Same. Pixel + GrapheneOS sounds like the move for most now.
Comment on Samsung’s $1,300 phone might someday have fees for AI usage
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Up until the S9, I considered the Galaxy series of phones to be basically worth their weight in gold, as they were the one holdout with things like headphone jacks and expandable storage. Sure, they preloaded cloud crap, but they were throwing everything at the wall at once.
From the S20 onward, they were the lesser evil, having abandoned those things, and seeming to charge more for extra storage with each generation. But they were still smooth, their camera still put out pictures that impressed me, and using Gboard didn’t result in the swipe jitter I’d always experience on a comparable Pixel device.
Sounds like when my S23 dies, I’ll be shopping around more seriously. AI is not a feature. The cloud is not a feature. It’s an anti-feature, giving the manufacturer the ability to alter your bargain with them at any time, with the only limit being the law.
just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 months ago
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I still wish there was a Pixel phone with the kind of camera (software) you would get on a Samsung, and have a keyboard that doesn’t act like your finger is jittering all over the place. Seriously, I don’t know how Samsung pulled this off with a Google product, but somehow Google has not.
Maybe with the next Pixel.
Or maybe I should look into Sony phones, which are almost never talked about, but still have that beloved SD card and headphone jack.
Tinnitus@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What’s the issue with the Pixel cameras? I thought they were typically one of the selling points of the phone? Maybe I haven’t paid enough attention to recent reviews (been on iOS for a few years now, but want to switch back to Android).
LWD@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Probably just preference. Pixel cameras have better specs, but I’ve found both indoor and outdoor photos taken with my Samsung seem to better represent the subject of them. At least to me. It could be the quality of the post-processing, or just bias on my part, but for a while it sure did seem like Samsung had a monopoly on photographing and reproducing deep greens.
kadu@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That kinda goes away if you do install Graphene or other de-Googled software though. The camera hardware isn’t that impressive and using the AOSP camera makes this super clear. Google’s image processing is what really elevates the quality you get from a Pixel picture.
karpintero@lemmy.world 8 months ago
100%. Seems like phones continually get worse under the guise of “progress”. No more headphone jack or removable battery, more bloated software, anti-privacy assistants/AI. Switched to a Sony Xperia for the headphone jack alone and it’s been great, I hope they don’t follow this AI trend or else I’m out.
GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
I’m with you on the cloud, but non-cloud AI would be a killer feature if anybody actually offered it. But instead, everything just sends all your data to OpenAI. Yawn. I can do that myself in any web browser.
Samsung talks about on-device AI, but if you look through their footnotes almost everything requires a Samsung account and an active internet connection. It’s all cloud shit. Probably OpenAI, but as far as I can tell they don’t actually say who their providers are. Perhaps the details are (or will be) buried in a privacy policy somewhere.
Google has Gemini Nano, Microsoft has Phi-2, and on the open-source side there are plenty of 3B or 7B models that can run on a laptop or phone (e.g. Mistral, Falcon, Wizard). Whisper is great for on-device multi-lingual voice-to-text, and there are tons of Stable Diffusion implementations that could run on a high-end smartphone. A Snapdragon 8 gen 3 should be able to run this stuff, unless Qualcomm seriously dropped the ball (remains to be seen).
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Kind of like what Google did with the Pixel 8 (Pro). “Hey look at our cool Tensor 3 chip, it does AI.” … “Oh but almost everything we showed you with object removal and most other stuff works in the cloud.”
That’s some bs.
Will be interesting to see what Apple does. They’ll at least try to get some form of chat bot running on-device, all of their AI features run locally so far.