Samsung just yesterday launched its newest slate of foldable smartphones, but that might not be the only foldable phones the company releases this year: The company is reportedly preparing to launch a triple-folding smartphone before the year’s end.
Samsung’s consumer electronics head TM Roh told The Korea Times that the company aims to release such a device this year.
“I expect we will be able to launch the tri-fold phone within this year. We are now focusing on perfecting the product and its usability, but we have not decided on its name. As the product nears completion, we are planning to make a final decision soon,” he told the publication.
Separately, another unnamed executive confirmed to Android Authority that a tri-fold device by Samsung is ready to go into production.
Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch8 smartwatch today at its Unpacked July 2025 event, along with the Galaxy Watch8 Classic version with a rotating bezel, which made a comeback after a year’s gap. Both watches have undergone a design overhaul and now resemble the Galaxy Watch Ultra, launched last year, which had a squarish case around a circular bezel.
The Galaxy Watch8 gets a screen upgrade with a brighter display that can have a peak brightness of 3,000 nits as compared to 2,000 nits on the Watch7. This allows you to use the smartwatch better in brighter conditions.
The Watch retains the Exynos W1000 chip and a BioActive Sensor, which measures heart rate, EKGs, and body composition analysis.
The smartwatch comes with other features Samsung rolled out last month, including Bedtime Guidance, which gives you suggestions for the best time for you to sleep based on previous sleep-tracking data; Vascular Load, which measures stress on your vascular system while you are sleeping and gives you lifestyle tweak suggestions; a Running Coach, which lays out the optimum pace for your runs; and Antioxidant index, which measures carotenoids — a type of antioxidant found in vegetables and fruits. Most of these features assume a lot of factors about a user’s health and use calculations to provide a score and suggestions, which might not be very useful in real life.
Image Credits:Samsung
Both the watches run One UI 8 Watch based on Wear OS 6. With this software release, Google is making Gemini available on watches, so you can ask questions without typing. Gemini is integrated with Samsung Health, Calendar, Reminder, and Clock apps.
While Samsung is not making any changes to the Galaxy Watch Ultra, it is releasing a new Titanium Blue colorway at $650.
The Galaxy Watch8 starts at $350 for the Bluetooth model, $50 more than the previous-gen watch, and is $400 for the LTE model. The new Watch comes in 40mm and 44mm sizes in graphite and silver colors. The Galaxy Watch8 Classic is priced at $500 for the Bluetooth version and $550 for the LTE version, and it comes in a 46mm size.
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Preorders for all the watches start today, and the devices will become generally available in the U.S. on July 25.
For the past few years, Samsung has released two foldable phones at its Unpacked event. This year, however, the company has added a cheaper model to the lineup, the Z Flip7 FE, which sees the new Z Fold7 and the Z Flip7 taking up the foldable flag for the Korean hardware giant.
Samsung has once again sought to make its phones thinner, though the new models are thinner than last year’s iterations.
The company has also updated the pricing: The new Z Fold7 is $100 costlier than the Z Fold6, retailing at a starting price of $1,999. Samsung hasn’t increased the $1,100 starting price of the new model in the Z Flip line.
The new Z Flip7 FE is priced at $899 to attract people looking for a new form factor under the $1,000 price mark.
Z Fold7
Samsung’s new foldable flagship, Z Fold7 is a bit lighter than its predecessor, with the measuring scale topping out at 218 grams (compared to the Fold6’s 239 grams). It’s quite a bit thinner, too, measuring 8.9 mm when folded, down from the Fold6’s 12.1 mm girth.
The cover screen on the Fold7 is also bigger, now sporting a 6.5-inch dynamic AMOLED 2x display, while the main screen measures 8 inches when unfolded. The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite processor.
Image Credits:Samsung
Samsung claims that it has made the phone more durable by putting in a restructured hinge and hinge housing. Its display is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Ceramic 2.
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The company is now using a 200-megapixel main camera with a f/1.7 aperture, compared to the 50-megapixel camera on last year’s model.
Image Credits:Samsung
Samsung has added some AI powers to its photo editing software. You now get a Photo Assist function, which moves, erases, or enlarges objects, and adjusts angles automatically. It also uses generative AI to fill in empty spaces in pictures. The editing suite also lets users see edited and original photos side-by-side on the unfolded screen.
Z Flip7 and Z Flip7 FE
Like its bigger sibling, the Z Flip7 is also thinner this year, and comes with a larger cover screen — a 4.1-inch super AMOLED display — as well as an enlarged main display (6.9 inches). Samsung is using Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 for both the cover and the back for protection.
The company is packing a 4,300 mAh battery for the Z Flip7 — the largest ever in its Flip series. Unlike the Fold7, which uses a 3nm chip from Qualcomm, the Flip7 gets a 3nm Exynos2500 chip, made by Samsung itself.
At first glance, the Z Flip7 FE seems like a reincarnation of the Z Flip6, with its 4,000 mAh battery, a 3.4-inch cover screen, a 6.7-inch main screen, and the Exynos2400 processor.
Samsung is adding DeX support to the Flip series for the first time, so you can plug the phone into a monitor and use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to get a workstation-like experience.
The new phones also come with a new feature, called Now Bar, on the cover screen, that looks similar to iOS’ Live Activities. The Now Bar shows real-time activities, like the progress of a podcast or the status of a delivery.
Another feature called Now Brief presents a summary of traffic, reminders, events, and fitness insights. You’ll also get music and video recommendations based on your existing subscriptions.
Google features
Samsung has added support for Gemini Live on the cover screen of the Z Flip7, letting users use the assistant without having to unfold the phone. It also integrates with Samsung Notes.
All the new Z Flip and Z Fold phones will get support for Gemini Live’s camera and video AI features, which enable users to take pictures or videos to ask the AI bot questions.
The Galaxy Z Flip7 and the Galaxy Z Fold7 go on preorder today, and will be generally available on July 25. The Z Flip is available in 256GB and 512GB storage versions, has 12 GB RAM, and comes in Jetblack, Blue Shadow, and Coralred colorways. Meanwhile, the Z Flip7 FE is available in 128GB and 256GB versions, has 8GB of RAM, and comes in just two color options: white and black.
The Z Fold7 has three storage options: 256GB, 512GB (both with 12GB RAM), and 1TB (16GB RAM). You can choose from Jetblack, Blue Shadow, and Silver Shadow colors.
I’m wearing a pair of thick-rimmed glasses on my face. They don’t feel heavy, but they feel chunky. I walk over to a poster of a painting—Girl With a Pearl Earring—and ask out loud what was so special about it. A brief answer detailing its expert use of light and color by Johannes Vermeer floats into my ears, and when I ask a follow-up about when it was painted, I quickly hear the same voice say, “around 1665.” I’m not talking to myself, I swear. Nor am I hearing imaginary voices. No, I’m wearing a prototype of Google’s upcoming smart glasses, powered by its Gemini voice assistant. The company teased these smart glasses at its I/O developer conference earlier this year, showing a proof-of-concept video of AI-powered smart glasses using the name Project Astra. The pair I gazed through and chatted with uses that same Astra technology, but here it’s been built into a functioning product. Even though the glasses are still in their development phase, Google plans to release them sometime in 2025. These smart glasses are one part of Google’s big announcement today: Android XR. This “extended reality” platform marks the 10th year of Google’s mobile operating system expanding to new platforms beyond phones, joining the ranks of Wear OS, Google TV, and Android Auto. It sets the stage for a new wave of virtual and augmented reality headsets and glasses with a customized version of Android running on them.
Glass, a Decade Later
I remember watching the first-ever Google Glass demo in my college dorm room—truly an iconic moment at Google I/O 2012, where people skydived toward the Moscone Convention Center wearing cyborg smart glasses that were streaming video of their approach over a Hangouts call. These Android XR–powered smart glasses don’t command that much fanfare but, in my limited time with them, I can say this: Of all the smart glasses I’ve tried, they come the closest to realizing the original vision of Glass. But Google is also in a very different place as a company than it was in 2012. A judge recently ruled Google Search to be an illegal monopoly, calling for the company to sell off Google Chrome. Yet Google (with Samsung) now wants to be the platform for the next wave of spatial computing. VR also has had a rocky road due to wavering consumer interest, and given Google’s history of killing off projects, it’s difficult to glean whether a face computing platform that requires special (and expensive) hardware will meet the fate of so many apps and services that came before. Izadi says the platform approach helps in that regard: “I think once you’re established as an Android vertical, we’re not going away anytime soon, so that’s kind of a guarantee we can give.” The big bet seems to be around Gemini and AI. Oh, and the synergy between Google and Samsung. As Kihwan Kim, the executive vice president at Samsung spearheading Project Moohan, says, “This is not about just some teams or company making this—this is different. It’s completely starting from the ground up, how AI can impact VR and AR.” He went on to say the collaboration with Google felt like “one single spirit,” adding that it’s something he’s never experienced before in this line of work.
Keith Haring, Untitled (Breakdancers and Barking Dog), 1985. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
As the November marquee auction season approaches and the major auction houses start to build momentum by revealing their top lots, the search for who has consigned what and why begins. Provenance, as we know, can play a big part in establishing and validating an artwork’s value, whether by sparking renewed interest, providing reassurance to buyers or adding art historical context. Sotheby’s, for its part, just announced that a group of thirty-one rare Keith Haring subway drawings will star in the Contemporary Day Sale on November 21 with a combined estimate of between $6.3 and $9 million. This is a very exciting moment for Haring’s collectors as none of these works have ever been offered at auction before, and it’s very difficult to find the originals in such well-preserved condition.
Haring came from a family of modest means in Pennsylvania. His father was an amateur cartoonist who, from his early years, encouraged Keith to invent his own characters. Haring’s talent for drawing led to his receiving a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he studied semiotics, but it was his contact with the copious street art that was everywhere in 1980s New York that inspired him most.
Haring started drawing in the subway just as a hobby while en route to work: noticing that the MTA covered unpaid advertisements with black matte paper, he began scrawling his inventive visual language on them in white chalk. In short order, his unique and highly recognizable style attracted his first fans. Nonetheless, Haring continued his drawings in front of the crowds and the NYPD, who ticketed and even arrested him for vandalism over the next five years. Describing them in an essay published for Art in Transit: Subway Drawings, published in 1984, he said felt that his work was “more of a responsibility than a hobby,” a way to leave a critical trace as an individual presence in a cannibalizing metropolis dominated by corporate interests and unstoppable real estate speculation and gentrification. Even when Haring’s career skyrocketed and he established himself as a leading figure in the downtown art scene, he said the subway was still his “favorite place to draw.”
During his subway project, he appropriated thousands of black panels for energetic mark-making to build an inventory of iconic images, such as his nuclear dogs, angels, flying saucers, babies, smiley faces, etc.—the motifs mostly engineered at his seminal creative haunt, Club 57. “I think the origin of the subway drawings was part of how they came about in a sense, where it was part of Keith’s DNA,” Gil Vazquez, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said in a statement. “There’s a significant component of generosity. When I think of the subway drawings, I think of them as one of Keith’s first acts of activism.”
Given the nature of urban guerrilla art, most of the subway drawings have been lost or destroyed, making the ones coming to auction a true rarity for fans and institutions looking to add to their collections. Because of their importance and rarity, the works have also been included in prominent exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum’s 2012 critically acclaimed exhibition of Haring’s career titled “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” which marked the last occasion the group exhibited together. Most of the works coming to auction have a long exhibition history, like Untitled (Still Alive in ’85), which is one of the final subway drawings and has been featured in many prominent exhibitions at MoMA, the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville in Paris, de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Rotterdam.
Behind their extraordinary survival is a passionate art collector, Larry Warsh, who has taken on stewardship of these thirty-one works for nearly 40 years, building the most exceptional and extensive assemblage of Haring’s subway drawings in private hands. Observer spoke with Wash to understand how those gems came into his collection, the importance of preserving these drawings and, more generally, what’s in his art collection today.
“I’ve been collecting Keith Haring since the mid-’80s, and collecting all kinds of artwork all along, drawings, subway drawings, even a car, anything to do with Keith that was very compulsive at the time,” Warsh told Observer. Arguably, the collector was one of the first supporters of Keith Haring, despite the fact that he doesn’t see himself as a patron in traditional terms. “I was a patron for him in supporting his creative self, what he stood for and what he did. I was not a traditional patron; I just gave money or attended all the gallery functions. I was more pure in the sense of seeing his creativity and what he was doing then. It was a different time.”
Warsh is also an art historian, having published three books about Keith Haring. When asked how he spotted Haring’s talent so early and realized that his work would have historical relevance, he demures. “First of all, it was him, as a creative being and a person. Wherever he drew as artwork, his energy and translation of symbols and signs were unique, and most people would feel comfortable looking at his art. It was art for everyone. He made art for everybody, and he was a generous person and cared about people; he cared about causes; he cared about kids.”
Those subway drawings were part of his tridimensional works—Warsh is currently writing a book on this—and link him to the notion of the Duchampian ready-made, bringing it to a more democratic and public level by appropriating elements in urban spaces. “He was a student of the immediate art act in drawing and painting on objects like Duchamp, so these are considered like found objects.”
While he sometimes tried to get them directly from the subway, Warsh admitted that peeling them out proved difficult, so he just started to find and buy them compulsively. “I basically hunted them down and tried to accumulate them as a body of work,” he said. “It was not about commerciality. It’s about historical importance. My feeling was that these were historically important.” For the same reason, he also started buying Basquiat’s notebooks, being one of the first to acknowledge the historical importance of those texts. Today, he also has the most extensive collection of them. “It’s not the commercial goal that propelled me into collecting. It was the manic, compulsive accumulation personality that I had for many, many years.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warsh started collecting very early in his life, having been introduced to art by an uncle who was a collector of German art. However, he really got into it when he moved to downtown New York City, immersing himself fully in the art scene and the collective energy that shaped an entire community, creating the fertile ground for this entire moment of art history to happen. “I was interested in the energy of the time,” Warsh explained. “My good friend Renee Ricard used to visit me at all night hours with all kinds of things. So I learned with my eyes, and I felt with my emotions, and I had to look into the future and feel what I was collecting in the present would have value. Not just commercial value, but historical value.”
Keith Haring, Untitled (Boombox Head); est. $400,000-600,000. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
When asked why he wanted to part with them, Warsh said that he wanted to let them circulate and be seen again by giving the opportunity of ownership to another collector or, even better, an institution that will show them. “I think I did my job to accumulate them as the body of works,” he said. “They were shown in museums; we did a book, with one version in Mandarin. I don’t want to own much art anymore in the same way I wanted to. I’m thrilled with what I did, but at this point, it’s time for institutions to have a chance to add these drawings to their collections because they are the most important works by this artist, I believe.”
To further promote the value of this group of works, Sotheby’s is hosting an immersive exhibition of the subway drawings that will help visitors envision these works where they were initially conceived by turning the galleries into a vintage subway station with turnstiles, benches and archival footage. Warsh is excited to see what the auction house and exhibition partner Samsung (SSNLF) are cooking up, as it aligns with his desire to share Haring’s art with as many people as possible, particularly in the city. “I think New Yorkers will want to come and see this because everybody has always heard about them or seen pictures, but very few have had the chance to see these drawings in person,” he said. “Seeing them in person, seeing how fragile they are and how sensitive they are, will leave everyone amazed.” Wash concluded that he hopes the exhibition will further enhance the value of Keith Haring’s work and revive interest in it by showing its relevance as an essential part of a pivotal moment in New York’s cultural history.
Samsung’s Onyx cinema LED displays are pioneering a new era in cinema screens, offering sharp, vibrant visuals and deeper contrasts than traditional projectors. Recently installed at the Pathé Palace cinema in Paris, a landmark renowned for its architecture by Renzo Piano, these displays merge the cinematic past with a future-ready, visually immersive experience. The introduction of six Onyx screens, combined with Samsung’s The Wall 8K MICRO LED screen in the cinema lobby, represents a blend of historic ambiance with cutting-edge digital enhancements.
Redefining Picture Quality with Onyx’s Vivid LED Screens
The Samsung Onyx screens set themselves apart by their Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) certification, making them the first LED displays certified for theatrical viewing. This distinction is significant for moviegoers who value quality visuals that match a filmmaker’s intent. Onyx screens are built to display high-dynamic-range (HDR) images with impressive brightness levels—up to 300 nits—making them more than six times brighter than typical film projectors. This enhanced brightness, combined with a wider color gamut, allows for sharper, more vivid images and consistently saturated colors across the entire screen.
These screens at Pathé Palace include four large 4K displays, each over 10 meters wide, and two smaller 2K displays of 5 meters. Their installation introduces moviegoers to an unprecedented level of detail and depth, creating an engaging experience that feels both immersive and intimate, regardless of seating position.
Immersive 3D Capabilities without Compromises
Beyond 2D viewing, Samsung’s Onyx screens deliver robust 3D capabilities, offering bright, clear images that make the content stand out. Traditional 3D screenings can sometimes strain the eyes, causing blurriness or dizziness due to less advanced projector technology. However, Onyx’s LED technology tackles these challenges by producing more stable and vibrant 3D visuals that reduce ghosting effects and improve visual clarity. This means viewers can enjoy 3D movies with a more natural look and feel, enhanced by active 3D glasses that bring out even finer details, from subtitles to minute facial expressions, without shadows or distortion.
The experience of watching 3D on these screens at Pathé Palace promises an immersive journey, transforming the typical movie outing into an engaging, sensory-rich experience for patrons.
The Wall: An 8K Showcase in the Cinema Lobby
As part of Pathé Palace’s recent five-year renovation, Samsung installed “The Wall” in the cinema’s lobby. This 8K MICRO LED screen, measuring 5.4 meters high and 9.6 meters wide, delivers a spectacle right as audiences enter. “The Wall” leverages a MICRO AI Processor that instantly upscales visuals to 8K, adjusting for sharpness, reducing noise, and enhancing colors through HDR technology. It’s designed to give viewers a taste of what’s possible with modern digital displays, providing an awe-inspiring preview even before stepping into the theater.
With “The Wall” and Onyx screens, Samsung has enabled Pathé Palace to offer visuals that resonate with today’s audiences who seek clarity, brightness, and realism in their viewing experiences.
Samsung and Pathé: A Future of Cinematic Innovation
The collaboration between Samsung and Pathé reflects a commitment to innovation within the cinematic landscape. With installations at other Pathé cinemas in Paris and Lyon, the introduction of Samsung’s Onyx screens at Pathé Palace is a major step in their partnership. By integrating these advanced LED screens and visual technologies across locations, they aim to push the boundaries of what cinema can offer, creating environments that appeal to a new generation of moviegoers.
The completion of the Pathé Palace renovation, including the installation of The Wall and additional Smart Signage to display movie schedules and trailers, shows the extent of this transformation. Each installation is intended to enhance not only the cinematic experience but also the visual atmosphere of the venue itself.
Conclusion
Samsung’s Onyx cinema LED displays at Pathé Palace mark a move towards more immersive, visually engaging movie experiences that prioritize detail, color, and brightness over traditional projection. While Samsung’s installations at Pathé Palace may not signal the end of the film projector, they demonstrate a compelling alternative that aligns with the expectations of today’s viewers. Samsung’s Onyx cinema displays and lobby screens like “The Wall” illustrate how advanced display technology can elevate historic venues while also making an industry-wide impact.
For more than two decades, the premier freeride mountain bike competition, Red Bull Rampage, has featured the world’s best athletes in the iconic red-rock deserts of southwest Utah. And for the first time, eight of the world’s best female freeride athletes joined the ranks of freeride’s greatest to compete in the inaugural Red Bull Rampage women’s competition. It was a day to be remembered in mountain biking history.
All the attention was on the finals, held on October 10, when riders flashed down their lines in less than two minutes per run. It was a historic moment, years in the making, and regardless of the results, no one was happier to see it than Casey Brown. The Canadian women’s freeride pioneer has built her career around proving women belong at Rampage. In 2019, Brown even competed in the qualifying competition, Proving Grounds, hoping to earn a spot in the men’s competition. “Being here this year felt surreal,” says Brown. “The whole ten days [building lines at Rampage]. Waking up every morning going, ‘OK I’m going to go dig for my own line at Rampage,’ which is a dream come true. We all wanted this, and we got such an awesome zone to build our lines.”
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 and Galaxy Ring (Photo: Samsung)
Brown was referring to one of the things that makes Red Bull Rampage so special: Competitors ride their own custom-built lines. It may look like a one-day event to spectators, but the real competition started more than a week earlier, when athletes and their dig crews spent long days scouting and molding their lines. After creating a line featuring multiple vertical drops, step-downs, and jumps, Brown finished third—an amazing result on its own—and also earned the coveted McGazza Spirit Award, presented to the athlete who best exemplifies the spirit of freeride through camaraderie, sportsmanship, and passion for freeride. “I’m so honored to take the award home,” says Brown.
In a competition this tight, with so many elite riders, every part of the preparation process makes a difference, and Brown says using Samsung Galaxy Z Flip6 was key to her success. Building a line requires a fine balance of calculated risk versus reward, finding that razor’s edge between what’s possible—and what’s not. “It’s really impressive to see the builds going down and seeing what [the riders] create with the terrain that we’ve been given,” Brown says. “There is a lot of visual scoping and taking photos to get the lay of the land. Using the Z Flip6 has been awesome. You can stand it up on its own. You’re not struggling to find a place to set it when you’re trying to take a selfie from a distance with the crew. And all you have to do is show your hand to get it to start the timer, which is really cool. Also, I really like the camcorder-style filming. It feels a lot more natural. I love the FlexWindow. And the phone can fit in my pocket and hooks on so you can kind of have it hanging out if you want to film something on your bike. You can get a lot more content that way.”
The inaugural women’s competition at the 2024 Red Bull Rampage. (Photo: Samsung)
Brown also relied heavily on Galaxy Ring to ensure she stayed in peak physical condition in the leadup to competition day. Thanks to Energy Score—a daily reading based on the previous day’s sleep, activity, and heart rate—she could ensure that she optimized recovery and stayed hydrated even after the most grueling days of digging and practicing lines.
“Samsung’s Galaxy Ring has really helped me map my sleep and gauge my energy for the day and be able to adjust,” Brown says. “It’s definitely full-on out here, and any little tool you can have that gets you a little bit ahead is a huge help. I also like that you can check your stats easily with Z Flip6’s FlexWindow—you don’t even have to open your phone. It’s also cool that you can gesture for a photo with Galaxy Ring by simply pinching your fingers together.”
Another female athlete, Argentinian Camila Nogueira, also used Galaxy Z Flip6 to refine her line, leveraging FlexCam with Galaxy AI to capture and analyze her run.
“Galaxy Z Flip6 is really pretty sick,” she says. “I can flip it to 90 degrees, and it’s really cool because I can put it anywhere on my course and just film from there. Also supercool: Galaxy AI lets me rewatch videos in slow-mo, and I can see exactly where I need to go slower and faster. It has so many AI tools that actually help to do [Rampage],” Nogueira adds. “The technology helps because first I can see my speed. If I want to check out something with more details, I can touch the screen and then slow-mo.” Using Instant Slow-Mo with Galaxy AI allowed Nogueira to fine-tune her speed and braking points.*
Because of the difficulty in designing and building a top-to-bottom run in less than a week, athletes often team up to take advantage of the terrain’s most challenging features. Brown and Nogueira linked up to create one of the most death-defying features of the women’s event, a rock roll nicknamed the Laundry Chute that required harnessing the dig team into ropes to access the terrain. Using Galaxy AI on their Z Flip6 phones, Brown and Nogueira could reimagine what was possible and assess terrain with precision.
In the aftermath of this historic event, one thing is clear: The future of freeride mountain biking is being reimagined—by not only the athletes but also the technology empowering their ambitions. Whether you’re a professional rider sending it over canyon gaps in the Utah desert or a local hero looking to share your latest ride with friends, Samsung Galaxy devices are helping athletes take their riding to the next level.
*However, like all the riders, Nogueira is always pushing what’s possible in the sport—she suffered a crash in training that left her unable to compete in the finals.
Most people buy phones directly from their carrier, but if you’re reading this guide, I suggest you buy an unlocked smartphone. When you buy a carrier phone, it’s “locked” to that network. That means if you want to switch carriers, like move from Verizon to T-Mobile, you’ll have to ask your carrier to unlock the device, and this can be a huge headache. (Especially if you’re traveling and want to use an international SIM card.) Asking a carrier to unlock a phone usually has a few requirements, like making sure your device is paid off, or waiting for a set period of time. Unlocked phones, on the other hand, don’t have this problem. You’re free to use whatever carrier you want, whenever.
Carriers also mask the true cost of a smartphone. AT&T may entice you with a $36 per month payment for a shiny new Samsung flagship, when in reality, that means you’re paying $1,300 on a smartphone over 36 months. Did you really want to spend that much? Or will a cheaper phone suffice? Also, you’re more likely to get software updates faster as they come directly from Samsung, and there’s often far less preinstalled bloatware to deal with.
All to say, buy unlocked! You can buy unlocked Galaxy phones directly from Samsung and most third-party retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart.
Samsung has long been a leader in memory technology, and their latest development marks another milestone: the mass production of the PM9E1 SSD. Designed with on-device AI applications in mind, this new SSD brings unprecedented speed, power efficiency, and security to PCs. Let’s dive into what makes this SSD a game-changer for AI-powered machines and high-performance systems.
Blazing Speed with PCIe 5.0 Technology
The PM9E1 stands out primarily due to its incredible speed. Built on Samsung’s in-house 5nm controller and eighth-generation V-NAND technology, this SSD uses an eight-channel PCIe 5.0 interface, more than doubling the read and write speeds of its predecessor. It can reach sequential read speeds of up to 14.5GB/s and write speeds of 13GB/s. For context, a 14GB large language model (LLM)—a data-heavy AI application—can be transferred to DRAM in under a second. This level of speed is essential for AI applications that demand rapid data access and transfer, ensuring smoother workflows and faster processing times for users working on machine learning models or other AI-driven tasks.
Storage Options for Every User’s Needs
Storage capacity is another highlight of the PM9E1. Samsung offers a range of options to cater to different needs, from 512GB to 4TB. The 4TB model is particularly valuable for users handling large AI-generated content, high-resolution videos, and data-intensive programs. Whether you’re an AI researcher, content creator, or gamer dealing with massive files and workloads, having this much storage space at your disposal ensures you won’t run into capacity issues anytime soon.
For those with lighter storage demands, the 512GB or 1TB options offer excellent value without compromising on the performance boost that the PM9E1 delivers. The SSD’s variety of capacities makes it a versatile solution for users across multiple industries.
Power Efficiency to Extend Battery Life
Another key feature of the PM9E1 is its exceptional power efficiency. Samsung has improved the SSD’s power usage by over 50% compared to previous models, which means that devices running on this SSD can last significantly longer between charges. This is particularly beneficial for AI PCs and mobile devices, where extended battery life is crucial for running intensive applications without being tethered to a power source.
For anyone working on AI projects or using their devices for long hours, this improvement in power efficiency makes the PM9E1 a practical and attractive option. You get all the benefits of high-speed performance without the downside of rapid battery drain.
Enhanced Security for Data Protection
Security is a growing concern, especially for those working with sensitive data, and Samsung has equipped the PM9E1 with robust security features. The SSD supports the Security Protocol and Data Model (SPDM) v1.2, which helps guard against supply chain attacks. This includes technologies like ‘Secure Channel,’ ‘Device Authentication,’ and ‘Firmware Tampering Attestation,’ all of which work together to prevent data manipulation or forgery during production and distribution. For users handling confidential AI models or sensitive information, this added layer of security is a major plus.
Conclusion: Power and Performance Combined
Samsung’s PM9E1 SSD delivers top-tier performance, energy efficiency, and security, making it the ideal solution for those working with AI applications or managing data-heavy workloads. With storage options that go up to 4TB, it’s versatile enough for a range of professional and personal needs. While the SSD is now in mass production, we can expect it to be integrated into consumer products soon, further cementing Samsung’s leadership in the AI and memory technology sectors. Keep an eye out for its release and pricing details as they become available.
With summer officially over, it’s back to business (or school) for many people, which can mean more time writing longer things, especially on the go. The smartphone has replaced the laptop for many tasks, but when it comes to text input, tapping away on tiny onscreen keys might make you wish you had hauled along the computer just for its keyboard. Thankfully, your phone includes several features to make text entry much easier. Here are a few suggestions.
Visit your settings
Thanks to predictive text prompts, automatic punctuation and other shortcuts (like pressing vowel keys to see the pop-up menu of accent marks), typing on small glass rectangles isn’t as awkward as it used to be. To find out what features are available for your phone, start with its Settings app.
On an iPhone, tap General and then Keyboard.
For many Android phones, tap System, Keyboard, On-screen Keyboard and then Gboard (often the default app). Galaxy models typically offer the Samsung Keyboard with similar options.
You should see choices for spell-check, text correction — yes, Apple’s infamous Auto-Correction has gotten better — and other aids. For example, both the Apple iOS keyboard and the Google Gboard (which has an iOS version, too) can display a compact keyboard for easier single-handed input.
On the Gboard keyboard, press and hold the comma key for a shortcut into the settings — or tap the four-squares icon on the far left and select the One-Handed button; the same menu lets you resize or “float” the keyboard around the screen if you prefer.
Password-manager tools prevent mistyped logins, and fewer taps may help to prevent errors elsewhere. With tools like Slide to Type from Apple and Glide Typing by Google, you can drag your finger around the keyboard and the software guesses the word you want; note that the results may vary.
The keyboard can move the text-insertion cursor, too. On an iPhone, press and hold the space bar until the keyboard dims, and then drag your finger to reposition the cursor on the screen. For the Google Gboard, you can move the cursor by sliding a finger along the space bar if the “gesture cursor control” is enabled in the Glide Typing settings.
Apple and Google include keyboard layouts for typing in languages other than English or inserting emojis. You can add third-party keyboard apps, but beware of software from unfamiliar companies that could pose security risks.
Add hardware
If you have a lot of text to enter, pairing your iPhone or Android phone with an external Bluetooth keyboard (including the Magic Keyboard made by Apple) lets you switch to traditional typing hardware. You can even use navigational buttons and shortcuts with an iPhone by going to Settings, Accessibility and Keyboards and enabling the Full Keyboard Access feature.
If you don’t want to haul a full keyboard around, consider a folding model, as it can fit easily in a jacket pocket but expand into something resembling a full-size set of keys.
Traveling keyboards, which typically fold up into two or three sections when not in use, range in price from about $25 to $80 depending on the size and features.
Speak your mind
Speech-to-text technology that converts the spoken word into editable type on the screen has been around for decades and has only become more accurate as the software has improved. Many apps (including virtual assistants) can take dictation. The Apple Notes app in iOS 18 can now directly record a live audio file and transcribe it.
To use the feature on an iPhone, open Settings, select General and then Keyboard, and turn on Enable Dictation. The Auto-Punctuation option automatically inserts commands, periods and question marks as you talk, but Apple’s site has a full list of dictation commands for editing text and inserting emoji characters.
On Android phones using the Gboard keyboard, open the Settings app, go to System, select Keyboard and make sure Google Voice Typing is enabled. When you tap the microphone icon, you can start speaking or select the Info icon (an encircled “i”) to see the list of voice commands that Gboard understands, including in the Google Docs word processor. As with most dictation apps, you must call out punctation by name, like “question mark” or “new paragraph,” and other formatting.
Dictation can be helpful for quickly transcribing a lot of words, but it may not be the best method for, say, a crowded coffee shop or composing a confidential memo within earshot of co-workers. Some dictation requests are uploaded to the internet for processing and require a network connection.
But no matter how you input your text, be sure to proofread it (or have artificial intelligence do it) before you send it along, as typographical errors do have a way of sneaking in no matter how you get your words on the screen.
Didn’t know where else to post about this but Our samsung electric range caught on fire near the knob control panel on the back last night. Almost burned our entire house down. I had to spray water on it and shut off the breaker so i could pull it out and unplug it. House was FILLED with toxic smoke. I have looked it up and apparently a lot of other people with the same model number have had the EXACT same issue with that control panel catching fire. I have never thought about being in a class action lawsuit but I’m pretty sure if this is a for real defect on this range then it could potentially take houses and lives. IDK honestly it’s been a rough 12 hours since then. My eyes and throat burn and we’ve been on the phone with insurance/samsung for hours. If any one here has experience with class action lawsuits or just lawsuits in general feel free to drop a comment or PM me some info because we almost died and lost our home and I want SAMSUNG to ******* pay. (S/N NE59J7630 in case anyone has this oven do not leave it alone) I would love to take those ******* to court. (I am located in Oklahoma in case state matters for lawyer stuff)
There is plenty to consider when buying a smart ring, so use these tips to help you narrow your choice and get the best from it.
Size: Some smart rings come in standard sizes, but there is some variation, and half sizes are rare. Most manufacturers will send you a free sizing kit, enabling you to wear a dummy ring for 24 hours to ensure you get the right fit. (You may have to buy the ring directly from the manufacturer to get this kit for free.) You should absolutely do this. Bear in mind that your fingers swell and shrink over the day. Your smart ring should be snug to enable the sensors to measure accurately, and it will work best on your index finger (though the middle or ring finger can work).
Finish: All the smart rings we tested combined tough titanium with a sensor array on the inside, but the coatings and colors vary. If you are hard on rings, a silver or gold finish will likely suit you best, as there is less risk of damage. My Oura and Ultrahuman rings with black finishes have visible scratches and chips after a few months. The Oura and Amazfit rings have tiny dimples to help you align the sensors. While I prefer the smooth finish of the Ultrahuman, I suspect correct placement aids accuracy enormously.
Care: If you want to avoid damage, you should remove your ring when working with tools, weight lifting, washing pots and pans, or even cleaning the sink. If your ring is likely to rub against a surface, take it off. I found this was a bigger problem wearing a ring on my index finger than with the middle or ring finger. I scratched the Oura and Ultrahuman rings when gardening, moving boxes, and using a dumbbell. Titanium is also tough enough to damage surfaces in your home. I gouged the porcelain of my sink and marked the inside of a mug with the angular Ringconn. All the smart rings we tested are water resistant, so you can swim or shower without taking them off.
Charging: Smart rings come with a charger and cable, but you will generally have to provide your own wall adapter. From dead, they take anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours to fully charge, but you should avoid letting the battery run down completely, or you run the risk of losing data. We tested the smart rings above with all the bells and whistles turned on, so our battery life estimates are lower than the manufacturers claim.
Features: Most smart rings will track your sleep, heart rate, and temperature. If you want to keep an eye on your sleep and health unobtrusively and comfortably, smart rings are ideal. Fitness tracking varies, with most smart rings offering basic step counts and movement, some offering manual workout tracking, and only the Oura and Galaxy Ring offering automatic workout recognition. But you can expect more depth and accuracy from a traditional fitness tracker or smartwatch. Combining a smart ring with an Apple Watch or Fitbit makes for a seamless experience, allowing you to take off the watch and let it charge at night without gaps in your tracking.
Lately in Overwatch 2, I’ve taken up playing Wrecking Ball. Compared to my usual main, Mercy, it somehow involves even more disorienting motion, whipping across the map, and tracking fast-moving characters. So I was excited to play on the Samsung Odyssey G6. It has a 360-Hz refresh rate that’s faster than just about anything I’ve played on. At last, I finally have more frames than I need.
The Odyssey G6 is a 27-inch flat-panel OLED display with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution. It supports AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, which supports HDR content, something that other FreeSync-compatible monitors can’t necessarily do. That said, the standout feature here is the ludicrous refresh rate, which is faster than many will have ever used before.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
The Whole Package
The Odyssey G6 stand is a delight to set up and use. The monitor pops onto the sturdy stand with a click, though it does support VESA mounts if you’d prefer to bring your own monitor arm. It can swivel up to 60 degrees horizontally (30 in each direction), and you can rotate the screen between portrait and landscape mode in either direction.
My only complaint on the rotation is that there’s no center hole in the stand to run cables through. There’s a small rubber clip on the back to hold cables in place, but if you plan to rotate your screen a lot, you could end up getting cables tangled if you don’t run them properly.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
Faster Than a Speeding Frame
When I tested the Razer Blade 18 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) gaming laptop, it packed a blisteringly fast 300-Hz refresh rate, which I thought would be overkill. Human eyes don’t exactly see in “frames per second.” Our brains are tuned to focus more on things like contrast and motion, so even if we can technically see flickering artifacts that flash by at very high speeds, in practice we might not notice much difference between a 120-Hz display, where things refresh 120 times a second, and a 300-Hz display, where they refresh 300 times, simply because we’re not focusing on how quickly the image on the screen updates.
However, frame rate becomes far more relevant when you’re trying to track fast-moving objects (or players) in video games. When there are fewer frames per second, objects will look less like they’re moving and more like they’re making little micro jumps from one place to another. You can see this effect in action with this online tool. Try comparing 24 fps to 120 fps (if your monitor can support it), with or without motion blur. The effects become pretty obvious.
It’s important to understand why this works the way it does, because the Odyssey G6 doesn’t just make motion smooth. It almost makes it unnecessarily smooth. I’ve been using this monitor for a couple weeks, and I’m still undecided on whether such smoothness is a good thing. At a certain point, I have to wonder whether my brain is the real bottleneck preventing me from mentally updating where the enemy Cassidy is 360 times per second.
Like most fitness tracking rings, Samsung’s Galaxy Ring has been positioned as a minimalist health wearable for people who don’t want the pings and buzzes of a wrist-worn smartwatch or fitness tracker. But that’s only part of its appeal. Its real appeal is that it’s a supplemental wearable if you already have a Galaxy Watch and a Galaxy phone.
When I received my tester, I immediately charged it and added it to Samsung’s Health app, where it joined my Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra. You can elect to send battery-intensive tasks to either the watch or the ring to save battery life on one or the other. I delegated heart-rate monitoring to the watch, and after two days, the ring’s battery life was still at 97 percent.
I can’t think of any other devices that work together that seamlessly for such an immediate, quantifiable improvement. I did compare the Ring’s measurements to an Apple Watch Ultra, which I will discuss later, but after a few days, I switched back to the Galaxy Watch. This is what the ring was made for, so this is the most appropriate testing scenario.
Box It Out
Even from the first unboxing, the Galaxy Ring compared favorably to the Oura Ring. It arrives in an awesome clear charging case with a USB-C connector that snaps shut with a cover. I love this cover. You would not believe how often I manage to knock the Oura Ring off its charger when it’s sitting on my desk. You can also check the battery level by putting the ring on the charger. An LED around the perimeter shows the ring’s battery level, unlike the Oura, whose light just shows if the battery is full or not.
Photograph: Adrienne So
The Ring is titanium and comes in three finishes; I tested the titanium silver. Samsung has a sizing guide consistent with other fitness tracker rings as I was bucketed into my usual size 8. Like most other rings of this type, it has an array of sensors on the inside; a photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor with three LEDs to track changes in blood volume, an accelerometer, and a skin temperature sensor.
I can’t feel any of these sensors when wearing the ring. I don’t mind wearing the Oura Ring, but the Galaxy Ring is more than a gram lighter and is noticeably thinner and lightweight. As a bonus, you can go into your Health app on your Samsung phone and click Find My Ring and the LEDs will start flickering! You can’t see them in daylight, but at least the company has acknowledged that one of the major problems with smart rings is how often you lose the darn things. I keep taking mine off mindlessly to wash dishes, lift something heavy, or play the violin. It’s also rated at 10 ATM and IP68, and I have kept mine on while swimming and paddling with my kids.
The battery life depends on how many tasks you want to outsource to your watch. If I’m wearing my Galaxy Watch, the Galaxy Ring lasts over a week. Without it, it lasted a standard three to five days of continuous tracking.
On Period
The Galaxy Ring measures a fairly similar set of metrics to the Oura Ring. For example, it offers an Energy Score, which is similar to Oura’s Readiness Score in that it takes in several factors, like your sleep time and consistency and the previous day’s activity, and spits out an easy-to-understand number to show you how ready you are to tackle the day.
To do that, it tracks your sleep. You can click through the Samsung Health app to check your sleep stages, including how long you’ve been awake, your blood oxygen, and whether you’re snoring. It usually records more sleep time than my Apple Watch Ultra; I’m guessing it’s easier for the watch to tell that I’m reading in bed instead of sleeping when my arm is holding my Kindle up to my face.
Samsung makes everything from gaming monitors to dishwashers. WIRED often reviews the South Korean company’s products—especially Samsung’s vast lineup of Galaxy smartphones. WIRED is also always looking for a sale, finding the best promo codes and coupons to help you save big on your most important tech purchases.
Right now, one of the hottest Samsung promo codes is a whopping 30% discount for government employees and educators. Samsung also has offer programs, meaning you can combine your promo code discount with most other offers to increase discounts. Get a pal involved for more savings—when a friend uses your referral code to make a purchase at Samsung.com, you’ll receive a $100 discount. WIRED’s insider tip is to sign up for a Samsung Rewards account for even more perks, including exclusive promo codes, flash sales, and updates on the newest Samsung products. WIRED continuously seeks out the best deals for you, including great savings on TVs—like the QLED 8K, select refrigerators, and other home appliances.
Right now, until September 29, Samsung has some of the best deals we’ve ever seen on their best-selling tech. You can save up to $2,100 on select OLED TVs and get up to $2,200 off on select Neo QLED 4K TVs. You can also get up to $750 enhanced trade-in credit on the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which we rated 8/10 for the phone’s overall great performance, good battery life, and exceptional screens.
WIRED also regularly rounds up the best deals from seasonal, end-of-year, and special sales on all of Samsung’s products, including finding Samsung promo codes from discounts for educators to friend referral codes to help you save on everything from soundbars to wireless chargers to Samsung’s highly anticipated health-based wearable Galaxy Ring.
WIRED often reviews Samsung’s products, including their newest Galaxy phones, product updates, and announcements. The Samsung Galaxy is one of iPhone’s biggest competitors, with their newest line of Galaxy S24, S24+, and S24+ Ultra phones rated an 8/10 by WIRED reviews editor Julian Chokkattu, because of its new AI features powered by Google’s Gemini and adaptable settings.
We nerds here at WIRED also follow CES (sort of the Coachella for tech nerds) for all the updates on tech (almost) no one asked for, and Samsung’s bi-annual Galaxy Unpacked event, where they show off its newest toys. We have coupons for money off trade-ins, our honest opinions about its foldable Galaxy Z Flip6 and Z Fold6 phones, and the Galaxy Watch7, which matches the Apple Watch in caliber.
Head to WIRED’s roundup of promo codes and coupons for Samsung to see all the best deals we have to offer right now.
With the conclusion of the Olympic Games Paris 2024, Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition stands out as a unique memento of the event. Designed exclusively for athletes who participated in this year’s Olympic and Paralympic Games, this special edition phone blends advanced technology with design elements that celebrate the Olympic spirit.
Unboxing the Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition
Unboxing the Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition is an experience in itself. The black packaging, featuring a golden track design, immediately captures attention. The box also displays the Olympic rings, Paralympic agitos, and the Samsung logo, symbolizing Samsung’s ongoing partnership with the International Olympic Committee.
Inside the box, the packaging is divided into two sections: one for the smartphone and another for the Flipsuit Case. The box containing the phone continues the track design theme, while the Flipsuit Case box offers a vibrant mix of colors, adding an element of surprise to the unboxing experience.
A Design Rooted in Olympic Spirit
The Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition is distinguished by its bold yellow color, reminiscent of the excitement and energy that defined the Paris 2024 Games. The back of the phone is engraved with the Olympic and Paralympic emblems, as well as the Samsung logo, providing a subtle yet meaningful connection to the global event.
This foldable phone is compact but powerful, featuring a 50-megapixel rear wide-angle camera enhanced by Galaxy AI. Athletes used this camera to capture and share high-quality moments throughout the Games, including the now-famous “Victory Selfies” taken on the Olympic podium.
Tailored for Olympians
More than just a collector’s item, the Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition includes features specifically designed for athletes. Upon powering up the device, athletes were greeted with a personalized message: “You, the athletes, are the heart of the Olympic & Paralympic Movement.” This thoughtful touch reflects the phone’s theme of honoring those who competed in the Games.
The phone’s Cover Screen, known as the FlexWindow, and Main Display are also tailored to the Olympic experience. The Cover Screen displays a running track from an athlete’s perspective, while the Main Display features a circuit board design—a nod to Samsung’s technological innovations. Additionally, the device came pre-installed with apps like Athlete365, providing competition information, and Paris 2024, offering general updates on the Games.
The Exclusive Flipsuit Case
The Flipsuit Case that comes with the Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition adds another layer of personalization. Made from luxurious leather, the case includes an NFC-equipped Flipsuit Card that can be attached to it. When the card is in place, it syncs with the phone’s Cover Screen, displaying an animation that matches the card’s design. The Flipsuit Card itself features a color scheme inspired by the Olympic flag, making it a stylish addition to the phone.
Conclusion
As the Olympic Games Paris 2024 come to a close, the Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition serves as a lasting reminder of this historic event. While primarily available to the athletes who competed, the phone encapsulates the spirit of the Games with its thoughtful design and athlete-focused features. From its packaging to its pre-installed apps, every aspect of the device is a tribute to the Olympics. Though specific details on availability and pricing may vary, the Galaxy Z Flip6 Olympic Edition remains a unique piece of Olympic history and a testament to Samsung’s dedication to innovation and global events.
A new blog post from Samsung highlights how its Galaxy Z Flip series devices are being adopted by law enforcement. The line of foldable mobile devices was part of a pilot program at the Kimberling City Police and the Indian Point Police in Missouri two years ago to test how the electronics could improve the forces’ daily operations. According to Samsung, the program was the first time a foldable device was used by police as a bodycam. After the end of the pilot program, two more police departments signed on to use the Flip devices as bodycams. The solutions from those pilot tests are also being extended to 25 metro police departments in five states.
The Flip devices used for the police testing were customized in a collaboration with Visual Labs, a company that repurposes mobile devices for use as body and dash cameras. The modifications, like remapping the volume button to start the camera, were intended to make it easier and faster to begin recording in the field, according to Samsung.
It’s a surprising use case for Samsung to emphasize for its US audience. The Verge picked up on the blog post and was also quick to cite an investigation from ProPublica and The New York Times that demonstrated how local policies can negate the positive value of bodycams, either delaying or preventing footage from being released.
That said, Samsung is hardly the only tech company that has gotten involved with making its products part of law enforcement. Amazon-owned smart doorbell company Ring had (and reversed) policies of how and what footage it would share with officers. There are also broader stories still unfolding around how law enforcement are using technologies such as facial recognition and drones.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra are supposed to be your forever watches. With all those demands to close your circles and long-lasting batteries, you’re never supposed to want to take them off. So I didn’t. I’ve regularly swapped between the two over the past few weeks, never spending a minute without a watch. Occasionally, I’ve worn both simultaneously, going watch-akimbo like a fitness-obsessed cyborg. I wanted to see which one I liked more. All I learned was that Apple and Samsung wearables are at near-complete parity.
Samsung ate Apple’s homework on some of its latest devices. The competing company’s high-end sports watches even bear the same “Ultra” monicker. It’s become a major talking point among Samsung and Apple fans, but it truly doesn’t matter. When Samsung copies a device so well and still manages to sell it for $150 less than the competition, then you’re doing right in my book. I’m not a lawyer; I’m a consumer. I don’t care who steals from whom.
The Galaxy Watch might have a more customizable Ultra-exclusive watch face, but the Apple Watch bears a singular, though significant edge over the Galaxy: analog controls. They both offer near-full two-day battery life, even with always-on displays. Samsung barely edges out Apple with battery life and a spare few unique health tracking features, but it’s not a wide gulf. Otherwise, they pack titanium frames, dual-frequency GPS, programmable buttons, water resistance up to 100 meters, and multi-sport workout tracking. The only question remains: how accurate are these watches tracking your fitness data, especially with Samsung’s latest touted upgrades?
If you’re an outdoor exercise aficionado and an Apple user, you would go with Apple’s Watch Ultra. Ditto with Samsung fiends and the Korean tech giant’s big, durable watch. What I was curious about was the minute differences between them. Is one truly more usable than the other? To find that out, I wore both at the same time through several workouts and on a three-hour hike through Breakneck Ridge just south of Beacon, New York.
The differences between these two watches are so minuscule that I have to dig for comparisons like a prospector sifting for gold in a dry riverbed. There are differences in sensing capabilities, and on its face, Samsung has Apple beat thanks to its blood oxygen sensor (which is currently disabled on Apple wearables) and body composition tracking. Unless you’re particular about sleep apnea testing, there’s not much there that actually changes how you use the watch or what data you get from it.
Apple Watch Ultra Versus Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: Design and Comfort
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
If you ever decide to hike Breakneck Ridge, you’ll find impeccable views of the Hudson River as well as the stumped, green mounds and rising rock faces of the Hudson Highlands. But yes, I kept turning my attention to the watches, which both never shut up about different legs of my journey. They look great, though. I like them both, especially in dark mode, with the glowing red neon feeling very thematic.
The Samsung Watch wins out simply because of its circular face and bounty of customizable complications worked among the buttons and compass. Both are very bright, and they do an excellent job of getting nice and bright when you glance at your wrist, even in direct sunlight.
The Galaxy has a 47-mm watch face compared to the Apple Watch Ultra’s 49-mm, yet the Samsung is the bigger watch. That’s due to its large, square frame, which—combined with its 12.1-mm thickness—makes it a wearable that really takes over your wrist. That said, it’s not uncomfortable—far from it. You never know it’s there, but the size distributes its 60.5 grams of weight over more skin.
The Apple Watch Ultra is similarly thick but not nearly as wide. That means its 61.4 grams of heft are more concentrated on one point. As silly a thing as it is to say, the Apple Watch Ultra feels more noticeable on my wrist. It’s not like either watch is dragging my wrist to the floor, but there is a difference you’ll only ever notice if you dare try both in quick succession.
The digital crown is a godsend. It’s useful for simple things like diving through your app waterfall or selecting watch face colors. The widget-like Tiles on the Samsung Watch Ultra are good for quick access to some apps and weather info, but they would be much easier to control with a dial. The Apple Watch doesn’t have any kinds of tiles, but you know what? It’s not missing much.
The Tiles are nice for quickly accessing some of your most-used widgets or exercise data, but without analog controls, it’s not as enjoyable to swipe through them as they could be. I didn’t miss them at all that much on the Apple Watch Ultra 2 with Smart Stack showing my recent notifications and health data. Perhaps if WearOS 5 on the Ultra lets you implement more than 15, but Samsung told Gizmodo that will be the limit, at least for now.
Apple Watch Ultra Versus Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: Software
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
These are both very powerful watches that last quite a long time, though Samsung might have the slightest edge in battery life. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 uses the S9 SiP, and it’s fast and responsive without any lag in any of the apps I’ve used. The Galaxy Watch Ultra uses a new 3nm processor that’s supposed to be three times faster than last gen. The company also redesigned its sensors, calling the new set its BioActive Sensor, which should offer more accurate readings.
My time with the Apple Watch Ultra 2 was with watchOS 10, though watchOS 11 is currently in beta, and the Cupertino company will likely release it this September. Some pretty nice features are incoming, such as the ability to pause your rings (and finally get a minute of peace). There’s a new Vitals app incoming for sleep tracking and a Training Load tool to tell how your regular exercises impact your overall health.
They’re features meant to compete with Samsung Health’s sleep tracking. For the Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra, Samsung released new sleep apnea and electrocardiogram detection. That sleep apnea detection isn’t on Apple’s wearables, at least not yet. Those capabilities might be enticing to some, but they’re not going to offer a medical diagnosis.
The watch explicitly tells users that if there are any potential issues, they should check in with an actual doctor, but that’s not stopping the Korean tech giant from proclaiming its new sensor tech is more accurate than ever. Samsung also offers body composition snapshots, but the accuracy of those measurements is dubious at best. Apple watches need a separate accessory to judge things like body fat percentage. Based on a study it sponsored, Samsung claims that its body composition results are 97% accurate. Yet, getting results from trained health and nutrition professionals who can tell you the next best steps is better.
With the new generation of watches, both Apple and Samsung now support the same double pinch gesture that works on some notifications and apps. I’ve struggled to get it to work on both devices. It sometimes takes several pinches to get the watch to recognize it, though I had more luck on Apple’s device than Samsung’s.
However, other smaller details differentiate the two. Apple’s watch has a better-designed compass app with a Backtrack mode to help you find your way back to a trail. I can’t compare underwater features since I never took this thing to Davy Jones’ locker.
Apple is conservative when it says you’ll get 36 hours from a full charge without using battery-saving mode. Wearing them both simultaneously, Apple’s device managed to go around 42 hours before needing to charge again. Samsung’s went closer to 46 hours.
Apple Watch Ultra Versus Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: Fitness Metrics
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The Breakneck Ridge trail is notoriously difficult for amateur hikers despite the regular 2.8-mile “Long Loop” only taking a few hours to complete. It starts with a demanding rock scramble up several peaks, so it front-loads the heart-pounding, calorie-burning action early on. The trail then falls into a routine of straight paths across the forested peaks before eventually transforming into a slightly treacherous stroll downhill along pebble-strewn trails.
On my hike, both Ultra watches had consistent elevation gain, but that’s where the two stopped agreeing on my workout’s metrics. Apple’s high-end watch measured my top elevation at 1,218 feet compared to Samsung’s at 1,270 feet. The Apple Watch breaks down heart rate into different zones than Samsung does. Apple’s heart rate zones list my aerobic heart rate as between 145 and 158 BPM. Samsung says my aerobic workout sits between 134 and 152 BPM. According to Doctor Apple, I spent 24 minutes of my 2-hour and 10-minute hike with an aerobic heartbeat. Doctor Samsung disagrees, saying I only spent 33 minutes at vigorous intensity.
Two watches, two very different scores. Left, Apple Fitness; right, Samsung Health. Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
The stated length for the Wilkinson Trail Loop of Breakneck Ridge is 3.2 miles. Alltrails start the trail in the center of the loop, on the road between where the hike begins and ends. Samsung’s watch said I did exactly 3.13 miles, which seems accurate. For some odd reason, Apple declared my hike was 3.45 miles. Apple likes to measure pace in minutes per mile rather than Samsung’s miles per hour. It could be a difference in how each device tracks GPS.
What’s more strange is that these two watches presented wildly different numbers for total calories burned. The Apple Watch Ultra declared I had 546 active calories and 738 total calories burned (which includes basal or non-workout calories, such as during a break). Samsung’s Watch Ultra claimed I burned through 1,126 calories on my hike.
During a normal workout during sword practice at the gym, the Galaxy Watch recorded that I burned 709 calories. The Apple Watch claims it was 616 in total. Apple says my average heart rate was 72 BPM, while Samsung says it was 85 BPM.
As a reminder, these watches can’t actively track calories with any particular sensor. They instead calculate the calories you burn based on your personal information and workout routine. Both watches had the same information about my health, but Apple’s judged my workouts much more harshly than Samsung did. I still wouldn’t take Apple’s data at face value. Stanford researchers stressed in a paper from 2017 that no wearable is really great at determining energy expenditure. As more recent tests of fitness wearables show, neither rings, nor bands, nor watches can calculate a precise measurement of your calorie burn.
Fitness-minded techies like YouTuber Rob Ter Horst judged the heart rate accuracy of these latest Apple and Galaxy watches compared to more medical-minded sensors. In those tests, the Apple Watch was normally more accurate by a few percentage points than Samsung’s. That falls in line with a recent study of the Apple Watch’s ECG sensing is fairly accurate, though not to a pure medical-grade extent. In this case, I would trust Apple’s heart rate tracking more than Samsung’s.
But that’s all beside the point. You should not use these smart watches for medically accurate health measurements. They’re better considered as metrics to judge your own improvement. Samsung Health and Apple Fitness apps will show your heart rate recovery after a workout, but Apple can break down your heart rate over more granular time segments than Samsung. I don’t stress about every little detail of my fitness routine, but for those that do it’s a small point in Apple’s favor.
Verdict: They’re Both Damn Expensive, but Damn Good Watches
Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo
Samsung has the benefit that its high-end watch costs $150 less MSRP than Apple’s and packs a slightly better battery. On the flip side, I might like the Apple Watch Ultra 2 more in pure usability simply because of the digital crown. I don’t have to worry about smudging up my tiny screen with all my pertinent fitness data with a little dial.
I said it in my review, and I’m saying it now—Samsung should bring the rotating bezel to the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. At that point, with its full two-day battery life, it will be the perfect sports watch, on equal or better footing than Apple.
But you can’t go wrong either way. They’re so comparable that I sometimes go to the wrong phone to check my data when I’m wearing one or the other.WatchOSS 11 may do more for tracking your sleep cycles, and perhaps that matters to you. I can say for certain that you shouldn’t feel like you’re missing out if you’re hanging in Samsung’s camp or kicking it with Apple.
I used tolove Samsung’s wireless earbuds. They came in all types of magical shapes and sizes, with designs that genuinely seemed to embrace the new frontier that totally portable listening devices offered. Why on earth the brand shifted course and began imitating Apple (badly) for its third generation of wireless buds, I honestly can’t say.
The new Galaxy Buds3 look (and mostly act) like a Cybertruck version of standard AirPods, rather than an updated version of the Buds2 that I gave a 9/10, WIRED Recommends badge a few years ago. They cost more than the AirPods, are even less comfortable, and sound worse.
What’s particularly baffling isn’t that Samsung is bobbing for Apple’s designs, it’s that it had perfectly excellent earbuds to begin with. The Galaxy Buds3 sound worse than their predecessors, work worse than their predecessors, and cost more than their predecessors. They aren’t very good at all, even when compared to AirPods (which also aren’t very good).
Back in the Box
It gets embarrassing as soon as you start unboxing them: The case is a rip-off of the rounded rectangular thing you get with the AirPods Pro (8/10, WIRED Recommends), but with a clear plastic top that makes it look and feel cheaper. The case works fine, with wireless and USB-C charging so you can place them on a mat by your door so you don’t forget them when you head out.
The buds themselves look as though AirPods took a flight to Austin, Texas, with nearly identical rounded plastic upper ear tips that transform into silver triangles as you go toward the tip of the elephant trunk. (They also come in white, where they look so much like Apple’s product that you probably would mistake them if you saw someone wearing them.) There is a bright red accent on the right earbud (and inside the case) to tell you which bud is which, which is admittedly a nice addition over Apple’s drab white nothingness, but otherwise these look like Cybertrucked AirPods in every sense of the word.
Photograph: Parker Hall
They’re larger and more cumbersome to insert than standard AirPods, especially thanks to said triangular design: Gripping a triangle to adjust an ear tip is significantly harder than gripping a rounded cylinder, which makes putting them in and out of your ears a test of dexterity.
Same goes for the controls, which use the same squeeze and swipe controls that AirPods offer, except the shape of the buds means I always messed up the way they were sitting in my ears whenever I wanted to adjust volume or change tracks. What happened to the simple touch controls and shockingly comfortable design of the Buds2?
On the Go
The main feature Samsung is touting for these new buds is that they have AI onboard, so you can use voice controls to change songs, adjust volume, answer calls, and even do real-time translation. The voice controls work fine, but Samsung’s AI-based translation isn’t great; I asked my wife, who is fluent in Spanish (the most likely language to be used for this here in the United States), to speak a few sentences, and the app missed all context and translated poorly. Stick to Google Translate.
The app is full of all sorts of other unhelpful features too. The headphones will, for some reason, remind you if your neck has been bent over for too long. If you’re bent over for so long you’re getting neck pain, I’m not sure a pair of headphones cheerfully chirping at you will solve the problem.
Then there is the active noise canceling: Because the headphones have such a poor seal, it’s like putting an air conditioner next to an open window. Sure, the ANC does what it can to remove outside noise, but without a physical barrier (like ear tips) to seal out the world (or place it through some sort of venting like Apple does with the AirPods Pro and Samsung used to do with the older Galaxy Buds), its abilities are limited. All this to say: You won’t get silence wearing these buds, even with ANC cranked and your music blasting along with it.
To test the Galaxy Watch Ultra, I had to take off the Apple Watch Ultra 2 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) with a mere two days left to go before completing my 28-day preliminary Training Load analysis. Training Load is a new feature in watchOS 11 that takes cumulative, calorimetric data like heart rate, pace, effort, and age to gauge whether your efforts are improving your fitness performance or not. It was annoying to be so close and not finish. However, it was not as annoying as it might have been, since I’ve tried this feature before. Garmin has had a Training Load feature for years.
In the race to create the most fully-featured outdoor smartwatch that works well with your phone, Apple is clearly winning. The Apple Watch Ultra’s design is more visually distinctive. The software is better, with more sports like diving, better algorithms like Training Load, and a better UI. It’s also hilarious how closely the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s design mimics Apple’s, with a safety orange band that looks exactly like Apple’s Ocean Band ($99) and a Quick Button on the side where you can assign a function, like Apple’s Action button. There’s even a gesture-based feature very similar to Double Tap, which is called (still laughing) Double Pinch.
With all that said, Samsung has the resources to catch up quickly, and I found no major flaws. If you’re pretty happy as an Android user and would like the experience of wearing an Apple Watch Ultra, this is a decent start. It can only get better.
Add It Up
The Galaxy Watch Ultra is very pretty. It’s not as visually distinctive as the Apple Watch Ultra, but its design does echo the look of a high-end Garmin or Coros watch. It’s a 47-mm smartwatch, which makes it slightly smaller than the Watch Ultra’s 49-mm case, but it feels bigger because it’s square instead of rectangular.
It has a titanium case with a sapphire glass face that is rated to 10 ATM (which means it can withstand the pressure exerted by 100 meters of water) and IP68, and can withstand elevations as high as 9,000 meters and temperatures as high as 131 degrees Fahrenheit. I didn’t have the opportunity to bag a Colorado 14er while testing, but I did stupidly go biking to run errands with temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in a heat wave, and the watch operated well (I did not).
Photograph: Adrienne So
Battery life is my main issue with these smartwatches turned extreme fitness trackers. The Watch Ultra can last a little longer than two days, which is great for a smartwatch but far below what you’d need for your average weekend camping trip. Every other morning, it took three hours to charge the watch back up from 10 or 15 percent. With Power Saving mode on, the watch could last up to three to five days. I like being able to tinker with the settings to figure out what to turn off or keep on to extend the battery life.
Samsung notes that the watch has a new enhanced BioActive sensor, which increases the accuracy of the heart rate sensor and other new health metrics. It’s remarkably consistent with what I track on my Oura ring—for example, if the Oura said my heart rate was 69, the live reading on the Galaxy Watch Ultra was 70.
The other new feature is the AGEs index. According to Samsung, the Galaxy Watch 7 and Watch Ultra can measure your advanced glycation end products (AGEs). (Diagnoptics is the company that powers the tool, which takes readings via a light source that excites specific fluorescent moieties, or molecule parts, on your skin). Your AGEs index is important because it can help predict the risk of diabetes and stroke; the way most people do this now is by taking a test called an A1C, which is a more invasive blood test.
