Samsung has finally lifted the lid on its highly anticipated Galaxy S24 phones, leading with the devices’ new ‘Galaxy AI’ tools such as real time phone call translation, a chat assistant that can reword your texts, and Google image searching from any app or screen.
The Galaxy S24 Ultra has a four lens rear camera set-up with a new 5x optical zoom lens, the S Pen stylus stored in the phone itself for marking up documents and writing notes, and a fully flat display after years of the priciest Galaxy S phones having curved screens.
It also has a titanium frame, a design move Apple recently made with the iPhone 15 Pro. The S24 Ultra will set you back £1,249 – the same the S23 Ultra launched at – when it goes on sale on 31 January.
The regular Galaxy S24 and larger Galaxy S24 Plus cost £799 and £999 respectively, £50 cheaper than their old S23 counterparts. The new phones have flat displays but are not made fron titanium, instead having flat matt aluminium sides that also pushes their design closer to the iPhone’s than before.
The S24 Ultra has a 200MP main camera, 12MP ultra-wide, and 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom that look close to what was on the S23 Ultra. But it has a new 50MP 5x optical zoom lens instead of 10x on the previous phone, which Samsung says is to improve the quality of images at a closer zoom range. The other two phones share the same 50MP main sensor with a 12MP ultra-wide and 10MP telephoto.
On the face of it, the three new phones are very similar to the Galaxy S23 series with a largely unchanged design. They’re IP68 water and dust resistant, support 5G, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.3, and all run Android 14 with Samsung’s One UI 6.1 skin.
Even upgrades to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for the S24 Ultra are unlikely to convince most people to upgrade, even if the Qualcomm chip does enable a lot of the new AI tools (in the UK the S24 Ultra has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset but the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus use Samsung’s Exynos 2400 instead). That might be why the new Galaxy AI features themselves are stepping in to take some of the limelight.
“Our Galaxy S Series range has always been the trend-setter in providing premium mobile experiences, and we’ve taken this further with the Galaxy S24 – placing AI right into people’s hands,” said James Kitto, Vice President at Samsung UK.
Pleasingly, all three phones can run all the new Galaxy AI features with none held back for the priciest models.
Samsung reckons you’re making a lot of calls to people who speak different languages, as one of the S24’s marketed new tools is live call translations, which works for you in calls to any other phone. After you’ve selected your language and theirs (from a list of 13 languages supported at launch) the AI on the phone will translate what you say to them and vice versa in real time.
Whether the person you call will know what’s going on is another matter, though a new interpreter mode cleverly translates what you’re saying to someone in person and displays it on the screen for them to read, letting them talk back to you. It works without a data connection or Wi-Fi, too.
Samsung says all this particular processing happens on device and not in the cloud. But another clever AI tool called ‘circle to search’ does have to hop online to work. Using Google image search, you can hold down the home button on the Galaxy S24 to freeze the screen you’re on and then circle an image you want to know more about. This works in any app and on any screen, and gives you a list of search results based on the image.
And if you want to spruce up how you text people, Samsung Keyboard on the S24 phones has ‘chat assist’ which can change the tone of something you’re about to send. It can make a chunk of text more professional or more casual from a selection of several tones, presumably helping ensure you don’t text “yo, what’s up?” to your boss.
You will also be able to use the Galaxy S24 to summarise text from various sources, including audio files after Galaxy AI has transcribed them first. Some of these features are similar to what Google offers on its recent Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel 8 smartphones. The devices will also get seven years of Android and security updates, matching Google’s latest Pixel range.
