At the height of the excellent presentation of the Galaxy S24, one piece of information was slightly overlooked. The “Galaxy AI” features that Samsung boasts about will only be available for free until 2025.
Rarely, high-end phones worth over KSH 100,000 or above their value lose functionality after a few years of existence. However, this is the case with the Galaxy S24, which Samsung has just introduced. Although the Korean manufacturer has focused much of its news on the artificial intelligence functions accompanying its phones, they can only be accessible for a while.
As we can read very briefly on the official page of the website, “Galaxy AI features will be provided free of charge on compatible Samsung Galaxy devices, at least until the end of 2025. “This means that after this date, when Samsung decides, it will have to pay a subscription to take advantage of features such as on-the-fly translation, rephrasing suggestions, or summarizing the article.
Paying for access to advanced artificial intelligence features is reasonable; ChatGPT and Google Bard use (or will use) this strategy, but when these features are presented as the basis of S24 software, it is more challenging to cope mainly if most of these operations can be performed locally without resorting to the cloud (which often entails high costs).
This means many “new features” built into the S24 can be loaded in 2 years. In this game, Samsung triumphs less than Google and its Pixel 8, although they are also reinforced by artificial intelligence. It should also be noted that this policy does not affect the artificial intelligence functions provided by Google, for example, the “Environment Search” function. As Samsung clarifies, “The availability of artificial intelligence functions supplied by third parties may be changed. “This way, S24s will be able to get specific free AI features at the end, while others will pay for it. It takes work to keep track.
The vocabulary used by Samsung still leaves little hope since the manufacturer indicates that these functions will be accessible “at least” until 2025. By then, the Korean manufacturer will review their copy and not force their customers to re-order.