Unfortunately, AI is the best thing that could have happened to smartphones
AI is the next big thing in smartphones, and there’s nothing we can do about it. I’m sorry if you were hoping for one foldable iPhone or a rollable Motorola Rizr available soon. Instead, you get AI, and for smartphone makers, this couldn’t have come at a better time.
Hoping something else would be the next big thing? Did you think it would be glasses? I thought it might be glasses. I admit I seriously overestimated the state of smart glasses technology from the past. Real smart glasses are still ten years away, perhaps more. I still believe that smart glasses are the next, but now it looks more like the next, or what comes after. You know, not the next one, but the NEXT one.
We’re stuck with our phones. The phone you just bought won’t be the last thing you buy, a so-called ‘smartphone’. There will be another one, and it will do more than the one you have now, and what it will do more of, in particular, is AI. It will be an AI like you have never seen, heard or perhaps even felt. With AI we can never be sure; there could soon be a sense of AI.
There will be other improvements besides AI, right?
Forget the rest of the smartphone. Forget other improvements. They already use titanium. What’s next, Adamantium? That’s not real, unlike AI, which is completely real and not a marketing gimmick for a trick you can do with large language models.
Won’t smartphone cameras get better too? Who knows more. Camera numbers no longer have meaning. They are similar to quantum string theory. Everyone pretends to understand them, but then a quark wobbles on the other side of the galaxy, and we pretend that cause and effect can be reversed.
A good example: the Milky Way. We had 10x zoom on the Galaxy S23 Ultra. It was amazing; the best zoom ever. It couldn’t be right. But you know what’s even better?! 5X zoom. We had 10x zoom, then we got 5x zoom on the new and improved Galaxy S24 Ultra. When it comes to over-zooming, 5 is better than 10.
And let’s face it: Samsung’s best camera phones are great because of AI, not zoom. When you take a photo of the full moon that stuns iPhone fans, it’s because of AI. AI was already here, and it is also what the future holds.
But we don’t have a foldable iPhone yet!
There should be other improvements besides AI, right? Have we passed the point of no return? To find the answer, I asked Google Gemini Advanced, an AI. The answer was a mix of folderol, AI hallucinations and shrugs.
Gemini suggested there could be some new breakthroughs in battery life, faster displays, or the best sustainable materials and manufacturing. It also says that 6G is coming soon, so 5G should be on the lookout.
I guess this means foldable phones are no more? They were just beginning to get the basics down, but serious questions remain about the durability and longevity of foldable displays.
Why is the OnePlus Open not water resistant? Why doesn’t Samsung offer certified updated foldable phones? Why has the Google Pixel Fold lagged behind less powerful Pixel phones when it comes to feature drops?
Foldable phones have had a short, questionable history so far. The best thing that could happen to foldable phones is an AI distraction.
The symptoms of AI on your smartphone
What does it mean to have AI on your smartphone? It means you need a new smartphone. AI probably won’t work on the one you have now. Or it works, but soon it won’t. Or maybe soon it never worked. AI is changing quickly, it’s hard to keep up.
When your phone has AI, it’s ready for the AI world. Your With a Pixel phone, your photos become much more attractive to the bots on Twitter. Your Galaxy phone writes messages which may summarize your colleague’s Galaxy before it automatically responds. Your AI phone can call your friends and talk to them AI call screening app on your behalf.
Remember when AI seemed so great!? (Also remember when That man loudly quit his job because he thought he was turning off the AI would be like killing a living thing!?) It comes to your phone, even better than before! It’s also not scary at all, unless you think it’s scary when AI confidently expresses satire and anecdotes as irrefutable facts. Then it’s terrible!
So get ready, because AI is here, either it’s coming soon, or it’s been here for a long time, depending on which phone you’re using. If your phone doesn’t have AI yet, your next smartphone will. There’s never been a better time to never upgrade.