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your-tv-set-has-become-a-digital-billboard-and-it’s-only-getting-worse.

Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.

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Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.

Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.

Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.

How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?

The value of software

Success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible. But with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TV OS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads. They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons.

Some TV brands already prioritize data collection and the ability to sell ads, and most are trying to boost their appeal to advertisers. Smart TV OSes have become the cash cow of the TV business, with providers generating revenue by licensing the software and through revenue sharing of in-app purchases and subscriptions.

A huge part of TV OS revenue comes from selling ads, including on the OS’s home screen and screensaver and through free, ad-supported streaming television channels. GroupM, the world’s largest media investment company, reported that smart TV ad revenue grew 20 percent from 2023 to 2024 and will grow another 20 percent to reach $46 billion next year. In September 2023, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, reported that “each new connected TV platform user generates around $5 per quarter in data and advertising revenue.”

Automatic content recognition (ACR) tech is at the heart of the smart TV ads business. Most TV brands say users can opt out of ACR, but we’ve already seen Vizio take advantage of the feature without user permission. ACR is also sometimes turned on by default, and the off switch is often buried in a settings menu. Including ACR on a TV at all says a lot about a TV maker’s priorities. Most users have almost nothing to gain from ACR and face privacy concerns by sharing information—sometimes in real time—about what they do with their TVs.

At this point, consumers have come to expect ads and tracking on budget TVs from names like Vizio or Roku. But the biggest companies in TV are working on turning their sets into data-prolific billboards, too.

When TVs watch you back, so do corporations

In recent years, we’ve seen companies like LG and Samsung increase their TVs’ ad capabilities as advertisers become more eager to access tracking data from TVs.

LG, for example, started sharing data gathered from its TVs with Nielsen, giving the data and market measurement firm “the largest ACR data footprint in the industry,” according to an October announcement. The deal gives Nielsen streaming and linear TV data from LG TVs and provides firms buying ads on LG TVs with “‘Always On’ streaming measurement and big data from LG Ad Solutions” via Nielsen’s ONE Ads dashboard.

LG, which recently unveiled a goal of evolving its hardware business into an ad-pushing “media and entertainment platform company,” expects there to be 300 million webOS TVs in homes by 2026. That represents a huge data-collection and recurring-revenue opportunity. In September, LG said it would invest 1 trillion KRW (about $737.7 million) through 2028 into its “webOS business,” or the business behind its smart TV OS. The company said updates will include improving webOS’s UI, AI-based recommendations, and search capabilities.

Similarly, Samsung recently updated its ACR tech to track exposure to ads viewed on its TVs via streaming services instead of just from linear TV. Samsung is also trying to make its ACR data more valuable for ad targeting, including through a deal signed in December with analytics firm Experian.

Representatives for LG and Samsung declined to comment to Ars Technica about how much of their respective company’s business is ad sales. But the deals they’ve made with data-collection firms signal big interest in turning their products into lucrative smart TVs. In this case, “smart” isn’t about Internet connectivity but rather how well the TV understands its viewer.

Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse. Read More »

dozens-injured,-pets-killed-in-fires-causing-samsung-to-recall-1.1m-stoves

Dozens injured, pets killed in fires causing Samsung to recall 1.1M stoves

consumer product safety commission, electric range, electric stove, fire hazard, Policy, product safety, samsung / /

Only you can prevent cooktop fires —

Samsung is currently offering free knob locks and covers to prevent fires.

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US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of 1.1 million Samsung Slide-in Electric Ranges due to hundreds of reported fires.

Enlarge / US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of 1.1 million Samsung Slide-in Electric Ranges due to hundreds of reported fires.

After hundreds of reports of fires causing dozens of injuries and several pet deaths, Samsung is recalling more than a million electric stoves sold in the US between 2013 and 2024.

In a press release, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) reported that the voluntary recall was due to “front-mounted knobs” on Samsung’s slide-in electric ranges. The faulty knobs “can be activated by accidental contact by humans or pets, posing a fire hazard”—particularly when people leave objects on the stove.

The stoves impacted by the recall were widely sold in Costco, Home Depot, Best Buy, Lowe’s, and other appliance stores nationwide. Their knobs can be easily triggered by accident, heating up the cooktop and increasing the risks of fires, the CPSC said. Since 2013, Samsung has received “over 300 reports of unintentional activation.” According to the CPSC:

“These ranges have been involved in approximately 250 fires. At least 18 fires caused extensive property damage. Approximately 40 injuries have been reported, eight of which required medical attention, and there have been reports of seven fires involving pet deaths.”

Luckily, there’s an easy solution recently devised that can prevent this safety hazard in homes across America, Samsung said. Customers concerned about unintentional activations can request free knob locks and covers that Samsung confirmed made it much harder to accidentally turn on the stove.

Whereas the problematic electric ranges’ knobs require users to push the knob and turn, “precision knobs” that Samsung rolled out in April introduce a new safety measure that requires users to pinch the knob before pushing and turning knobs to activate the stove.

“A simple pinching motion” releases a pin that otherwise would remain locked and prevent stoves from accidental activation when knobs are unintentionally bumped or perhaps twisted by a young child or knocked around by a pet, Samsung said.

Consumers who bought one of the 30 affected models listed here can contact Samsung online or by phone or email to receive free knob locks and covers and implement this new “pinching” safety measure, even if their warranty is expired. They can also check if their model has been affected here. If the serial number is no longer readable, customers should call or chat online with a Samsung agent.

Once Samsung receives a request for free knob locks and covers, repair kits “should arrive within five business days,” an FAQ said. And customers will receive tracking information once the knob locks and covers ship. Instructions to install will be provided and are also available online.

Until knob locks and covers are installed, customers can continue using their stoves, Samsung said. But the CPSC advised people to “keep children and pets away from the knobs,” “check the range knobs to ensure they are off before leaving the home or going to bed,” and avoid leaving “objects on the range when the range is not in use.”

Additionally, customers with Wi-Fi-enabled ranges can enable notifications in their Samsung SmartThings app to receive alerts when the stove is on.

Samsung noted that parents in particular seemed to appreciate the precision knobs, with one review calling it a “favorite feature,” because “we have two young girls in the house and not having to worry about one of them playing with the knobs and starting the stove… is a huge plus.”

Fire hazards go beyond Samsung—and can be fatal

Samsung’s recall is part of a worrying trend where front-mounted knobs on both gas and electric ranges from many different manufacturers have caused hundreds of fires in the US. In June, the CPSC’s Joint Gas and Electric Range Knob Working Group hosted a meeting with leading stove manufacturers and other stakeholders to confront the industry-wide problem.

During the meeting, the CPSC shared data showing that across 338 incidents between January 1, 2018, and May 30, 2024, stoves from “ten specific manufacturers” were involved in fires causing 31 injuries and two deaths. Additionally, the CPSC had recorded “two other fatal incidents where a range was accidentally turned on when a knob was bumped, but the manufacturer is unknown.”

According to the CPSC, manufacturers were “interested to learn the events that lead to the ranges accidentally activating, including whether pets were involved, unsupervised children were at fault, or there were unusual circumstances.” Companies said the CPSC data would help them “fully understand the issues” and “make sure that reasonable and foreseeable circumstances would be addressed” without impacting compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Samsung attended the meeting, saying that it joined other “major brands across the appliance industry” to “discuss how to revisit knob safety standards for all ranges to address inadvertent activation.”

The working group’s meetings are expected to continue, but a deadline to reconvene approximately a month after the June meeting has since passed without any further discussion.

A few months prior to the meeting, Samsung introduced the precision knobs as a novel solution in its ranges, as well as an additional safety feature now available in “its most premium Bespoke Slide-In electric and gas ranges,” which illuminates the knobs when they’re turned on. This provides a “visual cue when the knobs are activated,” Samsung said.

As manufacturers like Samsung continue to tweak knobs to improve safety, the CPSC this week issued a safety alert warning the public of fire hazards of gas and electric ranges.

The safety notice advises customers to use safety locks and covers to prevent accidental activation, keep kids and pets away from cooktops with front-mounted knobs, and take care when leaning over the stove to avoid bumping into knobs.

For anyone concerned about safety issues with a gas or electric range, the CPSC provides a database to search additional recalls or otherwise recommends contacting manufacturers directly.

“Consumers who have experienced or have concerns about accidental activation of the front-mounted control knobs on their cooktop should immediately contact the manufacturer of the range to ask if there is a solution or remedy available from the manufacturer,” the CPSC safety alert said.

Dozens injured, pets killed in fires causing Samsung to recall 1.1M stoves Read More »

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All the possible ways to destroy Google’s monopoly in search

android, antitrust, Antitrust law, Apple, Bing, chrome, department of justice, duckduckgo, Features, Google, google monopoly, microsoft, mozilla, online search, online search industry, Policy, samsung / /
All the possible ways to destroy Google’s monopoly in search

Aurich Lawson

After US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google has a monopoly in two markets—general search services and general text advertising—everybody is wondering how Google might be forced to change its search business.

Specifically, the judge ruled that Google’s exclusive deals with browser and device developers secured Google’s monopoly. These so-called default agreements funneled the majority of online searches to Google search engine result pages (SERPs), where results could be found among text ads that have long generated the bulk of Google’s revenue.

At trial, Mehta’s ruling noted, it was estimated that if Google lost its most important default deal with Apple, Google “would lose around 65 percent of its revenue, even assuming that it could retain some users without the Safari default.”

Experts told Ars that disrupting these default deals is the most obvious remedy that the US Department of Justice will seek to restore competition in online search. Other remedies that may be sought range from least painful for Google (mandating choice screens in browsers and devices) to most painful (requiring Google to divest from either Chrome or Android, where it was found to be self-preferencing).

But the remedies phase of litigation may have to wait until after Google’s appeal, which experts said could take years to litigate before any remedies are ever proposed in court. Whether Google could be successful in appealing the ruling is currently being debated, with anti-monopoly advocates backing Mehta’s ruling as “rock solid” and critics suggesting that the ruling’s fresh takes on antitrust law are open to attack.

Google declined Ars’ request to comment on appropriate remedies or its plan to appeal.

Previously, Google’s president of global affairs, Kent Walker, confirmed in a statement that the tech giant would be appealing the ruling because the court found that “Google is ‘the industry’s highest quality search engine, which has earned Google the trust of hundreds of millions of daily users,’ that Google ‘has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices,’ ‘has continued to innovate in search,’ and that ‘Apple and Mozilla occasionally assess Google’s search quality relative to its rivals and find Google’s to be superior.'”

“Given this, and that people are increasingly looking for information in more and more ways, we plan to appeal,” Walker said. “As this process continues, we will remain focused on making products that people find helpful and easy to use.”

But Mehta found that Google was wielding its outsize influence in the search industry to block rivals from competing by locking browsers and devices into agreements ensuring that all searches went to Google SERPs. None of the pro-competitive benefits that Google claimed justified the exclusive deals persuaded Mehta, who ruled that “importantly,” Google “exercised its monopoly power by charging supra-competitive prices for general search text ads”—and thus earned “monopoly profits.”

While experts think the appeal process will delay litigation on remedies, Google seems to think that Mehta may rule on potential remedies before Google can proceed with its appeal. Walker told Google employees that a ruling on remedies may arrive in the next few months, The Wall Street Journal reported. Ars will continue monitoring for updates on this timeline.

As the DOJ’s case against Google’s search business has dragged on, reports have long suggested that a loss for Google could change the way that nearly the entire world searches the Internet.

Adam Epstein—the president and co-CEO of adMarketplace, which bills itself as “the largest consumer search technology company outside of Google and Bing”—told Ars that innovations in search could result in a broader landscape of more dynamic search experiences that draw from sources beyond Google and allow searchers to skip Google’s SERPs entirely. If that happens, the coming years could make Google’s ubiquitous search experience today a distant memory.

“By the end of this decade, going to a search engine results page will seem quaint,” Epstein predicted. “The court’s decision sets the stage for a remedy that will dramatically improve the search experience for everyone connected to the web. The era of innovation in search is just around the corner.”

The DOJ has not meaningfully discussed potential remedies it will seek, but Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, celebrated the ruling.

“This landmark decision holds Google accountable,” Kanter said. “It paves the path for innovation for generations to come and protects access to information for all Americans.”

All the possible ways to destroy Google’s monopoly in search Read More »

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Samsung delays Galaxy Buds3 Pro release over quality concerns

#earbuds, airpods, AirPods Pro, audio, samsung, Tech / /

Delayed until August 28 —

“It tore from the inside instantly.”

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Samsung Galaxy Buds3 Pro

Enlarge / A marketing image for the Galaxy Buds3 Pro.

Samsung

Samsung is delaying the release of the $250 Galaxy Buds3 Pro in the US from July 24 to August 28, per its website. The third-generation earbuds have Samsung moving from a bean-like shape to an Apple AirPods Pro-like design, including silicone ear tips. But some users have claimed that the new tips rip too easily.

Samsung confirmed to Android Authority today that it has temporarily stopped shipping units to stores. The devices were no longer available for preorder on Amazon or Best Buy as of this writing.

Samsung’s statement to Android Authority noted “reports relating to a limited number of early production devices” and asserted that it’s taking the problem “very seriously.” The statement continues:

We are urgently assessing and enhancing our quality control processes. To ensure all products meet our quality standards, we have temporarily suspended deliveries of Galaxy Buds 3 Pro devices to distribution channels to conduct a full quality control evaluation before shipments to consumers take place. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Samsung also advised people who already have a pair to contact Samsung or go to a Samsung Service Center. Android Authority reported that some customers also received an email from Samsung informing them of the quality control concerns and offering a link where customers can find contact information to ask Samsung representatives about canceling their orders for a refund.

Samsung’s website says the earbuds have a one-year warranty that does not cover defects or damage “caused by accident, misuse, abnormal use, abnormal conditions, improper storage, neglect, or unusual physical, electrical or electromechanical stress.”

“It tore from the inside instantly”

Although the Galaxy Buds3 Pro were originally going to be available in the US on July 24, they have already been available for purchase in South Korea, per Android Police. Other people who already have the earbuds include reviewers, employees, and those who made their preorders early. (Some people also claimed that they were able to buy the earbuds at US Walmarts before Samsung announced them).

Some who reportedly had the earbuds claimed it was hard to remove their silicone tips without tearing them. Like AirPods Pros, Galaxy Buds3 Pros have a silicone tip that latches onto a plastic ring on the earbuds’ chassis. Various people reported trying to remove the tip and the tip ripping, with a piece of silicone remaining stuck on the plastic ring.

Some, including reviewers at The Verge and Android Authority, said they hadn’t experienced the problem yet. But others, including TechRadar, found it challenging to remove the ear tips without damaging them.

One Reddit user claimed that they pulled on an ear tip to remove it, and “it tore from the inside instantly.” They noted that because the silicone is clipped into the plastic ring, “you have to pull it strongly.” Similarly, another user said the “left ear tip ripped right off” when they tried to remove it.

Samsung has even published a support page on its Korean website explaining how to remove the ear tips to avoid damage. It notes various ways in which the silicone could tear, including, per a Google translation, if you hold them with your fingernails while inserting or removing, if you press or twist the ear tips hard, or if you pull the ear tips out quickly.

After numerous complaints online, including on Reddit (examples here, here, and here) and YouTube (examples here and here), Samsung has pushed back general availability. Complicating potential quick fixes, Samsung doesn’t yet offer replacement tips for the earbuds. People usually don’t have to frequently change their earbuds’ tips, but not offering replacement when Apple has for years seems like an oversight.

Samsung’s Galaxy Buds3 Pro look like the AirPods Pro that originally debuted almost five years ago, and it doesn’t care. What it definitely should care about, though, is a new design appearing weak and inferior before it’s even fully released. Samsung has at least taken the initiative in addressing early complaints rather than ignoring them and is instead offering refunds and delaying the release to limit the number of impacted customers. We’ll see if the earbuds are more sturdy by August.

Samsung delays Galaxy Buds3 Pro release over quality concerns Read More »

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Samsung’s abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick

Digital Camera, digital cameras, e-waste, firmware, firmware hacking, Open Source, samsung, samsung nx, samsung nx camera, Tech / /

Samsung: The Next Big Thing is Here (And Gone) —

All it took was a reverse-engineered camera firmware and a custom API rewrite.

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Samsung camera display next to a 4G LTE modem stick

Enlarge / Under-powered Samsung camera, meet over-powered 4G LTE dongle. Now work together to move pictures over the air.

Georg Lukas

Back in 2010—after the first iPhone, but before its camera was any good—a mirrorless, lens-swapping camera that could upload photos immediately to social media or photo storage sites was a novel proposition. That’s what Samsung’s NX cameras promised.

Unsurprisingly, Samsung didn’t keep that promise too much longer after it dropped its camera business and sales numbers disappeared. It tried out the quirky idea of jamming together Android phones and NX cameras in 2013, providing a more direct means of sending shots and clips to Instagram or YouTube. But it shut down its Social Network Services (SNS) entirely in 2021, leaving NX owners with the choices of manually transferring their photos or ditching their cameras (presuming they had not already moved on).

Some people, wonderfully, refuse to give up. People like Georg Lukas, who reverse-engineered Samsung’s SNS API to bring back a version of direct picture posting to Wi-Fi-enabled NX models, and even expand it. It was not easy, but at least the hardware is cheap. By reflashing the surprisingly capable board on a USB 4G dongle, Lukas is able to create a Wi-Fi hotspot with LTE uplink and run his modified version of Samsung’s (woefully insecure) service natively on the stick.

What is involved should you have such a camera? Here’s the shorter version of Lukas’ impressive redux:

  • Installing Debian on the LTE dongle’s board
  • Creating a Wi-Fi hotspot on the stick using NetworkManager
  • Compiling Lukas’ own upload server, written in Flask and Python
  • Configuring the web server now running on that dongle

The details of how Lukas reverse-engineered the firmware from a Samsung WB850F are posted on his blog. It is one of those Internet blog posts in which somebody describes something incredibly arcane, requiring a dozen kinds of knowledge backed by experience, with the casualness with which one might explain how to plant seeds in soil.

The hardest part of the whole experiment might be obtaining the 4G LTE stick itself. The Hackaday blog has detailed this stick (and also tipped us to this camera rebirth project), which is a purpose-built device that can be turned into a single-board computer again, on the level of a Pi Zero W2, should you apply a new bootloader and stick Linux on it. You can find it on Alibaba for very cheap—or seemingly find it, because some versions of what looks like the same stick come with a far more limited CPU. You’re looking for a stick with the MSM8916 inside, sometimes listed as a “QualComm 8916.”

Lukas’ new version posts images to Mastodon, as demonstrated in his proof of life post. It could likely be extended to more of today’s social or backup services, should he or anybody else have the time and deep love for what are not kinda cruddy cameras. Here’s hoping today’s connected devices have similarly dedicated hackers in the future.

Samsung’s abandoned NX cameras can be brought online with a $20 LTE stick Read More »

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Samsung users ask, “Why does the S-Pen smell so bad?“

S Pen, samsung, stylus, Tech / /

Smells bad, tastes fine! —

Apparently the “Ultra” phone’s S-Pen often smells like burning plastic.

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The Galaxy S24 line.

Enlarge / The Galaxy S24 line.

Samsung

Electric design is a field full of varying opinions and trade-offs. Companies agonize over the physical shapes of their devices and the materials used, all trying to create a high-quality, premium-feeling device that fits with the constraints of mass production. Material choices usually center around cost, feeling, and durability, but how often do manufacturers take into account smell? Samsung users are finding that if you pop out the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s “S-Pen” stylus and give it a whiff like you’re huffing a marker, you’ll find that it… smells bad?

9to5Google found the following incredible post from Reddit user “LatifYil” titled, “Why does my s pen smell so bad?” The post has almost 250 comments of users all mostly agreeing with the post’s sentiment that “the S-Pen in my Galaxy S24 Ultra absolutely reeks. Either I have a sensitive nose or this thing is being barbequed by the internals while it’s unsheathed.” The top-rated, very-online comment is, “Op got me to smell my pen. Can confirm it’s a stinky boi.”

Those describing the smell all seem to agree Samsung’s stylus often smells like an electrical fire. One user writes that it’s “a very burnt and plastics smell.” Another says the S23 Ultra stylus “smells like new tech with a hint of burning.” A more descriptive commenter says it smells like “an electric mixer that’s turned on, but the beaters are jammed up and can’t turn, so the motor is overheating.” The S-Pen is mostly plastic but has a soft rubber tip, and a lot of users identify that soft bit as the smelly part.

One user baselessly suggested that the bad smell was due to a bitterant added to the S-Pen, similar to what is used on Nintendo Switch cartridges to make them taste bad, so babies don’t put a potential choking hazard in their mouths. But then another user admits to licking the S-Pen and reports that it tastes fine! Don’t you just love the Internet?

The issue of the smelly S-Pen was recently raised on the Samsung community forums, too, and Samsung employee “AndrewL” gave a statement on the issue:

This isn’t anything to be concerned about. While the S Pen is in its holster, it is close to the internal components of the phone, which will generate heat while in use, and cause the plastic to heat up. This can smell like burning, but it is similar to the smell you might experience after leaving your car in the sun for a few hours. The seats and plastic fittings in the vehicle might smell hot, but this will diminish after it cools.

If you don’t like the smell of the S-Pen, you can always just not smell it. It’s not like the pen has a room-clearing stench—most users didn’t notice until someone pointed it out.

Samsung users ask, “Why does the S-Pen smell so bad?“ Read More »

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Speedy “SD Express” cards have gone nowhere for years, but Samsung could change that

microSD, samsung, Tech / /

fast, but for whom? —

Compatibility issues and thermals have, so far, kept SD Express from taking off.

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Samsung's SD Express-compatible microSD cards.

Enlarge / Samsung’s SD Express-compatible microSD cards.

Samsung

Big news for people who like (physically) small storage: Samsung says that it is sampling its first microSD cards that support the SD Express standard, which will allow them to hit sustained read speeds of as much as 800MB per second. That’s a pretty substantial boost over current SD cards, which tend to top out around 80MB or 90MB per second (for cheap commodity cards) and around 250MB per second for the very fastest UHS-II-compatible professional cards.

As Samsung points out, that 800MB/s figure puts these tiny SD Express cards well above the speeds possible with older SATA SSDs, which could make these cards more useful as primary storage devices for PCs or single-board computers that can support the SD Express standard (more on that later).

Samsung is currently sampling a 256GB version of the SD Express card that “will be available for purchase later this year.”

Because this is a tech company announcement in 2024, Samsung also makes an obligatory mention of AI, though there’s absolutely nothing specific the cards are doing to make them particularly well-suited for generative AI tasks other than “be faster.” Adding extra storage to phones or PCs could be useful for on-device generative AI—storing larger language models locally, for example—but most software companies that are offering generative AI features in their OSes or browsers are mostly using server-side processing to do all the heavy lifting for now.

What’s the SD Express standard, again?

The SD Express standard allows SD cards to take advantage of a single lane’s worth of PCIe bandwidth, boosting their theoretical speeds well beyond the 104MB/s cap of the UHS-I standard or the 312MB/s cap of UHS-II (UHS-III exists but isn’t widely used). The SD Express spec was last updated back in October 2023, which bumped it up from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0; it also defines four speed classes with read/write speeds of between 150MB and 600MB per second—a target these Samsung cards claim to be able to surpass.

But the original version of SD Express goes back to mid-2018, when it was added to version 7.0 of the SD specification. And adoption from SD card makers and device makers has been slow to nonexistent so far; AData makes full-size SD Express cards in 256GB and 512GB capacities that you can buy, but that’s about it. Lexar announced some cards back in 2021 that never ended up being released. And even if you had a card, you’d have trouble finding devices that could actually take advantage of the higher speeds, since most cameras, phones, and computers have opted to stick with the more common UHS.

One issue blocking SD Express adoption is that the card and the device have to support SD Express to get the promised speeds; an SD Express card inserted into a regular run-of-the-mill UHS-I SD card slot will be limited to UHS-I speeds. And because both the slots and the cards are visually identical, it’s not always easy to tell which slots support specific speeds.

Heat may also be a major limiting factor when using these SD Express cards to move around hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of data or when using the SD card as the primary storage device in a computer (as you might in a Raspberry Pi or other single-board computers). There’s no room for this kind of thing within the confines of a microSD card slot, so the sustained read and write speeds of Samsung’s new cards could be a bit lower than the promised 800MB-per-second maximum.

The SD Express spec does have mechanisms for keeping thermals in a reasonable range. Samsung also mentions a “Dynamic Thermal Guard” technology that promises to manage the temperatures of its SD Express cards, though it’s not clear whether this is different from what’s already in the SD Express spec.

Samsung jumping into SD Express cards may be what the format needs to take off, or at least to become a viable niche within the wider market for external storage. It’s certainly not difficult to imagine a scenario where something with SSD-ish speeds in an SD card-sized package would be useful. But SD cards are mainly useful because they’re cheap, they’re widely compatible, and they’re fast enough for things like recording video, taking pictures, and loading games. SD Express cards have a long way to go before they can check all the same boxes.

Speedy “SD Express” cards have gone nowhere for years, but Samsung could change that Read More »

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Samsung’s $1,300 phone might someday have fees for AI usage

AI, Galaxy S24, samsung, Tech / /

Will Samsung even care about AI in 2026? —

Samsung says Galaxy S24 AI features are “free until the end of 2025.”

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Samsung’s $1,300 phone might someday have fees for AI usage

Samsung

Samsung’s big Galaxy S24 launch was yesterday, and to hear Samsung tell the story, the big highlight of the event was “Galaxy AI.” Another view is that Galaxy AI is the usual bundle of baked-in Samsung features skinned on top of Android, but with generative AI being the hot new thing, Samsung went with AI-centric branding. Whatever value you want to place on Samsung’s AI features, you might soon have to place an actual monetary value on them: Despite devices like the Galaxy S24 Ultra costing $1,300, Samsung might start charging for some of these AI phone features.

The fine print on Samsung’s Galaxy S24 promotional page features 44 asterisks and footnotes, and tucked away in that pile of caveats is the line “Galaxy AI features will be provided for free until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices.” That means Samsung reserves the right to charge for Galaxy AI after 2025.

AI features that require server time have an ongoing cost. Google and Amazon figured this out in the last AI generation (if we can call it that) with the Google Assistant and Alexa voice assistants. Amazon’s finances on the whole situation are clearer than Google’s, and Amazon’s 2022 Alexa financials were reportedly a $10 billion loss. Amazon is planning on a subscription model for Alexa in the future. Google’s normal user subscription plan is Google One, and while that mainly gets you more account storage, it also unlocks some Google AI features like “Magic eraser” in Google Photos. ChatGPT has a subscription plan for its best model, ChatGPT 4, too. Samsung apparently wants to join the party.

The Galaxy S24's

Enlarge / The Galaxy S24’s “Live translate” feature in the phone app. You can speak one language, and the phone app will repeat your message in a different language after a delay.

Samsung

This is the company that makes Bixby and the notoriously poorly coded Tizen, though, so it’s hard to imagine Galaxy AI features being worth paying for. The first item on Samsung’s “Galaxy AI” promo page is Google’s “Circle to search,” a feature it can’t charge for and didn’t build. The Galaxy AI features made by Samsung include “Interpreter,” which is a copy of Google Translate’s conversation mode, and Voice Recorder, a voice transcription app that is just a copy of Google Recorder (and apparently not as good). “Chat Assist” is part of the keyboard and can rewrite any inputted text with generative AI, making your input sound more “fun” or “professional.” “Note Assist” is a Samsung Notes feature that can generate AI summaries of your notes. The one interesting feature is “Live Translate,” which does voice translation of a phone call, translating communication via speech-to-text-to-speech. There’s a lot that can go wrong there, though.

Samsung is a hardware company, and presumably, a lot of these use on-device processing instead of bothering a server somewhere, so it’s hard to know if Samsung even has any serious costs to recoup. Like most Samsung Android features, this feels more like throwing a pile of stuff at the wall and hoping something sticks rather than a collection of killer apps. These are essentially all just app features, too, meaning they have to compete with the nearly infinite Play Store app selection, and you could easily download a free competitor.

The first step to charging for something like this is throwing the idea out there, so Samsung is probably listening to how people will react between now and the end of 2025.

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Smartphone manufacturers still want to make foldables a thing

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Huawei MateX 5

Enlarge / A Huawei Technologies Co. Mate X5 smartphone arranged in Hong Kong, China, on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023.

Every large smartphone maker except Apple is betting that “foldable” phones will help revive a lackluster mobile market, despite the devices still largely failing to attract mainstream consumers.

Foldables, which have a screen that opens like a book or compact mirror, barely exceed a 1 per cent market share of all smartphones sold globally almost five years after they were first introduced.

But Samsung has doubled down on the product, investing heavily in marketing this year. In July, the Korean group released its 5G Galaxy Z series.

The world’s largest smartphone manufacturer points to estimates from Counterpoint Research that foldable devices may surpass a third of all smartphones costing more than $600 by 2027.

“We will continue to position our foldables as a key engine for our flagship growth with the clear differentiation, experience and flexibility these devices have to offer,” said Samsung.

Other handset makers such as Motorola, China’s Huawei and its spin-off Honor are also pinning their hopes on the product helping to revive a market that suffered its worst year for more than a decade.

“This is the year people [in the industry] really dived in,” said Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight. “Everybody now is betting on this, except Apple.”

The iPhone-maker has yet to show any interest in the category, though patent filings suggest it may one day introduce an iPad that folds in half. Every other big smartphone maker has followed Samsung into the market, including Google’s Pixel Fold and Chinese alternatives from Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi.

“We believe foldables are the future of smartphone devices, just like electric cars were to the auto industry,” said Bond Zhang, UK chief executive of Honor. “We’re approaching a crucial tipping point where foldables may soon become mainstream.”

But market data shows foldables are still far from mainstream. Counterpoint Research estimates about 16 million foldable phones will be sold this year, just 1.3 per cent of the 1.2 billion smartphone market total. Analysts say consumers are deterred by concerns about price, reliability and utility.

“I do wonder if there are too many products chasing too little market share at the moment,” Wood said.

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Samsung Files XR ‘Glasses’ Trademark in the UK

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Samsung has secured a trademark with the UK’s Intellectual Property Office for ‘Samsung Glasses’, which could mean we’re finally seeing some movement from the South Korean tech giant to release an XR headset.

Filed in August and later entered into registry in November, the Samsung Glasses trademark specifies that it covers “Virtual reality headsets; Augmented reality headsets; Headphones; Smartphones; Smart glasses.” The news was first reported by UploadVR.

Samsung announced in February it was partnering with Google and Qualcomm to develop an XR device, something the company said at the time was “not too far away.” We’re still not sure what it will be other than hardware made by Samsung, software by Google, and chipset by Qualcomm.

While unconfirmed as a related device, only a short month later Samsung filed for the US trademark ‘Samsung Galaxy Glasses’. In its description, the US filing is said to cover the same categories as the UK trademark.

Granted, this is a pretty wide range of devices which span the entire XR gamut, although both proposed ‘Glasses’ monikers seem to imply it wouldn’t be a direct competitor to either Meta Quest 3 or the soon-to-release Apple Vision Pro, the $3,500 mixed reality headset which is set to launch sometime early next year.

Quest 3 (left) and Apple Vision Pro (right) | Based on images courtesy Meta, Apple

Vision Pro is well beyond the size of spectacles, so calling anything with that format would be an odd move. There are a few candidates though.

Something similar to Meta’s Smart Glasses from Ray-Ban could be more fitting to bear the ‘Samsung Glasses’ name. Confusingly enough, Meta Smart Glasses don’t have a display, instead packing in cameras, off-ear headphones, microphones, and voice access to Meta’s digital assistant.

Another option might be a device similar to XREAL’s Air 2 Pro, which packs in birdbath optics and micro-OLEDs for traditional content consumption, such as film, TV, and flatscreen video games.

A full-blown pair of all-day AR glasses is decidedly out of the picture though, as optics and battery technology (among other things) still aren’t at a point where they’d fit into a glasses format. These are problems that every major tech company in the XR space is working on currently, but it’s safe to say we’re years away from what many hope will be the next major computing platform.

Samsung Files XR ‘Glasses’ Trademark in the UK Read More »

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Report: Samsung Delays XR Headset Due to Stiff Competition from Apple Vision Pro

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Samsung’s upcoming XR headset, which is meant to compete with Apple Vision Pro, has been delayed by “one to two quarters” from its reported early 2024 release target, according to an SBS Biz (Korean) report.

Samsung announced in February it was developing an XR headset in partnership with Qualcomm and Google, the former supplying the device’s chipset and the latter the headset’s operating system.

The report maintains that Samsung Electronics recently notified its display manufacturing partners Samsung Display and China’s BOE that it’s postponing the release of “existing XR devices.”

Samsung was reportedly hoping to ready samples of the headset by year’s end, aiming to mass produce the device starting early next year. That’s apparently been delayed by about “one to two quarters,” or three to six months.

Quest 3 (left) and Apple Vision Pro (right) | Based on images courtesy Meta, Apple

SBS Biz cites an official familiar with Samsung’s internal affairs, maintaining the decision to delay was made in direct response to Apple Vision Pro, which was unveiled early last month during Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference.

“We decided to review all internal specifications and performance, such as the design and display of the new XR product,” the official told SBS Biz.

Provided the report holds true, it will be interesting to see Samsung shoot for the high-end, which is where Apple’s $3,500 mixed reality headset is undoubtedly headed when it launches sometime early next year. While it wasn’t clear when Samsung announced the headset earlier this year, it makes more sense the Korean tech giant would rather compete somewhere in the premium XR headset market with Apple than compete with Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 mixed reality headset, slated to launch in Fall 2023 for $500.

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Samsung Files Trademark for ‘Galaxy Glasses’ AR/VR Headset

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Samsung announced last month it was partnering with Google and Qualcomm to develop an XR device, something the company said at the time was “not too far away.” While we’re still left guessing as to what sort of headset the Korean tech giant has in store, a new trademark filing has come to light which may suggest the headset’s naming scheme.

As reported by 9to5Google, Samsung filed a trademark request with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on February 27th for the name ‘Galaxy Glasses’.

In its description, the trademark registration is said to cover the categories of “virtual reality headsets; Augmented reality headsets; Headphones; Smartphones; Smart glasses.”

According to a recent Washington Post interview with TM Roh, the president and head of Samsung’s mobile experience business, an upcoming Samsung XR device is “getting there, but we’re not too far away.”

Roh told WaPo that the XR headset’s chipset is going to be “a strategic collaboration with Qualcomm.” Google is building the software, while Samsung builds the hardware.

Provided the trademark isn’t just a defensive measure, and will actually be applied to a real product, Samsung would be pitching the proposed device as a part of its Galaxy line, which includes its smartphones, tablets, notebooks, smartwatches, and earbuds.

Notably, the company has never positioned its VR devices directly under its Galaxy branding, with Samsung Gear VR and its PC VR headset HMD Odyssey marketed separately from the Samsung mothership of mobile devices.

Smasung Odyssey+ | Image courtesy Samsung

It shouldn’t come as any real surprise the Korean tech giant is prepping XR hardware now. In 2021, two leaked videos surfaced featuring Samsung AR concept devices, although we haven’t heard anything since about the company’s XR ambitions until Samsung announced it was throwing its hat back in the game with Google and Qualcomm by its side.

Meanwhile, Apple’s rumored mixed reality headset is reportedly set to arrive sometime this year at around $3,000, with a lower-cost version of Apple’s mixed reality headset reportedly set to follow sometime in 2024 or early 2025.

And although Apple is largely seen as the most present threat, Meta recently released word it is not only prepping an enthusiast-targeted Quest 3 headset for release this year, and a “more accessible” consumer version in 2024, but possibly another ‘Pro’ branded Quest headset “way out in the future,” Mark Rabki, Meta’s VP of VR, allegedly told thousands of employees in a memo last week.

Samsung Files Trademark for ‘Galaxy Glasses’ AR/VR Headset Read More »