Samsung has just launched a bucket load of next-gen products. There's new folding phones, there's new earphones, new watches, including for the first time ever a watch Ultra, and then the thing that I've been most excited about, the Galaxy ring, and I've just been hands-on with all of it and fingers in. So here's what's good and here's what's less good. So there's two new phones, the Z Flip 6 and then the Z4 6, and I got to say I have a lot of respect for this flip because it is a design improvement. In fact, compared to the last flip, I think it looks smarter from every angle, it looks cleaner, it feels cleaner thanks to the matte finish on the sides. The camera rings now match the color of the body you pick, the hinge protrudes out less, and crucially, the display crease on the inside is less noticeable. Oh, and the screen also has a new layer that makes it more impact-resistant, plus a new coating that's meant to reduce scratches and also.

fingerprints, a major key feature, if that works out over time. But the thing that I'm really happy about is that the design is not the focus here. All of the best improvements are under the hood. It's got the latest Snapdragon HM3 chip, now with, for the first time ever on a flip phone, a vapor chamber which gets heat away from that chip to keep it fast. It's got improved speakers. It's got 12 gigs of RAM by default, instead of last year's 8 gigs, a bigger 4,000 mAh battery instead of 3,700, and an inner screen that now goes up to 2,600 nits of brightness, compared to 1750. These are substantial jumps. The ultra-wide camera has been upgraded slightly with a bigger sensor, but the main camera has been upgraded majorly. This is now 50 megapixels after having been 12 for far too long, and it's much better for it. It's good enough now that even without any separate dedicated zoom camera, you can still zoom in 10 times and get a sharp

output there's a couple of strange features that accompany those improvements like a camcorder mode, which nudges all the controls to the other side of the screen for your thumb, but I don't understand why anyone would want to do this. This isn't a 9s camcorder, and that's a good thing. And then the cameras can now also auto-zoom while taking photos using your front screen, but the feature's a little bit slow to be useful. The important thing is that the cameras are finally not just passible on the Z flips but actually good. Another interesting tidbit I found out during my briefing was that Z Flip users change their wallpaper more times than any other type of phone user, which I guess is why Samsung is leaning into a few funky cosmetic extras too like interactive wallpapers that you can tilt, flip, and touch. I don't really see the appeal beyond the first 10 minutes though. There's ambient photos, which means whatever wallpaper you apply to your cover screen, you can mirror the current time of day and weather.

conditions onto it that I might actually use, and then they're also introducing the flip suit 2.0 cases, which can have LEDs embedded inside the case that can draw power from the phone to light up when notifications come in. I wouldn't personally buy one, but I sure enjoyed seeing it. The final thing, though, and the thing that I wasn't expecting to see coming into this, is that these folding phones are also where Samsung is showing off their next-gen Galaxy Ai, and it's actually improving rather quickly. There's a couple of bits that I'm not so sure about, like when someone messages you now, you get smart suggest suggested replies on your cover screen. The phone looks at the last seven messages sent to understand the tone of the conversation and then serves you up your options. I need to test it more thoroughly to see if it actually nails human tone 'cause that's typically a key failing point, but the idea is solid. There's portrait studio photo editing, which lets you use a photo that you've taken with a person

in and then AI turns that person's face into a highly stylized depiction. It does work quite well, but I don't know what I would use it for. It would be cool if it applied the effect to the entire image and not just your face, but as it stands, all I can think of is you could maybe use it to generate some slightly uncanny valy alternative profile pictures of yourself. But live translation, you know, the feature that we saw earlier this year when Samsung announced Galaxy AI, that wasn't very good. That is noticeably better here. These new phones are now starting with an AI that has access to an improved language pack, improved microphones that can pick up your voice better, and improved AI noise suppression that lets those microphones focus just on what you're saying. I'm not sure which of these ingredients is making the most difference, but in my early testing, the feature does seem to work quite a bit better and faster than it did at launch. Oh yeah, and it also now works on third-party apps so we can have a live

translation call on WhatsApp, but there's an extra twist now because you can also have that translation experience while in the same room as another person, thanks to an updated interpreter mode, which lets use both screens at the same time so each person can only see their own language. It's still not 100% there with the translation, but I can feel it creeping closer. And until chat gbt's realtime translation feature fully rolls out, this is probably the best implementation of it that I've ever seen. And what I'm pretty happy about is that the flip 6 is all of these things, and at least here in the UK, without going up in price. It's still £149. There are actually a few more AI features, but I'll show you the rest on the fold six, because this phone is interesting for the opposite reason. It's much less about internal improvements, but has had a lot more work done to the exterior, with sadly also A50 price bump versus last year. So it's immediately noticeably lighter at 239 G, and it comes

with this new titanium frame, which is making it only 7g heavier than the non-folding S24 Ultra. It's thinner, it's 5.6mm when it's open. The S24 Ultra is 8.6. For context, they've made it shorter and wider, which in my books are actually both perks. So you can actually reach the top of the phone and also feel like you have a more natural ratio to type and scroll pages with on the cover screen. And it just looks so much neater from the front, the squared edges, the slimmer even borders, the fact that those borders actually follow the natural curve of the device. And this fold is actually where you particularly notice the more compact hinge. You could probably fool just about anyone at this point into thinking this is a normal non-folding flagship phone. Now there are also spec bumps here, again the latest Snapdragon 8 gen 3 chip with a 1.6 times larger vapor chamber than the last gen. The screens are super bright both inside and outside go up to

2,600 nits, and this phone gets the same slight upgrade to its Ultra-wide camera, but the AI features are the most interesting, actually, and almost all of these should come to most recent Samsung phones too. There's a new smart select, which is kind of like taking a screenshot but a screenshot of the specific thing that you're looking at without having to manually drag four corners and crop the screenshot yourself. You can instant copy just the thing you want on any page, and it is good. Do you remember the circle to search feature? That's improving too. It now lets you circle QR codes to go straight to the link or equations to get not just the answer actually but also the entire methodology. Rip College professors. Oh, and then sketch to image is really wacky. You scribble something down, you specify a style of finish, and it manages to produce a result that feels weirdly human-like. It does neaten up everything you do. It applies a really convincing artistic effect, but it also retains just enough of your base image to still make

it feels like you made that. And it's one of those features that actually makes my head start to spin with all the possibilities. Like sometimes when we make videos, I have a really specific vision of the graphic that I want to show to visualize the point that I'm making. This could actually allow me to make that graphic myself. And you can also sketch an image on top of an existing image. And this, I think, has a very high ceiling. But I think the actual feature itself needs a little bit more cooking. The idea is that if you decide you want a pair of glasses or a cool tie or some devil horns in an image, you just sketch them in. And the phone then literally creates those objects within your scene using AI to factor in the lighting and the shadows and the objects in the real photo. And sometimes it was breathtaking. And I was so impressed how the objects don't look like cheap little stickers slapped on top of your photo, but full resolution objects baked inside of them. But then other times it was fiddly and also

produced some pretty weird-looking things that didn't really make sense in the context of that image. Aside from all that, Samsung have also said that the crease on the inside screen of both this and the Flip 6 is now down to just 100 microns instead of 240, but it doesn't feel like that much of a difference to me. It's definitely not the best phone for this that you can get right now, and it does bug me that the inner camera still looks like it's genuinely VGA quality, and that there's still no way to store the S Pen inside of the phone like you can on the S24 Ultra. I don't know, still slightly weird product for me. Okay, there's new watches too. So this is the Galaxy Watch 7. It's a pretty minor update. Key things are a new chip, the W100, that should make it more responsive and also last longer per charge. It's got AI suggested replies, you know, just like the Z Flip 6 on its cover screen. Slimmer screen bezels and a new sleep apnea

feature which can help you diagnose the condition by looking for patterns in your sleep. I feel like they've purposefully kept this as a very minor update to make room for the much bigger update because this is the first time in seven generations of Samsung watches that we've had a watch Ultra, and this thing's pretty jacked. It's water-resistant up to 100 m. It's made of a solid ID block of grade 4 titanium, which allows it to withstand 10 atmospheres of pressure and makes it feel like an absolute unit on your wrist. The screen goes up to 3,000 NS of brightness, and it's also got a red night mode watch face, which reduces battery consumption and eye strain. Does that sound familiar? Oh yes, of course, the Apple watch Ultra. And the second you notice the connection between those two products, you cannot stop seeing it. This thing has the same material, the same finish. It's even got the orange band just like Apple. But I mean, most upsetting to me is that Samsung has even

tried to copy the shape. Samsung watches are always circular, which I would say isn't quite as practical as the square Apple watches 'cause you get less usable screen area, but it's what makes them look way more elegant, you know? They look so much more like a classic watch than Apple's square body. This abomination is a circular screen on a square body. It feels like in the pursuit of trying to make this like Apple's, it forgot to do what Samsung does best. It's the worst of both worlds. Aside from the questionable design decisions, the Watch Ultra does have some extra quite specialized sport tracking features. One cool one is that when you're running, you can race against past versions of your own times, which was basically my entire childhood on Mario Kart. It's got dual GPS so you're less likely to get lost, a massive battery that can give you up to 48 hours of exercise tracking time, a quick button that you can set to launch any app or specific workout that you do particularly often, and also I have to

say a pretty cool new strap mechanism, which allows you to hold this button and just pull pull your existing strap out before pushing in a new one. Although it doesn't seem like this has any compatibility with past Galaxy watch straps. Now, only other weird thing that I noticed is the watch that I was using was pretty laggy, pretty laggy for the first Ultra watch specifically designed for performance Fanatics, which I believe is the term they used. It might just be the pre-production software though, so I'm somewhat willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. But hey, at least it's cheaper than the Apple watch Ultra at £599 instead of £799. Okay, let's talk about the new earbuds. By the way, this is the first time that I've ever covered all the products from a launch event like this. So if you want to see more of these, then please let me know. So these are the Galaxy buds 3, and these are the buds 3 Pro, and they're a pretty big departure for Samsung because, well, because they're

actually kind of normal-looking. Samsung has built up a bit of a reputation as the one company who likes to do earphones differently, but this right here almost feels like an admission that the wackiness isn't working and people just want the status quo. That's not to say that there isn't design flare here. I think the transparent lid of the cases looks wicked, and the earphones themselves have blade-like protrusions instead of circular stems, which I would be lying if I said didn't instantly give them plus two points in my books, especially the pros which integrate LED strips into those blades. I'm not really sure why you'd want LEDs on your earphones. I guess I mean the best use case I can think of is if you lost them in the dark, they could maybe help you to find them. Yeah, let's be honest, they're just there to look cool. But when I actually put these things in my ears, it quickly made me realize that. But while I do love looking at these blades, I don't

like using them both the normal and the pros fit really nicely in my ears, and you can control your music by pinching the blades and also sliding up and down on them. But they're so fiddly. These blades are not a comfortable or intuitive shape to pinch or even just hold. I kept dropping the things because of how severely UNG grippable they are, and trying to slide up and down to change volume, it just felt like an abrasive maneuver that kept pushing the earphones out of my ears. I will definitely give them a second chance when I get my own pair, but that was my first impression. On the bright side though, these things sound great, both the buds 3 and the pros. Bright highs, punchy lows, plenty of detail. I was very impressed and slightly concerned just how loud the pros got, and those also have higher quality Bluetooth transmission for if you're a big listener of lossless music. Samsung saying that the microphones have improved and that both earphones can now

reach 30 hours of battery life with the case, closer to 25 if you turn the noise cancelling on, which is a really good figure. But also, the sound leakage was very well controlled, even on the basic buds 3, which don't seal themselves inside your ears. I was blasting Burna Boy and no one around me could hear anything. The only other thing is the active noise cancellation, which both actually have. So, both tiers of earphones will fire out inverse sound waves to try and neutralize the incoming sound waves. But, eh, it's okay, the base buds 3 have enough isolation to notice that the feature is on, but not enough to tangibly cancel out background sounds. The pros, they are a lot better and they can also adapt on the fly, so they can reduce their noise cancellation when someone talks to you or a siren comes on that they decide needs to be heard, which actually really does work. But it's just that the max level noise cancellation is still not up there with the best of the

best if you want to block out a loud train or a construction site. But now it's time for the most curious product, the one ring to roll them all. This is the first time that a major smartphone maker has made a smart ring, and going hands-on or on hand with this thing, I can see why. So what's the hardware like? Well, it's all very well put together. The ring comes in three colors: black, silver, and gold. It's not exciting to look at, but it'll blend in nicely. These are actually pre-production units, I'm told the final ones will hide the internal circuitry better. But even now, you can very much tell that the Galaxy ring is designed to be put on and forgotten. You don't need to worry about breaking the thing, it is IP68 water resistant and can withstand pressure equivalent to 100m depth immersion. You don't need to worry about battery because the thing has no screen, so it lasts up to 7 days on a charge. Although bear in mind that the smaller ring sizes do also have smaller

batteries, and you don't need to worry about carrying it because I mean the thing only weighs 3 G. So if you struggle with that, then maybe you do need a Galaxy Ring. The only real design features are a slightly concave exterior, which I assume just helps to protect the middle of the ring from scuffing, and then this little ridge that you keep on your palm side to make sure that all the set sensors are in the right place. I will say I do think the hard case it comes in is very cool. It reminds me of something that the Nothing company might produce with an LED ring to indicate its current battery level. And this, just like an AirPod case, can also carry charge to juice the actual ring up many times. They didn't give me an exact number, but given that the ring has up to a 23.5 mAh cell and that can last a week, and then that the case has a 361 million cell, it would seem that with the two together, you could be looking at between 1 and 2 months of charge.

without needing Main's power, which is wild. Here's the elephant in the room, though: how does the smart ring fit in with the smart watch? Because there's a lot of overlap. The ring still does activity tracking, and it can Auto detect if you start running and Auto calculate calories, etc. It still has a heart rate sensor that can also do some interesting stuff like tell you how much to exert yourself while training to keep your heart rate in just the right place for calorie burn. It still tracks your sleep and assigns you an animal that represents your sleep style, and it rounds it all off with a Vitality score, a measure of your current health based on sleep activity and heart rate, paired with recommendations to try and improve that stat. So in one sense, it's like the best parts of a smartwatch without the clunkiness, but then in another sense, it's just like a smartwatch without half the features. I mean, the thing's got no screen, so instantly 50% of the things that require one are wiped, and the other

50% needs you to now use your phone app as your display. It's designed to consume less power. It's got smaller sensors, which I assume won't be as accurate. Everything about it is miniaturized. There's no voice assistant, so you can't ask it to remember stuff. There's no haptic feedback. There's no NFC, so it can't make payments. There's no microphone, so it can't ring people, not to mention the added hassle of rings being not a one-size-fits-all solution like a watch, meaning that you might well have to first order a sizing kit to figure out which one is for you. I think the ring is designed for three types of people: those who want basic Smartwatch features but just can't stand having a smartwatch, those who want to set it and forget it (this is the way more passive, non-thought-taking way of having access to your stats as opposed to the much more involved watch), and in a weird kind of way, it's a bit like

choosing a cat over a dog, but the really interesting one is C for those who want to go all in on their tracking because the ring can also combine with the watch. So, if you're using a Galaxy watch at the same time as a ring, they talk to each other. They use both sets of sensors at the same time when you're doing things to reduce the margin of error in your readings, and that is pretty fascinating and something I've never seen a company do before. Let me know if you want to see a detailed review of this thing. And while we're talking about things that are higher Tech than they look, did you know that surf shark VPN servers are Ram only? See, when you use a VPN, what you're doing is re-routing your internet traffic so that instead of going directly to your internet service provider and the website owners, it's instead going through a private server that masks your real details. But here's the thing, there's a lot of EPN that store that data on their private servers, not necessarily for malicious reasons.

but anytime your information is stored, it creates a new Avenue through which someone can access it. So what surf Shar VPN does instead is swaps out the hard drives in its servers for Ram. You know, the same Random Access Memory that exists in your computer. Simply because that way, it's very fast, and nothing stored Ram is designed to be temporary storage that wipes itself every single time the server is rebooted. Plus, this is like the best offer I've ever seen from these guys. With the code boss, they're now offering a package for just $29 per month, which will cover the VPN use for every single person you know, with four extra months for free. Isn't that crazy?

I tested every new Samsung product!

Let's become the Greatest Tech Community on the Planet 🌍

I'm Arun Maini, I'm a 27 year old Economics graduate whose life's passion is Technology, and I'm on a mission to make the most FUN and USEFUL Tech videos on the Planet! 🙏



