Time For a Galaxy S26 Ultra Reality Check - We're Back!

We catch up after a long break and then go deep on Samsung’s latest wave of products, from the Galaxy S26 Ultra to the Buds4 Pro, with a lot of blunt talk about what’s actually improved. We also dig into the AI phone narrative, the new privacy display, and a few Samsung decisions that feel hard to defend.

• impressions from Samsung Unpacked and living with the Galaxy S26 Ultra
• camera processing upgrades and why 5x zoom stands out
• Horizon Lock video stability and where it helps
• Galaxy AI features that save time vs features that miss
• priority notifications learning curve and real workflow value
• notification summaries limitations and app support gaps
• audio eraser on YouTube and other third-party apps
• what makes an “AI phone” once agents get fast
• privacy display best-use setup for banking messaging and notifications
• 10-bit display claim controversy and what FRC means
• 60W charging gains and Samsung’s conservative safety throttles
• S Pen feels cheaper and what it signals
• One UI 8.5 performance plus automatic call screening
• Buds4 Pro sound fit ANC and value compared to premium rivals
• why the base Galaxy S26 feels overpriced for the specs
• Quick Share adding Airdrop compatibility and why it’s slower
• Tab S11 Ultra Pro keyboard pricing and Samsung’s tablet strategy issues
make sure you go to SammyGuru.com, go to our page and click on the link on the pre-order page and buy them there.
Make sure you keep expanding your galaxy.

S26 Ultra Mystery Box Sign up: https://laylo.com/springer/8g0gnSvT
Video Podcast on Youtube: https://bit.ly/3yBw3Ro

Follow Jeff on X (Twitter): https://x.com/jspring86az
Follow Torrey on X:  https://x.com/T_Martin_23
Check out our website: https://sammyguru.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Welcome back, everybody. This is episode number 57 of the Sammy Guru Podcast. My name is Jeff Springer. With me as always, my co-host Tori. Tori, say hi.

SPEAKER_04 0:07

Hey, how's it going? And it's been five weeks. My gosh. It has been.

SPEAKER_02 0:12

We went all the way from winter to spring. It's April 1st. This is not an April Fool's joke. No, it is. This is a real episode of the Sam Miguel Podcast. I know you guys were probably thinking these guys would not come back because they're just they're just lazy. They're probably it's going to cut off in like 10 seconds from now. But it doesn't, I promise. It's at least an hour long. Where it's a real podcast today. Yeah. Tori, how have you been? April Fool's Day? Did you get fooled today?

SPEAKER_04 0:34

Uh no, I did not get fooled today. Uh no fool. No, no, no, no. Um, no, no, no. Uh, doing pretty good. Just had a uh airhead, you know, probably another one at some point.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Yeah, we got a stack of airheads over here on the podcast table because we still gotta do a little spring clean to clean up our the last mystery box. I'm working on getting a storage to put all of our mystery box inventory because it's just the whole entire storage closet is full from the last three launches. And we're gonna start doing the Sammy Group rewards that we fulfill all the time. I've already started setting that up. People buy a phone even without the pre-order, they get a free case at least and a charger. They won't get all the mystery box stuff. Like there's not gonna be golden or silver tickets. That's gonna still be special to the mystery boxes. We gotta get all this stuff out of the office. There's so much stuff in here. Yeah, but the good news is, you know, we've got like a hundred airheads sitting right here on the table. That we do because we had an extra box of airheads after we finished packing all the boxes, and I kept some for people who had like uh insufficient address or got returned or whatever. But how's the school going? You only got like what, like seven weeks left, maybe? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then Tori will be here full time for like seven or eight weeks, something like that. Yep in the summer.

SPEAKER_04 1:42

Yeah, yeah, we got about seven weeks, and then uh the last um little week would probably be the second to last week of May. And then yeah, uh full time at semi-groove from the end of May till close to the end of July.

The Mac Guru April Fools Prank

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Yeah, yeah. The third to fourth week of July. Yeah. So that's cool. So Tori will be here for seven to eight weeks. We'll probably be a lot better the brocast regularity then because Tori will be here for like six hours a day in the office, so yeah, we can accomplish other tasks, and then Tori will already be here, so we can always record on time and get stuff going. It's tough, you know, managing our schedules during the time where Tori is teaching. Um, what else was I gonna say? Oh, I I did a little April Fool's joke yesterday. Oh, yeah. The key now is the preemptive April Fool's joke. Oh, yes, because you can't just do the joke on April Fool's Day because everyone's waiting for it.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Yeah, you gotta do it the day before.

SPEAKER_02 2:35

So yesterday I tweeted out on X. I still call it tweeting because I'm not gonna call it posting or whatever. It's tweeting to me. Uh, I said, uh, tomorrow I'm unveiling my latest venture, which is Mac Guru, the website covering all things Apple, which will be a sister site to our beloved Sammy Guru. I couldn't resist the temptation. Covering Apple is just too important to the mobile space. That's what I said. Yeah, and a lot of people liked it, and they're like, I love this, it's exciting. They're like, I'm an Apple fan, we can't wait. I got a lot of people on that one. Even uh Colin, I think, saw it, and he was like, he's like, I would be so good at covering some Apple stuff for Mac Guru. And you know, we're not doing the Mac Guru. Yeah, yeah, we're not doing Mac Guru. There's no Mac Guru. I thought about setting up the like a fake domain that then redirected back to Sammy Gru and said happy April Fool's Day, but I had too many other things to do. I wish I had enough time to set up the full elaborate nature of the full April Fool's Day prank, but it was still pretty funny. I got a lot of people who liked it and commented on the post. So that was entertaining, you know. Um, a lot of stuff has happened since we've uh been off in Samsung and in life. Um obviously I went to Unpacked, so I'll talk a little bit about the experience at Unpacked, what the general vibe was. Let's talk about that today. Uh, we've we've been living, you know, everybody at Sami Guru, all the editors, and I have a phone, uh, S26, and I'll talk a little bit about my experience today. Um, I kind of got lost in the whole situation of doing everyone's upgrade. I I I might upgrade Tori's phone too. I just forgot about it, Tori, honestly. I forgot about it. But that's if you don't, if you want to upgrade, I don't even know if you would like to upgrade, because you might not like the S26 Ultra, who knows? Well, hey, I gotta hear your thoughts. We could talk about that today. So, yeah, because I was upgrading somebody's phone, so many people's phones, because I upgraded the editor's phones because they're helping me write the full review. But yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about the S26 Ultra and the base S26. Uh, I have the regular S26 and the Ultra. I bought a plus, but I shipped that off to Jolly Old England to our writer Josh Skinner, who's in the UK, a very talented guy, and I thought he deserved it. So I he's gonna he's gonna keep it after he's done with the review. He's reviewing it for us. So his review will be coming in the next week or two. I I can't review all three of them. So, and Samsung did not send me that one for free. That one was the one I bought myself. So uh, in fact, all those phones that I gave to the editors, they didn't send us review units for those. They gave me one review unit that I got in California, and all the other phones I bought for the other people at Sammy Grew to work on reviews with me, those were on my own dime, right out of the company coffers. They were not free, not discounted, they were not not any of those things. They were expensive. Um, so we could talk about that. Um, there's been some other interesting things that have been happening too. I don't know if you saw Tori, but Airdrop is now finally compatible with your Galaxy phone, well, at least certain Galaxy phones. No, I don't know. So now if you have friends with iPhones, just airdrop some files to them. Samsung finally did it. Samsung and Google came together and made it happen. Okay. And it does work. It does work. But I have some things to say about it as well. It works, but there's a couple caveats. These are what we call teasers. Yeah, so like usually I don't do enough like teasers of the content, I just go right into it. So I'm going over kind of the things I plan to talk about so that way you guys can get hyped up and stick around for the rest of the show.

SPEAKER_04 6:07

Yeah, you know, it's kind of true because I do uh uh everything you you're seeing just now is like okay, he normally goes into it, so it's kind of nice. He even it's a little teaser for me, too.

S26 Ultra Overall First Impressions

Camera Gains And Horizon Lock

SPEAKER_02 6:17

There you go. Uh Samsung finally released the Galaxy Tab S11 Ultra Pro keyboard. It only took them seven months after they released the tablet. I mean, it's just absolutely insane. And they also released it at absolutely insano in the braino price. Um, I bought one and it's gonna go to one of the other writers at Samy Guru, not to me. It's gonna come here first. I'm gonna take some video of it and some photos because I have a better camera than most of the other people at Samiguru, just because obviously I do YouTube as well, so I need a really high-end camera. So I'm gonna take all the photo and video, I'm gonna send it off to Fidel, who's gonna review it. He's our kind of tablet guru at Sami Guru. We've kind of assimilated a nice team. We've got like a guru for everything. We got like W Vision, he's the camera guru. You know, Fidel is the tablet guru. We've got our editors who are kind of the everything gurus. We've got Josh, who's like the one UI guru, uh, along with Mohammed and keep up with one UI. Those are like our one UI gurus. We got like a guru for every different subcategory of Samsung. Yeah, no. That was kind of my original vision was to have like a guru for everything, you know, and we're the podcast gurus. Yep. That's what we're doing here. So yeah, they released that. We'll talk about that. It's it's uh insane how much money they're charging for that keyboard. Oh my goodness. I don't understand how anyone's even bought it, but people are buying it because we've we've sold some through our affiliate link. I I don't I'm surprised because it it's so expensive. You could buy almost an entire computer for it. Um, of course, we've got some rumors to talk about because once one launch is over, yeah, it's time for the next launch, and all everybody cares about in this business is the next thing. You know, the current thing is as soon as the current thing launches, it's no longer that that interesting. It's time to think about the next thing. And since we're a media site, we kind of have to think about that as well. So we've got to talk about Z Flip 8, Z Fold 8, and the new device coming this year in July, the Z Wide Fold. So they're they're going to be competing with our good friends at Google who have the wider aspect ratio where the phone has a wider cover screen. And when you unfold it, it's wider instead of being taller, like the regular Z Fold 8. Interesting. So we're gonna have two Z Fold 8s this year. One will be the tall fold, which is the proper one, and then the wider fold, which will be the new entry in the device. We've also got Galaxy Watch 9 stuff already leaking. We expect the Watch 9 series to go live in July as well. That's pretty much confirmed. Uh the Galaxy Book 6 Pro 6 Ultra released. I have a Galaxy Book 6 Pro on my desk right now. Talk about that a little bit, looking at it. Uh, I can say a little bit about that. You know, there's just so many things we could talk about, and then you know, I'm sure we're gonna miss some things, but uh uh we could jump in and just at the beginning here, there's probably some other things I'll scroll through and see along the way. But let's start by talking about the Galaxy S26 Ultra, because obviously that was the biggest thing that happened between the last time we did a podcast and now, and obviously the last time we were doing the podcast, we were talking about what to expect from Unpacked, and then I went to Unpacked, got to experience it. You um I unpacked it. Oh, and of course, Buds4 Pro, talk about that too, because they were launched as well. And I did give Tori a pair of those. So even though he doesn't have the S26 Ultra, Tori does have Buds4 Pro. So we can both give some thoughts on that after I talk about the S26 series. So uh here's my thoughts about the S26 series Ultra first, and then I'll talk about the base. Um, after using it now for a little over a month, because I had a review in it starting on the day of the launch, which was February 25th, I've had an S26 Ultra now for about five weeks. Um, I would say I'm surprised with how good it is as a total package. Um, I think there's a lot of things that people were skeptical of, me included, going into the launch, that actually ended up being bigger upgrades in terms of the final result than we thought. And one example of that is the camera. I mean, I have to admit, even though I bashed Samsung for not doing proper hardware upgrades, the majority of the sensors, and you know, I still think that four years way too long to upgrade the prime you know, the hardware. And hopefully, according to some S27 Ultra leaks, which are already coming out, those are way too early S27 Ultra leaks, but yeah, but that happens all the time. I mean, there's always leaks, but they're very early. But that we might get a hardware upgrade next year. I'm not gonna get too invested until we get to like once we get to like September, October, then like the leaks are a little more legit. But for now, it we could. But but back to the S26 Ultra. I I thought maybe the camera upgrade was nothing gonna be that special, but I will give Samsung credit where it's due. They did optimize the power of the brand new processor from Qualcomm along with their own software, and they've made some impressive improvements. Um, in the main camera, in low light, it's overall better. I mean, in terms of the images, they look more true to life, in my opinion. Low light performance is better with less noise, and for the cameras they did improve some of the hardware on, um, you know, the overall like the 5x zoom has improved massively. The 5x zoom is so good. Uh, I mean, you you you can really get really good shots now uh with a 5x zoom. So if you're someone who likes to capture macro, you can even take quality macro shots with your 5x zoom. The only downside is you know, the minimum focus distance here has now gotten a little longer, so you have to be further away from it in order to shoot it. Okay, but I still think it's worth the trade-off. Like I I've honestly been impressed with what Samsung was able to do with the processing in the cameras. And I I thought originally the cameras were not gonna be much of a story when it came to the S26 Ultra. And then also they had this special feature, which I don't know if you saw any of the coverage on it, but you've got this new video feature which is called Horizon Lock. And the way Horizon Lock works is if you want to shoot a video and you want to basically have it shoot it in you want to be able to like move it wherever you want, and it still keeps it stable, you know, like keeps the current where wherever you start, that frame stays right in focus. Uh Horizon Lock lets you do this, and it's really impressive how good Horizon Lock is. A lot of people did you know various various videos where uh they essentially would flip the camera upside down and it would still keep everything you know in focus and in the frame. So basically, when you go up here, you go to this, this turns super steady with horizon lock on. And what basically happens is when you have super steady with horizon lock on, I can shoot a video, like a view, for instance. Let me shoot a video of you like this. And what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna flip this camera entirely upside down multiple times, and then obviously if you didn't have any kind of special processing, you would see that turning and all that the jarring and all the jerking in the footage. And so if you watch the footage back now, let's take a look and see how much you notice it being flipped upside down. You really don't notice it much at all.

SPEAKER_04 14:02

Yeah, I I didn't notice it at all. It's kind of like it's like it was kind of just like resetting. Yeah, like it's resetting a little bit.

SPEAKER_02 14:09

But it does a great job of keeping you in focus, and obviously, most of the time when you shoot footage, you know, for real, yeah, you're not actually going to be flipping it upside down fully. I mean, that's not a thing that people are doing for the most part, but it's really impressive how well it it keeps the person or the subject locked, the horizon locked, and the steady shot. So that's a really cool feature as well. So I think they they made some impressive improvements along the camera, even though I kind of thought the camera was kind of a snooze fest going into the to the event. And there was really nothing in the event that surprised us. We already knew all the hardware specs. So the only real question was, you know, did they do enough in the processing? Were there any special features that actually made it worth it? And it turns out that it looks like it looks like they did, in my opinion, for the camera.

SPEAKER_04 15:05

Um well, so then can I ask you, um, you know, because uh me and Colin and I were um you know uh running the uh the whole the live stream, yeah. Yeah, live stream. And so uh, you know, a lot of people are kind of echoing uh that even though Samsung opted not to go like full on like crazy innovation, like when it came to physical stuff, and uh they're really promoting the AI features of the phone and that it is an AI phone. Do you feel like this is an AI phone?

Galaxy AI Hits And Duds

SPEAKER_02 15:38

It's a good question. So I mean, yeah, let's talk about let's talk about that next. I mean, there's a lot of things to talk about here. Let's jump to the AI stuff. So there's a couple of genuinely useful AI features, in my opinion, and then there's a lot of them that are not necessarily that useful or kind of miss the mark. So the one that I called out on the first two days that I had the review in it in San Francisco, and I said, hey, it doesn't look like this is working very well, was priority notifications. And I was completely wrong about that. It just took time for the AI to learn. So priority notifications is very, very good. And I think probably the best implementation I've seen on any smartphone, um, Apple or Google, any of the main smartphones, it it does a very good job of figuring out what is is useful to you, what you usually check, and what you would find to be a priority, and it pulls it out. I find myself a lot of the times now only looking at the priority notifications. I don't know if there's one right now, if you can see. Uh there's not one flagged right now, because I probably because I just opened the notifications, it goes away after a minute. Yeah, but sometimes now I only look at the priority notifications at the top because it's gotten so good at taking the noise out of my notifications and filtering out the stuff I'm interested in. So I was really impressed with that. Um, the other feature that they talked about along with that one that's an absolute dud, in my opinion, is the notification summaries. We talked about how bad I thought this was with Apple's implementation originally, and they've gotten better. But uh I feel like the notification summaries are really bad for one main reason. They work in the apps that Samsung has implemented them in. But there's only like two or three apps that it works in. It's like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Google Messages, and that's it. And those are not really the apps where I would really want summarization. The main apps that I would want summarization is my Gmail, my Slack, places where I get a lot of stuff that I have to take actions on. I don't really need summarization in my personal conversations, although it's nice to have sometimes. In fact, the thing, the place I get summarizations the most are messages from you because we talk on Facebook Messenger. Yeah. And you're really the main person I speak talk to on there. And then some of the and then some of the uh some of the people I talk with um for brands who are in China or Korea or other countries, I talk to them on WhatsApp, so I get notifications and summaries of those, which that could be useful. I mean, that there's nothing wrong with that. That can certainly be useful. But I would rather Gmail is the biggest one. Like, why can I not get it in Gmail? Uh and the other thing is the app that I use for messaging, which is Beeper, which is an app I've talked about before, it aggregates all my messaging apps in one app. Yeah. So I don't have to check WhatsApp, X, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages. It puts them all in one app. Samsung's notification summaries do not work with Beeper, which obviously that's really sucks for me because that's the app I usually use for every messaging. I replace all the other ones and turn their notifications off. The Pixel, on the other hand, I have a Pixel 10 Pro fold. Its notification summaries work with Gmail, Slack, Beeper, all the apps that I wish Samsung's did. So I very rarely that that's not something that's worked great for me so far. Um the other AI feature that I thought was a huge dud is the now nudge, which is supposed to give you contextual information when you're doing certain tasks, like helpful information. I have never in three five weeks of using it seen it offered one thing to me. And I do tons of stuff on my phone, tons of work tasks. You know, I edit photos in Canva, I do lots of stuff in various productivity acts like Slack and Asana, Notion, social apps. It's never suggested anything to me at all. I I have it on, it doesn't work. Uh, a couple of the other guys in the Sammy Guru, Slack, who also have the phone, they've also said they've only seen it either none or once. And the one time they saw it was like not a helpful suggestion. So now Nudge, you know, that needs to go back into the oven and be baked a little longer. Yeah. It's not fully done. Some of the developers need to cook that up a little bit longer. It's not working. Um, but then another one that I think is really a massive hit is the audio eraser now coming to third-party apps because now you can use audio eraser, which is part of Galaxy i, to erase audio in YouTube videos and Netflix. That's pretty huge, especially the YouTube videos.

SPEAKER_03 20:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:08

Like if you're listening to a vlog or something, like someone's vlogging outside and it's got a lot of background noise, turn on audio eraser and you can clearly hear what they're saying. Especially useful. I find it, I've used it quite a few times. Like if I'm watching a tutorial on something I want to learn how to do, and the person either doesn't have very good audio, maybe they didn't use a very good mic, or they're doing it in a place that's kind of noisy, then you can hear exactly what they're saying. Um, sometimes you want that background noise depending on what the video is. The ambient noise might be add to the video, but if you don't, if it's a tutorial and you just want the information, obviously you don't want background noise because you just want to focus on what they're telling you. So I find that to be a very helpful feature. Bringing audio eraser to third-party apps, I think that was really smart on Samsung's part. And it does work very well. So basically, two features I really love the priority notifications, audio eraser, and third-party apps, and then two features that I found to be not particularly that helpful to me. Um, a lot of the other AI features I don't really use that much, like the new AI studio, creator studio. I don't I don't do a lot of stuff by making like silly AI pictures and stickers. My son likes it, but like that's not a feature I would use a ton. Uh, and now it does it also has this fit the features in the photo editor now where it can use Galaxy AI to basically edit your photo and and like remove stuff and things like that. But here's the problem uh one of the other journalists, I think, is Alex from Android Headlines, he posted on X a tweet that went viral and got millions of impressions. Uh when he was still in San Francisco, there was fog like the day after the event, and he took like a photo of San Francisco by our hotel with the fog, and then he asked Galaxy I to remove the fog and did a great job. Like you could see everything perfectly now, but the problem is. Is the AI also does things that it you didn't tell it to do? Like there was a flag that was like blowing in the wind a certain way, and when it took away fog, it actually straightened the flag out and made it a different position. So it actually changes a bunch of things about the photo, so it's not really that photo anymore. So is that really an edit, or is that uh reimagining or AI generated similar photo that's AI generated? Yeah, it sounds more like the last one. That's what I don't like, is that a lot of these AI photo editing things, even on the Pixel as well, they don't just do what you say because they they try to improve the photo to such that they actually end up changing various other features that you might have wanted. Yeah. And depending on the context of what the photo is for, could change the photo in a way that maybe it's no longer as useful to you. Of course, you can always revert it back. So not like it's the biggest deal. But it's like I don't use that that much because you know I just find that it edits too many things that I wouldn't or I didn't tell it to do. So I do feel like the AI has gotten better, not to the level that I would call it an AI phone. The majority of the features and the way people are using them are still smartphone-based. Yeah, so no, AI is is getting very useful. I still I certainly use AI even more in my life now than I did a year ago. I think the I mean, like I said, I uh as I've maintained the entire time, I think AI is the most useful in the business sector. If you're using it for your job, your professional life, or if you run a business like I do, like Claude and ChatGPT are super useful to me because it automates tons of automates tons of tasks that like I would have to spend, you know, I would never be able to do everything I do right now if I wasn't using those tools. Yeah. Because it helps me draft my scripts. I just dump like random thoughts in and it makes a formatted document that's 15 pages long. That's exactly what I would want, but that would take me three hours to write on my own. Yeah, for sure. And all it did was organize like my raw thoughts. And I can even speak voice to text and have to write them down. I don't have to type them. Yeah. And you know, it takes me 10 minutes to make something that would take three hours to do. It answers all my emails just from instructions I've given it, very careful instructions. So then in the morning, all I have to do is approve, sending the drafts instead of writing everyone manually. And for the amount of email I get, yeah, you get a lot. I respond to 50, 60 emails a morning from various inquiries, things I need to do for Sammy Guru, you know, brand increase for my web for YouTube. And you know, a lot of them aren't necessarily worth my time, but you don't want to miss one and miss an opportunity where there could be. So having AI draft them, it kind of you know comes up with a score to see how important it could be and then responds accordingly. And Claude does a really good job with that. But I don't think smartphones are yet to the point where they are at that level. I will say the one other demo, we're spending a lot of time on AI, but hey, Samsung did too on their Q. Yeah, no, they did. Maybe we should. Um the other demo they did, which I did try, is that now with the S26 and also on the Pixel, Gemini can take full control of your phone and it can actually do tasks as an agent, which ChatGPT and Claude both also have now. Um and it could basically do tasks for you like you can just say to Gemini, order me a double cheeseburger with a large fry and a sprite from DoorDash McDonald's, and it will open the app, add the items to cart, go all the way to the checkout process. You can even tell it which card to choose, and they'll just pull it up for you to review, and then all you have to do is hit order. You can even actually have it do it for you, but of course you probably want to double check it. I think you probably want to check. And it can also do the same thing for your ride. And I tried that when I was in San Francisco, it can book your Uber, and so when I was leaving that hotel coming back to Phoenix, uh, and I needed to catch an Uber back to SFO to fly home. I tried it because I was like, I want to try this. And I said, you know, schedule me an Uber for 9 15 at the hotel that we were at, and I need to get to the airport. Actually, no, I didn't even say 9 15 because I wanted to see if it could figure out by looking at the travel times what time I should leave. So I said, schedule me an Uber in time for me to reach SFO by 10 a.m. Because I have a flight that's at 11:30. I need to be there an hour and a half early, and it did then at a certain time. I did that the previous night. I said, do this tomorrow at start researching this at a certain time, and it brought it up and did it and just had it ready for me to confirm. I just hit it and my Uber was there. All right. Now, one thing I'll say it's very slow though, because you can actually see a replay of what Jim and I did and how long it took it to figure it out. Um, you know, it's not like uh the Jetsons where everything happens instantly. We're not at that future just yet. It basically took Jim and I, I looked at their screen recording, it took like 11 minutes for it to book my Uber. Interesting, which would have taken me about probably about 50 seconds, maybe. I can do it in less than a minute. Yeah. Because you know, I know everything is in the Uber app. I don't need to do any of the ACR, you know, recording of the screen, like what the gym, what what the program has to do, I just open it up to fire through. So it's definitely way slower if if you're in a time crunch. You know, if you need an Uber now, yeah, you're best just doing it yourself. Don't get Gym and I to do your Uber right now. And like, you know, if you're hungry like right now, don't get Gemini to order your dinner on DoorDash Uber Eats because you might not be eating for like an hour and a half. If you're hungry, you know, order it yourself or go pick it up. Don't have it ordering your food through food delivery. But it does work. Yeah. And like I really think that when we get to the level of like where Claude or Gemini or whatever, you know, the all Samsung, Google, and you know, obviously Google's gonna work with Gemini, but if Samsung, I I would really like to see Samsung work with Claude. I know they're doing perplexity, but I like Claude. Claude is my favorite AI now by far. If they had like Claude agents on the phone, just like Gemini's gonna have, that could go and do anything you want in the background, yeah. That's when it really becomes for me an AI phone. You know, like AI doing stuff that we're like making silly photos or stickers.

SPEAKER_04 28:01

Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of like that's not what I want. What people really want for yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Privacy Display Setup And Caveats

SPEAKER_02 28:07

What people really want for me to call it a truly from a smartphone to an AI phone, is I need to have agents that I can have do anything that I would do on my phone that takes me a long time, or that I need to do at a certain time, I need to be able to schedule an agent to do all that stuff and needs to do it fast, about at least 10 times faster than Gemini does now. And it needs to be accurate such that for certain things, I don't feel like I don't even need to check that it's right. I'm just gonna know. Um, now, of course, some things you would still want to check. Like my food delivery order, I probably still check. Yeah. Because hey, if I get my double cheeseburger and it has mayo on it, I don't want mayo on my double cheeseburger, I don't like it, I'm gonna be pissed. Yeah. Then, you know, I might have a chat, give a pink slip to my pink slip it. I'll pink slip that AI agent. You don't want that. No, no, no, we don't want that. So uh, but I think that's when we really get to AI phone. I think that's gonna happen in the next three to five years where we get to that level of automation, certainly going there. But uh, yeah, some of the features are hit, some of the features are missed for the AI, but I wouldn't say it's all bad. I would say for the people who are really down on AI, you know, you've got to give some of the features a chance. Like a lot of people are just rage against it and then they don't turn it in and on. Well, if you don't try it, you don't know if it's any good or not. Priority notifications is is good. Like if you get a lot of notifications and you have an S26, definitely turn on priority notifications because it'll save you a lot of time. Saves me a lot of time. I don't even read all my notifications anymore. I basically assume if they're not in the priority notification section, they're useless. Not really. I'm still working personal. But I mean, I I act on those first because they tend to be emails, Slack messages, and stuff that I or messages from Nicole. It's realized that Nicole is important to me and puts those up there. It's realized that the editors and Samiguru are important to me and always puts their messages in the surfaces of those. So that's good. Um let's talk about the other really big feature, the privacy display. Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 29:57

Because that is by far the latest physical. Aside from the AI to it.

SPEAKER_02 30:01

That was kind of the biggest, yeah, physical change, or that was the most innovative feature by far. Yeah, yeah, that they had. Yeah. And it's been polarizing for a lot of people since the launch. Um, you know, a lot of people have said who got this phone that they have headaches or eye strain from using it. So, like if when they turn it on and they look at the phone with it on, it tends to give them some kind of eye strain. Um, and I haven't experienced that, to be honest with you. But I feel like if these people are getting eye strain from using it, they're probably not using privacy display in the right way that Samsung intended it to be. And I don't want to be like, you know, Phil Schiller at Apple where you know they had a reception issue or or whatever, who was it? Steve Jobs, where they had a reception issue with the iPhone 4, and he's like, You guys are holding it wrong, you're holding the phone incorrectly. Yeah, I don't want to say that. Like you're using your phone wrong. But Samsung didn't intend privacy display to be left on for long periods of time. This is like if you have a situation where you're like, you're like you want to check your bank or something. Yeah, like you check your bank or you're putting in your pen or your pattern on your lock screen, or you're in a messaging app where you're messaging with a significant other and you're in a public space, maybe you have a conversation you don't really want people to be seeing, or you know, you've got a private business, you know, matter that you really don't want in a public space to be out there and checking your bank. All those are good reasons. But those are situations where you're gonna have it there for a very little bit of time. And Samsung made it very easy in privacy display to turn it on conditionally. You can turn it on only in certain applications and only on like your lock screen when you're putting in your pen. Yeah. And so, like what I do is I do exactly what you said. I have it on only for my password pins on the lock screen in my messaging apps where I feel like I actually need it. Usually I just basically have it on beeper because I use that for almost all my messaging. But that covers my conversations like with Nicole, and that would be the main one where I don't really care. But I mean, yeah, it's just get some privacy of your conversation if you're in public. That's a nice thing to have. Um, and then also all my financial apps. Yeah. So like my my banking, my stocks, all that stuff. Anything that has money, I just turn it on for those. And those are the only apps I really use it in, you know, and what you use it in is going to be different depending on you. Like if you're younger, you know, you're getting a lot of salacious Snapchats. Yeah. You don't want you don't want the people to see those, then you turn it on the Snapchat. I don't even use Snapchat because I never could very quite figure out how we would use it in a way that I could. I don't know. For me now, social media obviously something I do for a living, but if I can't find a way for me to personally monetize the app, then I don't really want to. Yeah, I know. Because I'm not really doing social media to meet people anymore. I'm 40 years old, so I have kids. I don't need to meet too many people. You know, I I have a lot, I have enough friends and my kids, those are my friends and my wife. And that's pretty much the end. When you when you turn 40, you're not really out there networking on the personal side a lot. But if I can find a way to monetize it for my business, then obviously I would use it. But with Snapchat, I can never really figure out a way that like how am I going to monetize it? Because like they don't really do monetization like you do on Facebook or Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. Even on X, you can make money. I was like, I can't really monetize Snapchat, so eh, I don't really care. So I don't even I have an account, but I don't use it. So but if you're younger, you might want to put your privacy swing on Snapchat. But my take on it is obviously, yes, when it's on, it does degrade this display quality. People have talked about this. I mean, this is obvious, right? I mean, there's there's no doubt about this. It's definitely worse quality. Like if you do this, you see here. Yeah. Yeah. Like it, but it also makes it so that you can't see it from the side. Like you can't see anything on my screen. Yeah, yeah, I can't see. Oh, and then the other way you can turn it on conditionally is when I get a notification, when the notification pops up, it automatically turns it on for that only. Oh you can turn it on only on that part of the screen, which is great because I do like that. Because what if I get a notification and I don't want someone to see in public, then I've got that, you know. I don't have anything too crazy, but if you've got something that's a sensitive matter, then you can turn it on for that. So I have it turned on for notifications as well. Um, but you're not supposed to be using privacy display all the time. If you got it on all the time, maybe it will hurt your eyes. I don't know, because I've never turned it on the whole time because it's just not something I don't see, I don't see that as the point. I don't think something intended.

SPEAKER_04 34:23

Uh why do you need it on the whole time?

SPEAKER_02 34:24

Yeah, like I because yeah, obviously it's gonna degrade the display quality, so you definitely don't want it on when you're watching media, scrolling through your general social feeds, like if you don't have something private, like a message um or playing games, you don't want it on. It's gonna make the display look worse, obviously. Um, but overall, I think privacy display is very good. Um, I do think there's obviously some improvements to it that could be made for the next generation. Um, it does affect the anti-reflective properties uh when the phone is off, but not when the display is on. So the way they had to implement the layer for privacy display, this phone is less anti-reflective, like when it's just sitting here than your S25 Ultra. We did a little test, and a lot of people did a test, but we we did a test of that. Um but it when the phone is actually on, if you put them in sunlight or you put them in light, they're both basically the same. So they really do anything there. Um I I think it's pretty good, honestly. I I don't have a problem with it. I also have it turned so that when I double click my side button, it turns on my privacy display. So I can double click it. Yeah, there you go. Uh usually I used to use that for the camera, but I found the privacy display is something that sometimes I want to turn on selectively. And the camera usually when I want to use it, I I usually take time to set it up. Although, you know, it really depends on who you are. If you need to sometimes access the camera quickly, I have so many phones I usually grab one of them and pick it up. So I have a camera near me at some point, plus the all the other cameras I have. Uh, but I like the privacy display. I think that was a good feature. I think most people found it, it was definitely an innovative feature. There's already a rumor that Apple's going to copy it. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_04 36:09

Do you feel like this is a feature that's gonna is here to stay? I think so. It'll be on every iteration.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

I think it will get to the point though, where eventually you'll be able to have it apply to other selected parts of your screen. So if in right now the only selected part you can do is the notifications. But Samsung showed some concepts at Mobile World Congress last month where you could actually apply it to the top half of your screen only or the bottom half. Um so like if you're doing split screen multitasking and you only want the top half to be censored, you could do that. Um, so I think they'll do that. I think they'll improve it. I think they'll make it so that whatever the issues are, because I believe people that their eyes are maybe strained. I they'll probably try to improve it and mitigate that. But I think maybe they'll also try to give some guidance the next launch next year that this is not intended to be on all the time. It's not. They didn't really say that, right? This time, yeah, no. They didn't, I mean they're kind of shown it off.

SPEAKER_04 37:04

They kind of hinted at it. Just to get to more AI stuff.

10-Bit Display Claim Backlash

SPEAKER_02 37:07

They kind of hinted it at it though, by saying, you know, you can use it only in certain apps, or you can use it only on your pen, you can use it only on the notifications. They're basically hinting at you should not use it all the time. Yeah, but I think some people didn't get the memo. No. And they're like, let me test what happens if I use it all the time. And they're like, oh no, my eyes, they're burning. Ah and Samsung's like, guys, we told you not to use it all the time. And I guess, I guess their point is that your eyes still shouldn't hurt, but I mean, it it no, it's it doesn't make any, it just doesn't make sense, you know. It's it's good in moderation, you know, it's like sunlight, you know. If you go outside for a little bit of time in the heat, you're okay. But if you go out there a long time without sunscreen, you you get roasted, and that's your fault for being an idiot. And so Samsung's basically saying that's your fault for being an idiot. Um, I I like it though, overall. No problems at all for me with privacy display. I found it to be very good. Um, there was also this controversy about um our good friends, uh well, we posted about it too, but our good friends at Samsung PR, when we were in San Francisco, they told everybody in the media briefing that the Galaxy S26 Ultra had a 10-bit display. And I know you probably don't know the difference between 8 and 10-bit, but I'll quickly remind everybody basically it means that it can display a wider range of colors. So like 10-bit, 8-bit's like 16 million colors, whereas 10 bits like on the order of a billion colors. Oh, it's a massive difference. Now of course, of course, unless you're looking at two displays side by side, yeah, it's hard to tell because the human eye, 16 million colors is still a lot. True. And even though our brain is very a very good computer, the human brain also has a lot of quirks, and it tends to blur colors together if they look similar, and it tends to trick you into thinking they are the same color if they look too similar. Yeah. So 16 million is already more than the human brain can usually perceive as being distinct. So you're not really going to notice. What you're going to notice if you have 10 versus 8 bit side by side is that if you have an image that has a lot of colors, like a color gradient that goes from like say pink to purple to blue, light blue to dark blue, you'll notice that if you have a 10-bit display, those colors they don't look as banded, like they don't look as like smeared together. Yeah. They look kind of distinct. You know, they kind of you can actually see all of the colors, right? They don't look like they all kind of smear together in the purple section, for instance. You can actually see how the gradient flows. There's more distinction in the different colors. That's what you'll see if you have them side by side. And so they told us they were 10-bit displays. So we all assumed that meant they were 10-bit at the hardware level. And it turns out they they lied, sort of lied. Uh, because when people did some testing, we found out, and all the blogs reported this, that the displays are actually 8-bit with what's called FRC. It's a software trick that makes 8-bit panels, which are at the hardware level, look like 10-bit displays by using software tricks. Basically the same thing they do with the cameras, where they take outdated hardware and make it take better pictures with good software. I don't know how that they decide to do the same thing with the displays, but the problem is you can't lie to the media. And I don't care what anyone says. I was in the room and I have a recording on my notion, because I use I use AI for recording my meeting notes, and I recorded the entire briefing. The guy said we used to have only 8-bit, and now we have 10-bit across the whole lineup. That's what he said verbatim, the Samsung guy who did the briefing. And he's like the head of device experience, uh, mobile device experience for the US. And you know, you can't just say that if you're not if you're not gonna be fully transparent. If you're doing it with software, say that. Now, is it true that most other smartphone manufacturers use 8-bit FRC to achieve 10-bit like quality? Yes, but most of them don't call it a 10-bit display in that case. And Samsung was selling that as a feature to the media and then having us print that and telling all the people who are buying it that it's 10-bit, that makes us look bad if we're lying. So, you know, I don't want to print that. So we printed correction, and so there's a big scandal about that. No, I all that is to say, is that really like a concern if you're thinking about buying it? Absolutely not. The display definitely looks better. Yeah like it definitely looks like 10-bit quality because I put a bunch of wallpapers that have gradients on here, and they all look way better on this display than the S25 Ultra. I even posted some photos on X doing some comparisons. It's definitively better. It's just that Samsung should have been transparent with us about the fact that they were achieving this using you know, using software. Um, that's just my personal opinion. So you can actually see here is the one that has a lot of gradients in it. You can see how good the display looks on here. I mean, it's a very nice.

SPEAKER_04 42:08

Oh, yeah, no, very nice. Actually, I really like that wallpaper.

Charging S Pen One UI 8.5

SPEAKER_02 42:11

Yeah, yeah. So the display on here is is beautiful and it definitely does a great job. You're not gonna be disappointed because it's eight-bit hardware with some FRC simulation. You're not gonna think about that when you use the phone. So it's not that big of a deal. The bigger problem is why the heck did they like not just tell us that in the first place? Maybe they claim that it was a miscommunication in you know, in the software side. I don't know. Uh, just one of their employees got miscommunication from one of the engineers, which happens, but because Samsung often is trying to cover up hardware deficiencies with software, it doesn't look good to the people. And you know, as media, we don't want to report incorrect information because that makes that's our whole thing is giving you valued information. If we can't do that, then no one's gonna want to read our site. So that kind of made me a little upset that they gave us the wrong info. Uh, what else can I say? Um, talked a long time about this phone. 60 watt charging, it's a little faster than 45 watt, which is what we had before. It's not revolutionarily faster. Um, you know, that's not really a reason to buy the phone. It's only that charges from zero to hundreds about six minutes faster. Um, the thermals and some other things, Samsung still throttles the charging because I think they're still paranoid from the Galaxy Note 7 debacle. They don't want anything to blow up. Yeah, no. So don't expect them to be making don't expect them to be making 120 watt charging anytime soon, like the Chinese phones. I wouldn't ex I would not expect to see that out of Samsung. They're just not they're just not interested in doing that whatsoever.

SPEAKER_04 43:41

Um well, so then for folks who have a S twenty three or lower, um just kind of like would this be a buy or a pass?

SPEAKER_02 43:53

Uh I still think if you have an S twenty three ultra or b or previous, it it's definitely a phone I would. Consider purchasing. The only big caveat is the S Pen obviously loses Bluetooth, but that happened last year. The S25 Ultra also lost Bluetooth. But I will, I was about to say that, so I guess this is a good segue into it. The S Pen does feel a lot cheaper this year than the S25 Ultra. Yeah. So um yeah, just be aware that not only are you not gonna have Bluetooth, but this feels very cheap. It's like a toothpick, in my opinion, compared to the old S-Pen. Oh yeah. It's a lot lighter, not as substantial if you're gonna do a long writing session.

SPEAKER_04 44:31

Definitely does have the curve. Yeah, it's got the curve on the back at the at the base.

SPEAKER_02 44:35

And I don't know if I necessarily love that either, because now you have to insert it a specific way for it to be flush with the device. So if you insert it the wrong way, then it's not fully flush with your phone. Yeah. And you don't want that because then you could easily pop it out. Um, I guess the whole point of this from Samsung was that they wanted to make you aware if it was not flush so you could fix it so it wouldn't accidentally pop out. Because they said a lot of people used to accidentally pop out their S Pens. Maybe that's true, but um, yeah, the S Pen does not feel as premium. It definitely feels like we're headed towards a S27 Ultra without the S Pen. Um because I mean the S Pen was not in the marketing materials at all. No, it wasn't. They didn't talk about it and unpacked at all. It wasn't in any of the demos. There's no new features for it. And then when you actually take it out of the silo, it feels a lot cheaper than before. Like that all doesn't bode well for the S Pen. Uh, in terms of the design, which I didn't really talk about much yet, I love the design. Um the the design is definitely not as rounded as anyone thought it was in the beginning. You know, we talked about this like the podcast before Unpacked, because I had a dummy unit. It looks exactly like the dummy unit I had when we when we were doing the the podcast before Unpacked. Um it's rounded, but not as rounded as an iPhone. It's still square-ish compared to an iPhone 17 Pro. So if you have concerns about that, I wouldn't worry too much about it. It's no big deal. Um trying to think what else. So we talked about the AI, talked about the cameras, talked about the charging, talked about the display, um, talked about the design a little bit. I think that's mostly Yeah, I think so too. Mostly the big things that I wanted to. Oh, and of course, one UI 8.5, which runs great. And by the way, you remember the whole thing where I said I was gonna shave my head if we didn't get it before the end of February? Yeah. It didn't come even by the end of March. So I'm definitely not only am I safe, I'm super safe. Super safe. Samsung also opened the beta to like 20 other models, like all the way back to the S22, you can get the 1U8.5 beta. Um, so I guess they're just planning to like ride that out and test the beta to like May or June. So don't expect stable anytime soon. So if you do want stable 188.5, the only way to get it right now is to buy an S26 device. So and it's and 188.5 runs great on here, by the way. I mean, all those features that we talked about, they do run incredibly well. You've also got the brand new call assistant, which is like the call screening from Google, which now will automatically screen your calls. Before you had to actually tap the Bixby text call button, but now you don't have to tap anything. You can just set it a setting, it'll automatically, anytime you get a call from unknown number, it automatically screens it. It makes the spammers really angry. I don't know. I like it. They just they rage they rage quit. Sometimes I go back and I just listen to sometimes I just go back and listen to them rage quitting because it's funny because it keeps a recording of all the call screens. Yeah. So sometimes I just go back and listen to the people get super mad and then hang up. It's like I'm an automated voice assistant answering your call.

unknown 47:44

They're like, just take my call.

SPEAKER_02 47:48

And then Bixby hangs up on them. Yeah, Bixby hangs up.

SPEAKER_03 47:50

I love that. It's very entertaining.

SPEAKER_02 47:53

It's definitely something you can do to get some extra entertainment out of your Galaxy S26 Ultra. Yeah. Oh, but I mean that's most of the stuff. I mean, overall, it's a very good package. Um if you from S25 Ultra. I mean, would I upgrade? It really depends on how much you value the privacy display and some of the 108.5 features, because not all of those are necessarily coming to the older devices. We don't know yet. Um the call screening, which I just talked about, may not come to older devices. That was actually um the current version of calls of the calls app, the phone app, seems to suggest that that might not come to older devices. So certain 188.5 features you might not get even if you have an S25 Ultra. You'll probably get most of them though. But you know, just like last time, if enough people complain, you know, you might get it. Because last time we had a lot of people didn't get the now brief until a lot of people complained, and then that came to other 188.18 phones. Um, but I mean it really comes down to do you like the privacy display? Do you like the rounder design? I previously said the 60 watt charging, but that it's only like six-minute difference from zero to full. That's not really much. I wouldn't spend any extra money over six minutes. No, I mean, unless you really got to do an S shower and shave a lot. Like if you have to come home and S shower and shave very often, then maybe that would tip the scale in the favor of that. But unless that's really the case, like I I don't know, I'd spend a lot of money on that. It really comes down to to privacy display, and I guess I guess I should say the better camera, because it is better. Um for Zoom, it is it is substantially better than the S25 Ultra. In daytime photos with a main camera, there's really not much difference. Yeah with low light photos with a main camera, there is a decent difference. So the big difference, I guess the real question is do you care about the privacy display? If yes, then that's probably still not enough for me to say you should upgrade from the S25 Ultra to this phone. But if you like the privacy display and you say, Well, I take a lot of zoom photos, 3X or 5X, and I also value having a slightly faster charging, then I would say I I would upgrade. But if you don't take a lot of Zoom photos, I still don't know that privacy display is enough to make you upgrade because the S27 Ultra is likely going to get a main sensor upgrade next year, potentially a bigger battery with silicon carbide and some other stuff, and the privacy display will still be there and it'll probably be even better. Yeah. Um you know, plus you might want to have a little peek at what they're doing with the foldables later this year. You might want to, you know, so you might want to just take a little peek.

SPEAKER_04 50:39

Take a little you might you might you might want to cop one, huh?

Buds4 Pro Sound Fit And Value

SPEAKER_02 50:42

Just just go over and take a look at what's going on over on the the foldable side of the Samsung fence. Sometimes you gotta take a little peek at what's going on over there. Yeah, you do. Uh, even if you're a slab phone person, you know, eventually maybe you want to have yourself a little look-see. You know, I'm just saying. That's true. Uh let's talk about Buds 4 Pro for a second, and then I'll come back to the base S26 because I I have a little less to say about that than the Ultra. The Ultra's obviously the big big boy, and that's why we waxed poetic about it for 40 minutes. We waxed poetically. Um, so the Buds4 Pro, they're I mean, I don't even know what I have to say about them other than they're fantastic and everyone should buy them.

SPEAKER_04 51:17

Uh fantastic. I um I talked about this before a few times, but I've had um I started out with the Buds 2, loved uh, or Buds uh 2 Pro, loved them. Um, then got the Buds 3, and they were not my favorite. I mean, they were my most anticipated product, I think, of that year for Samsung, but didn't like them. They didn't really find the year and whatnot. Um, so I was a little worried that they were kind of keeping the STEM design uh going into the shortened it up a little. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They did, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

They shortened it and stubbed it up a little bit.

SPEAKER_04 51:52

Yeah, because what was nice about the Buzz 3 Pro was the controls were very easy to get to. Compared to the Buds 2 Pro.

SPEAKER_02 51:59

Yes. Well, I would miss, I would miss tapping.

SPEAKER_04 52:01

I know, I'd be like, I'm just tapping, like I'm hoping I'm hitting the rate. What does this guy do in here? Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. A mental issue. Yeah, but they fit in his ear. But I'd be like, is it on? Is it like, did I hit it enough? No, all right. Um but I the the Buds 4 Pro um honestly is uh great. Um love, love, love. Um, they fit really good in the ear. The sound is just really good. I've tried both multiple different songs with you know, artists that you know mix a lot of songs really well and is really great. Uh, I haven't like quite figured out like the best way to use like the controls, you know, on the stems. Um, but I it's a great piece.

SPEAKER_02 52:49

Yeah, so the play and pause, you pinch the stem. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then you along the fat side of the stem, you run up and down to do the volume.

SPEAKER_04 52:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I figured out the volume, haven't figured out the play. Okay, yeah, but now I know I think.

SPEAKER_02 53:04

But I mean, yeah, I really I mean I have a lot to say about these, but not a lot. I mean, everyone should buy them. I mean, that's yeah, no, agree. If you haven't bought them yet, but but if you're gonna buy them, make sure you go to SammyGuru.com, go to our page and click on the link on the pre-order page and buy them there. But I mean, otherwise, everybody should buy them. Hey, if you buy them there, I'll give you a free Buds4 Pro case. We still have some. That's part of Sammy Guru Rewards. You can get it on that for sure. 100%. But I mean, I love everything about the Buds4 Pro. I'm not really having any notes about them. Um, the fit is great. Yeah, fit is one of them. I've I've ran with them, you know, I've I've just did work with them. I can wear them all day. You don't really notice that they're in your ear at all. There's no pain, they don't fall out easily. Um, they isolate the noise very well. If you use the ANC, the ANC works incredibly well. I mean, honestly, these headphones are on tier with headphones that I have that are you know around$400 because I have the Bangin' Olssons and I have the Bowers and Wilkins PI8. Those are$400 headphones. These sound as good in every facet, and I never ever really said that about any other pair of headphones, especially from Samsung or Apple. I don't really know a facet where they're really below. Like the bass is on par too. Everything that I care about in headphones, you know, they they get loud enough, they've got great bass, they still got clear mids and highs. Um, the touch controls work really well for me. Uh, the design looks good too. Like all the different colors look good. The black and the silver and white and the rose gold, which Nicole has. She really likes them too. Um, they fit good in all different ear sizes, too, because Nicole's been using hers. They give you the different ear tip sizes, so you're gonna find a size that fits. The case looks clean, which is nice. It's got that transparent case design, which I think looks really clean too. No, yeah, it does. And I think the case design's a lot better than the one they had with the Buds 3 Pro as well. Um, because it's kind of flat instead of being like that one that opens this way. It's got a little more to grab onto when you open the case. Uh, I I don't I don't really think there's a huge downside to any of this. I mean, it's the the Buds 4 Pro are just one of Samsung's best, their best products, I think. The smart features are all there that work inside OneUI. If you want to do translation or any of that stuff, it works perfectly through Galaxy Eye. I mean, all the things they advertised with this. The base, the bass blew me away. I mean, they they said that when they introduced them to us at the event, and the bass is just really impressive. So, I mean, that's something I care about. I listen to a lot of hip-hop, um, but I also listen to a lot of rock, so I care about the mids and the highs as well, and they're also still there. Um, and then also with the improved controls now in 1U8.5, when you guys get it. You know, if you're not on the beta, you might not get it for three months, but you've got improved controls for the buds in the quick settings, which makes it an even better experience. So I really can't say anything negative about them. Now, the regular Buds4 non-pro, one of our writers, David, is reviewing the Sammy Guru. He said that the active noise canceling isn't as good on those, but that makes sense because those are open-ear earbuds. A lot of people don't realize that the Buds 4, the main difference between the Buds 4 and the Buds 4 Pro is that those do not have like this the tips, the silicone tips at all. They just go in your ears. They're supposed to allow ambient noise and stuff, um, you know, for doing tasks while you still need to hear things. So that's the main difference between the Buds4 and the Buds4 Pro. Um, it's not like one is a higher end version of the other. They're actually two different kinds of headphones, which I don't think Samsung did a great job of explaining that. We we Yeah, I don't think so either. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, you think of like just a lesser version. But if you actually look at them, they're two different kinds of headphones. So it really depends on like what your needs are as to which one you would buy. It's not like there's just one one product line and one slightly better sound, which would you know make sense for some people to buy a cheaper, cheaper product. So we we wrote an article about that. I don't think some people fully well realize that though. But you know, there it is. Yeah, laid it out.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

I know, but no, I um great buy. I love it. Yeah, great piece, and you definitely pick it up, and you can find them on sale.

Base S26 Pricing Problem

SPEAKER_02 57:18

Samsung has them right now, so for they're$25 off. And and even at the$250 lit regular price, I think they're a good good value, honestly, because they're that good. But they've like$25 to$30 off right now on Samsung and Amazon. At$220, they're really, really good. They're like an amazingly good price. Yeah. Because, like I said, the bass and the overall sound profile is on par with the headphones I have from Bowers and Wilcombs and Bang and Olives, and those are like luxury boutique high-end headphones. Yeah. And Samsung's app and like controls are way better. The one thing I hate about Bang and Olives is their app is the hottest garbage I've ever used. How a company that makes such great hardware, their headphones products are amazing. I I love Bang and Olifson. Um, and I will say, the only headphones I would put above these, not that anyone should buy them, and I probably shouldn't even own them. Don't tell my wife. Um, the Bang and Olifson uh B O Grace, which are their latest headphones, they're$1,500 though. So those are the only ones I would say are significantly better, but obviously they have much bigger drivers. Yeah, no, for sure. They don't integrate with the Samsung ecosystem and a lot of other things. Not to mention, like I said, the Bang and Olifson app sucks. It's so bad, it crashes all the time. How can you sell headphones at$1,500 and then the app doesn't work? Like half the time when you try to pair the headphones the first time, you have to like open and close the app four or five times on Android to get it to recognize the headphones. You know, I always report the feedback too. I'm like, what are you guys doing? Yeah, how can you be such a you know, they make a lot of money. They're a very well-known company in audio. Someone invests time into your Android app. I know sometimes people just want to sell high-end products to their Apple users, but come on, man. There's some people who have a little money who use an Android phone too. Yeah, I know. Otherwise, people aren't going to buy your stuff. True. No, there's still probably at least 30, 40% of your base globally that has Android. Yeah. You don't want those people to stop buying your$1,500 headphones. Nope. Fix your stuff. What's wrong with you? It's wrong with you. But I mean, if you're a Samsung user in the Samsung ecosystem, I mean, I I can't recommend you buy any other buds than the Buds 4 Pro because they're such a good deal. And you really, I mean, the difference in audio between those and the higher price headphones is very minimal. Like you wouldn't really, unless you're an audiophile, you're not going to notice a lot. So I would say go for it. Um before we take a break, we might take a short break and then talk about a few of those other topics, but I want to quickly touch on the base S26. So I have a couple things to say about it. Um it's it's way overpriced. Uh I mean it's way overpriced. Samsung overpriced the S26 and the S26 Plus. They raised the price on the base and the plus for$100. Oh, okay. And they kept the Ultra the same in the US. But the base and the Plus also got the least number of changes. They got a battery upgrade, which yes, the battery upgrade is great, but it didn't really get any kind of camera upgrade. The camera's still okay. But considering how much Apple upgraded their base iPhone, the iPhone 17, this phone is just way behind. I mean, Apple put 120 Hertz and a lot of other stuff on there. Jeez. Um but yawn there, man. So get getting late. But um yeah, I don't know. I mean it's not a bad phone. And if you want a compact Android phone in the US, you really only have two choices. It's either the base 26, you want a flagship anyway, and the Pixel 10, assuming the Pixel 11 when it comes out this summer. I mean, I would still pick the Samsung phone just because the software ecosystem is better. Yeah. I think 188.5 is is better than Google's, you know, Android version, Pixel UI. But it's still not like you're happy about spending$8.99 on this phone. No, yeah. Now you can get there's discounts on it already on Amazon where you can get a free gift card and it's like$7.50 plus a gift card. Like then it starts to make a little more sense. But honestly, for the specs on offer and the fact that Samsung continues to not upgrade anything in the camera department on the base S26, this phone should be like$600. Of course, they're not going to do that because the Galaxy A67 and the S25 FE are both around$600. Yeah. So they have to have some price distinction to make this the true flagship. But if we're really being honest, it's not. It's not that much better than those phones. It really is not. Like what is much better? Yeah. The charging is slower than the ultra. Uh the cameras aren't anywhere near as good. Like everything gets downgraded. The display is not as good. There's no privacy display. Like everything is downgraded. You got no S Pen.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:56

It was downgraded, but it cost$100 more.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:58

Well, it costs$100 more than the last year's. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:01

Oh, yeah, still though. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Because most people who buy that level phone, they buy them, I mean, consistently. Yeah, yeah. You know, at that level.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:11

And it's sad to me because people on Android, they basically have no choice for a true flagship small phone. Like, if you want a smaller phone on Android, the the OEMs are just like F you. Yeah. Have a nice day. Keep it moving. We're not doing it. We don't do that here. That's not what we do. You go big or go home. Yeah. That's what they said to you. And that sucks. Like it would be nice if Samsung would do what Apple does in that regard. You know, they love to copy Apple. Let's copy Apple on something. Let's copy Apple on something they actually execute well, which is they have the Pro and the Pro Max. And they're almost the same phone. There's only like one extra camera feature that's on the Pro Max that's not on the Pro. Literally everything else about them is identical except the size. I'm okay if there's one thing that's different. But like the base model to the Ultra, there's like 50 different features that the Ultra has that the base model doesn't have any, you know, anything close to it. That's not cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:10

No, not cool.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:11

And it's not like it's a size restriction. Apple put their best camera in a smaller phone.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:15

So if people are like, oh, they can't put these good cameras inside the smaller phone. Yes, obviously you could. Yeah, you could if you wanted to. Apple does it every year. They put it inside the smaller pro. And maybe if there's one video feature or something you can't include, okay. But not everything about the phones is massively different. And then you raise the price$100. Because then that's why most people only buy the ultra. And then the plus is even worse because now it's$10.99. And it also has like 30, 40 features that don't even come close to the ultra. It's like no one should buy that because for$200 more, just get the ultra. Yeah, get the ultra. And it's almost the same size. So even then, like the plus isn't that much smaller than the ultra. So if you already are if you're already okay with a phone that big, yeah, might as well just get 1.2 inches bigger. I know. And then you get like every feature in the world, you get a much better phone.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:05

Yeah, way better.

Samsung’s Awkward Mag Battery Pack

SPEAKER_02 1:04:06

So my take on the S lineup is that the bass and the plus are very confusing. Not that they're not good phones, they're just overpriced for what they are in terms of the specs. And I'm just disappointed Samsung won't make a true flagship lineup, kind of like Apple does. Yeah. That's distinguished. Buds definitely should buy them. Oh, and this power bank for the S26 series that Samsung made, this battery pack that's a kickstand. Uh I don't know that I would buy this, man. I mean, it's they made it because Samsung had to make this because none of the other battery packs that you can buy with MagSafe that fit iPhones actually work with Galaxy phone, the S26, because the camera bump gets in the way. And there's no magnets in the phone. So they made one that's got this little curve on the back so it won't ding your camera bump. Yeah. Which is kind of crazy to me. Um, when you have a case on. But the problem is it's 15 watt charging, it's incredibly slow. I'm not even sure it's anywhere close to that. I tried it and it's like it took like 25 minutes to charge four or five percent. Oh my god. Like that is not useful to anyone. No, it's not um not useful. I mean, it does have a kickstand, which is kind of cool, I guess, but I would just say I don't know. I would not rely on this battery charger. There's probably the better ones out there where you can find a few that actually do fit without messing up the camera hump from Anchor. Probably just buy those. This is also sixty uh like seventy dollars or something. So you know they're not making a cheap accessory. No, you're not. Like if you want a battery pack that goes around your camera hump, you gotta come off some money here.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:55

Yeah, you do.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:55

We're not we're not here giving stuff away for free, you know. This is America. Sure. I guess we could just hit these last two topics and then finish instead of taking a break. There's only two main topics I want to finish. We can always do some more next week because we're going to try to get back to the street. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We are. So let's talk about these two topics. The first one is the airdrop because everyone has been wanting this forever. We hinted at this on a previous podcast.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:16

Which is interesting to me.

Airdrop Support Through Quick Share

SPEAKER_02 1:06:17

Yeah, we hinted at this on a previous podcast that Google was doing this. And actually, I think we talked about it on a podcast previously because Google had brought it to the Pixel. And we said, well, it's going to come to the Galaxy phones eventually. And of course, Samsung made Samsung and Google made the decision to bring it to Galaxy phones with the S26, a big giant product release. So why not bring Airdrop to the Galaxy S26 first? And so they did. And it came out like five days ago, earlier this week, uh, last week, the end of last week. Uh, and I tried it and it works very easily. So it basically works through QuickShare. All you have to do is go into your QuickShare. What you're gonna do is go into your connected devices, go to QuickShare, and then right down here, you'll see a little thing that says sharing with Apple devices. You see that? Ah, yeah. And so if you tap that, it'll say share with iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other devices that have airdrop. Send Apple devices, make sure the recipient has airdrop set to everyone. So your person who has an iPhone, yeah, they have to change something on their phone, so you can't just do it anytime, which is good because you don't want to be able to just be able to be dropping files. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No people dropping you illicit photos all the time. Uh, and then receive from an Apple device, you just tap quick share in the quick panel, and this makes your phone visible to Apple devices, and then they can send files to it. Interesting. While share with Apple devices is turned on, your phone may temporarily disconnect from Wi-Fi networks while searching for or sharing with Apple devices. So, of course, it's using the Wi-Fi to share. Yeah, to do it. So it's not really the same, obviously, as Airdrop. Um, because that's still it's a way. Yeah, yeah. It's not, it's it's it's basically lets it it works, it lets the airdrop protocol work, but obviously, here's the thing. So I tested it, and the difference is the big difference is the speed. So it's much different in terms of the speed. I tested it by airdropping files from my S26 Ultra to my uh MacBook Pro because I shot some, you know, I just did the dash cam video, and so I pulled a lot of footage off the dash cam in my car, and when you pull the photoshoot off the dash cam, it syncs it to your phone over the dash cam's Wi-Fi. And so those end up on your phone's gallery. And so I wanted to get those files to my MacBook because I need to edit the video, and that's where I edit the videos on my Mac. So I selected the photos, there's like or fo videos, there's like eight video files, yeah, and they're all around 300 megabytes. So it's like 2.6 gigs of files. Yeah. Now, normally if I share from airdrop on my iPhone to the Mac, even sending 2.6 gigabytes of files, it will not take that long. It'll take maybe two minutes, maybe two minutes, three minutes. I airdropped it from the S26 Ultra to my MacBook. It took 13 and a half minutes to get the 2.6 gigs of files. No, given it's a large file size. No, agree. I agree. And so, but still about six times longer than if you're going from an Apple iPhone to the Mac. Yeah. So it's a lot slower. It works, but it works easily. I mean, like there's no friction. Like I open up my S26 Ultra and my Mac is on, my MacBook is right there. And I can just hit it and send any files I want. There's only a lot of extra steps to do. Once you enable it, it's there.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:38

Um, and you know, I think that's the primary purpose for a lot of people is they want to airdrop files to devices they own. So from an Android phone they own to their own Mac devices. Now, obviously, there's a little more friction if you want to airdrop file to your friend, because they've got to go in and turn on sharing for everyone. But that's actually true, even if they're sharing from an iPhone to an iPhone, because typically you'll have that off. Most people have that off anyway, and they need to go and turn it on anyway. Um, except if you have it turned on for every everyone uh contacts only. Yeah. Because then it creates a little extra friction because of course Apple only considers contacts that people have iPhones, I believe. Yeah. So then you still have to go in and turn it from contacts only to everyone for your Android friend to share it. So a little more friction if you share it with your friend. But if you're sharing it to your own Apple devices from your Android phone, right now it only works on Pixel and Galaxy. It's pretty good. I think this is good. It helps that you know we have RCS working now between Apple and Android. Those are encrypted. Lots of good things have happened on the messaging side between the two, and now Airdrop between them works as well. You know, what's next? You know, is Apple gonna is Apple officially gonna bring the iMessage app to Android? Maybe probably not. Doubt it. Highly doubt it. Is Siri coming to Android soon?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:54

Maybe. I don't know.

Tab S11 Keyboard Price Shock

SPEAKER_02 1:10:55

I mean, Google Gemini, um, you know, now that it's the other way around, Gemini and the various uh other AI providers are gonna power the new AI Siri because Apple couldn't get their own AI to work. Because you know, they promised all this AI stuff uh and they couldn't deliver it, so they turned to Google and said, We need you guys to use Gemini to power Siri, and we'll just pay you you know several 20 tens of billions of dollars to do it. They did, they just made a big deal. Oh, well, so with the iPhone 18 in September, when you get that shiny new Siri and you're like, Oh wow, look, Apple is so good. It's really just Google's model powering it on the back end. Yeah, Apple couldn't figure out how to do any AI on their own device. It took them forever. I mean, they they basically couldn't deliver. Yeah, you say what you want, but they they they couldn't deliver it in a way that was up to their standards, so they had to choose one of the AI companies who are already doing it at a high level. And Google is already their partner. I mean, obviously, they get paid a ton of money from Google. Yeah, um, Google pays them like a hundred billion or something a year to make Google the default search engine on iPhones. Oh, okay. They pay them a lot of money to make the default search engine. Um, and so you know, they're like, We'll just you know, pay you back a little. You pay us$100 billion, we'll pay you$30 billion for the Gemini model. We still make$70 billion, it's a pretty good deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So a little bit of just a little bit of symbiosis, you know, kumbaya. Yeah, kumbaya. Okay, and then the last thing we'll end with, which is absolutely ridiculous, and I bought one, so we'll have a review of it on Sammy Guru. Uh, Fidel's gonna review it because he's the Tab Guru now. But um Oh, yeah, the keyboard? Yeah. The Tab S11 Ultra Pro keyboard was first shown off at MWC. Um, we were supposed to have one of our writers, Abnov, go, but unfortunately, uh a president of a certain country decided to invade another certain country right when he was supposed to fly, and it turns out that certain country was in the path of the plane he needed to take to get to Barcelona. So Abnov was not able to go to MWC because all the flights were canceled from Abu Dhabi to um Barcelona, where MWC is. So he didn't get to go. But the other people who were there who were in Europe who made it because they were able to fly the other way, they didn't have to go through that certain country. Um they were able to cover it, and Sam Mobile got a look at the keyboard. Samsung showed it off at their MWC booth. Um they didn't mention the pricing or anything, and then later some listings popped up and finally popped up at Best Buy and uh on the Samsung website in the US.$399 for a keyboard.

SPEAKER_04 1:13:36

It really should have came out seven months ago. It's not a tablet itself.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:40

It's not a tablet itself, it's not a computer, it's not even a smartphone, it's just a keyboard.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:48

And it costs$399. It's insane, man. It's absolutely insane to me. Um but yeah, I mean I don't have to say about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:00

It looks nice, basically, it's exactly what we said. It's kind of a copy almost of Apple's magic keyboard. It has the floating design where like magnetizes to the back and then folds over, and it's all metal construction, aluminum. It looks nice, but$400 for a keyboard? I mean, the tablet already costs a lot, the tablet already costs$1,300. If you pay for the keyboard plus the tablet, that's$1,700. This laptop, which we didn't get to talk about today, so I'll definitely talk about next week. The Galaxy Book 6 Pro, I paid six,$1,700 for this. And it is a whole package, and this is a whole entire laptop with an OLED screen and a terabyte of storage itself and a high-end new Intel Core uh Ultra 7 processor. This thing is much better for productivity if you wanted it for work. You can't do 10% of what you could do on here on the Tablets 11 Ultra. I have one in there, that's crazy, and it's an amazing tablet, but it's also not a laptop, it doesn't run Windows, and no matter what you say, yes, Dex is good, but it's not the same as running full Windows 11 Pro on your laptop if you're doing business. Yeah, I'm sorry, man. Like this is a way better buy if you want something to do work, and it can also do a lot of those other tablet things, and just like the tablet plus keyboard, it's super thin. Look at it. It's yeah, no, it's not thick.

SPEAKER_04 1:15:22

Yeah, no, that is that's actually really thick.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:24

The Galaxy Book 6 Pro is not thick. So if you actually put the Tabas 11 Ultra in the keyboard case, we'll find out tomorrow because it's coming tomorrow. I'm gonna take photos and videos and send it to Fidel. I'm gonna compare it. I'm gonna do a video and photo of this. It probably is almost as thick as the book, the Book Six Pro. So who should be spending the real question is who should be spending$1,700 on the tablet plus the keyboard when you could go buy a Book Six Pro for around$1,700? That just doesn't make any sense, man. Like, where's the value proposition?

SPEAKER_04 1:15:56

No, I agree. I agree.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:58

I mean, obviously, I'm I'm glad that I'm in the position to have both, but if you had to choose, I would definitely be buying the Book Six Pro. Yeah, that'd be my that'd be my pick. So, but we'll definitely review it, put it through its paces, just kind of crazy. It took seven months to release the keyboard, and it cost$50 more than the previous one, which was already overpriced at$350. Um, it's too much. And you know, it costs just as much as your one of your best laptops that you sell. Um, I don't know. I just can't figure that one out. Samsung's got to figure out like their tablet situation is the biggest problem they have right now in their mobile slash computers branding. Like their phones are doing pretty good. They got a couple things they could clean up. I would agree. In general, their lineups are pretty good. The watches are pretty solid. Like you've got the ultra, you've got the regular watch, you've got the watch classic. They've got a pretty well delineated lineup that all the models sell pretty good. Their buds are doing great. The computers are actually really good, which, like I said, a little teaser. I'll talk about this next week. I'll spend 20 or 30 minutes talking about the book six pro. The computers are doing great. You know, their TV lineup is doing great. Um, Galaxy Ring is pretty selling pretty well by all accounts. Their software is doing great in the mobile side. But yeah, the tablets is like the they're like the odd category out. It's like, what is going on? What is going on over there in Seoul? What is going on? They're like, guys, what we should do is just sell a tablet and a keyboard together that costs as much as our laptop. Who's on board with that? And they're like, me, that's what we should do. Smart. It's not. Plus, none of the apps on Android are optimized as well for the tablets as the iPad. So if you're really gonna spend that much.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:35

It's not a good package. I mean, why why why would you want to buy that?

Why Samsung Tablets Still Struggle

SPEAKER_02 1:17:38

And here's the other thing. If you're gonna buy a tablet that costs that much money, since a tablet's made to be portable, you probably would want it to do the one thing that your laptop can't do, which is have 5G cell service. And guess what? The tab S11 Ultra and the Tab S11, they don't offer a 5G variant. What? And the iPads do. You can get iPad 11-inch Pro or the 13-inch Pro in 5G from any carrier for Samsung's tablets. You can't get a cellular uh tab, there's no cellular tab.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:08

Interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:09

Come on, I feel like they should be able to do that.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:11

Yeah, like that's the one like they've got how you appeal to the consumer.

Wrap-Up And What Comes Next

SPEAKER_02 1:18:14

Yeah, like if I want a tablet, at least ease it. If I'm gonna use a tablet over my laptop, the number one thing I use it for, and this is why I'm being honest with you guys of all the tablets I own, I use my M5 uh iPad Pro more than I do my Galaxy tab. Because when I really want a tablet, the main thing I want to use it for is I know I'm gonna be like out and about, and I don't want to throw my laptop in there and I don't want to use a hotspot. So, what does it need to have? It needs to have 5G built into the device. And so I can't take the tab S11 Ultra. I end up throwing my iPad with the smart keyboard from Apple in there. So then if I'm like out doing errands and I stop at a coffee shop or if I stop to get lunch, I can answer those quick emails or do whatever I want because I have internet on the iPad. I don't always want to use a hotspot because that also drains my smartphone's battery. We must have 5G builds in, and Apple does. Kind of insane. No, I might have to spend part of an episode digging into how we could fix Samsung's tablet division because their tablet division is an absolute disaster. I know. Anyway, today I think we have a pretty good amount of productivity. We went through a pretty full review of the Ultra S26 Ultra and the Buds4 Pro, which is the main thing that we needed to do since we've been away for a while. Um look for the written reviews of those on Sammy Guru soon. We'll have written reviews of all the different S26 models plus the Buds as well. Um look for a review of that overpriced keyboard very soon. He'll have that. And uh yeah, anything else, Story? Nothing but uh this week. Make sure you keep expanding your galaxy.