts that will hold up if you use them a lot. More important, it’s hard to see why you would buy these over the alternatives. If you’re an Apple user, they do nothing obvious to pull you out of Apple’s ecosystem, while Meta is already the class leader, with Ray-Ban frames and direct integration with its social platforms. The way Samsung could stand out is by being cheaper. It announced neither a price nor exact markets, so I doubt the glasses will be.

Samsung’s Upgrades Are More Iteration Than Innovation

Samsung’s Upgrades Are More Iteration Than Innovation

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