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Samsung Unpacked 2024: Key Product Announcements
The hotly anticipated Galaxy Unpacked event showed off the company’s premium new smartphones for the first time, and revealed an unexpected new wearable.
South Korean tech giant Samsung has started 2024 by unveiling the Galaxy S24 series at the highly anticipated Galaxy Unpacked event. The new smartphones come equipped with on-device generative AI, enhanced specifications, and upgraded camera capabilities.
As customary for Samsung’s early-year events, the S24 flagship phones took center stage. This year, the spotlight was on generative AI, a technology that has gained prominence with the arrival of ChatGPT, Google Bard and more. The Galaxy S24 series is among the first phones to launch with Qualcomm’s cutting-edge Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, which features on-device generative AI capabilities.
The S24 series combines on-device and cloud-based generative AI, referred to as Galaxy AI, to deliver a range of innovative features. Some of these features, like live translation and text message tone suggestions, may sound familiar, while others, such as converting regular-speed videos into slow-motion by generating extra frames, are entirely new.
The top-tier model in the S24 series, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, has received substantial upgrades. It now boasts a titanium body, a 50-megapixel 5x optical camera for sharper distance photography (replacing the 10-megapixel 10x optical zoom camera), and comes with 12GB of RAM.
The standard S24 and S24+ models have fewer upgrades, with slightly larger screens and improved resolutions compared to their predecessors. The S24+ now shares the same Quad HD Plus resolution display as the S24 Ultra. Battery capacities have also increased slightly.
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Samsung has also stepped up efforts to incorporate more recycled materials in the devices, including using cobalt in batteries and rare earth elements in speakers. Notably, Galaxy S24 phones will now receive seven years of Android and security updates, extending their lifespan into 2031.
Towards the end of the event, Samsung unveiled upcoming enhancements to Samsung Health, particularly in the realm of sleep tracking and other health metrics. The event’s climax was the surprise announcement of the Galaxy Ring, a device expected to be equipped with various sensors for continuous health monitoring throughout the day.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Pricing
Pricing for the Samsung Galaxy S24 starts at $800, the S24+ begins at $1,000, and the S24 Ultra will set enthusiasts back $1,300. Prices are in line with last year’s models, with the increase in the S24 Ultra attributed to the use of more durable materials.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
