00:00 Speaker A

Samsung hosting its flagship Galaxy Unpacked event, Yahoo Finance's tech editor Dan Howley was there on the ground and he's joining us now. Dan, what did you see? What did you learn?

00:08 Dan Howley

Uh besides those stunning uh photos that I took the other day. Uh uh uh a lot. Samsung announced their new Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7. Uh you might be wondering, well, it's the seventh in a line of foldables. What's the difference? Uh the big deal here is that Samsung has finally, it seems, made foldable phones that are truly worthwhile when it comes to comparing them to a regular candy bar phone. So your iPhone, you know, your your Pixel phone, your regular Samsung phone, those are candy bars. Foldables are the ones that open like a book or might flip up like an old makeup compact or a foldable phone that you might remember. The big deal with them in the past has been they've been clunky and heavier than a regular phone. You think, okay, well, you know, it's a trade-off for getting this larger, unfoldable screen. Now that's not there. Uh I was going hands-on with the uh the Fold 7 and truthfully, it's wildly skinny. It's really about the thickness of uh Samsung's own uh S 25 Ultra. And then when you unfold it, when you when you have it opened up, it's literally a hair thicker than the USB C port at the bottom. So it feels like the limiting factor now for how thin the phone can get is the connector to charge it. Uh it's it's outrageous. It it does uh feel great when you use it. I used to complain about the front screen on it being a little too narrow for when I wanted to type. I got kind of fat thumbs. Uh they widened that so it's a lot better overall in that respect. And then the flip um is kind of uh the little party animal of the of the two. Uh it's meant for selfies and fun things along those lines. That now has a full uh cover screen. So it goes edge to edge on the front, takes selfies with that. Uh you can also load up apps. They have a special uh labs mode where you can run your different apps on there. And then that also got a larger screen in the middle, and is also a bit lighter. So, I mean, they they've done a great job here as far as the phones themselves go. I got a caveat though. The price is still way too high. It's 1999 for the Fold 7 and 1099 for the Flip 7. So, you know, these are uh fantastic examples of what foldable phones can and should be. The price though, look, I'm not going to be rushing out to to spend two grand on a phone at any point, right? Doesn't matter who makes it. If they made this less expensive somehow, I'd be picking it up, no problem.

04:33 Speaker A

What about the AI features they talk about, Dan? Who who they partner with for those features? Are they teaming up with Google on that? Okay.

04:42 Dan Howley

Yeah. So they have they have Gemini live on the cover of the uh the Z Flip. You can now access directly from that cover screen. And they talk about how they have, you know, uh uh different Gemini features. Look, this is kind of I I think the the thinking originally with smartphones was, here comes AI, boom, everyone's going to want to go out and buy it because AI. And it's like, no, no. Cool, you could rewrite a couple sentences. Cool, you can edit like, I don't know, the jogger out of the background of this photo of like my kids or whatever. Great, awesome. Do you want to spend a thousand bucks just for that? No. So I think it's what what's happening with AI and what's going to continue to happen with AI and on the PC side as well is, this is just going to slowly become part of our average workflow. It's not going to be this wow big feature that I have to get. It's just going to be sprinkled throughout different parts of the operating system. And that's great. And then eventually you'll look back and say, well, I don't want a phone without it because then I lose all of these features that I've become accustomed to over the years. There's I don't think there's ever going to be a big wow moment when it comes to the AI aspect of phones. I think it's still going to be the hardware. And when I looked at the the Fold 7, I didn't say, wow, look at the AI on it. I said, my god, how did they get this so thin, and how did they get the screen to be so large in this package? That's what gets me excited.

06:46 Speaker A

All right, Dan, thank you, sir. Appreciate it.