If you have been kind enough to be a reader here for even a little while, then you know that AI - new GenAI tool in particular - and top tier smartphones are two things that fascinate me. That’s more true than ever now that Thing 1 can be used with great effect on Thing 2. Tonight there are a few new, upcoming, and hanging around things in this area that I’m excited about.
The first one - which will make no sense when I mention the last one - is the next generation of Google’s Pixel phone models. The Pixel 9 models are set to be unveiled by Google on August 13. I have had the biggest screen model of the Pixel 6,7, and 8 phones - and Oh My does the big 6.8 inch screen and the 16GB of RAM look great to me. Especially when reports say the bump-up in RAM is specifically meant to support more powerful AI features. Like a 10 year old at Christmas time, I’m counting the days to the launch event.
Next up is the Claude Android app already has a nice little update, just two weeks after arriving on the Play Store. It’s doesn’t bring a huge number of new features, but the update change list includes “improvements to image uploads, including sharing from other apps”. I’m not sure I could do this before with Claude on my phone - attach a screenshot from photos and ask about it:
By the way, over the last couple of weeks Claude (on my phone and its web app) is neck and neck with ChatGPT 4o as my most used GenAI tool. In case you missed them, I recently shared two cybersecurity + AI posts that featured working with Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
Sticking with exciting new / upcoming AI things, there are also two very promising new things coming soon-ish from OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT:
SearchGPT - described by OpenAI not as a Google search killer (cough), but like so:
We’re testing SearchGPT, a prototype of new search features designed to combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.
Real-time conversational speech for ChatGPT 4o - shown in the demo video below at around the 9:20 mark. This is said to be rolling out now to ChatGPT free and paid users on the iOS and Android apps.
Lastly, there’s the In with The Old item. The one that wants to fight with the first thing I mentioned above. The consistently great Nothing Phone 2. I usually show a screenshot of the stunning home screen look of the Nothing Phone 2; for a change-up, here’s what the back of it looks like, showing off the actual innards of the phone:
Over the course of more than a year of using the Nothing Phone 2, I have tried many times to switch away from it. I’ve tried switching over to my Pixel 7 Pro, and then to the Pixel 8 Pro, and most recently to a Galaxy S24 Plus. Every time I have found myself back using the Nothing Phone 2 as my daily driver within a couple weeks or so. This phone is supposed to be way outgunned by the Pixel 8 Pro, but it …
Is just so damn fast - at opening an app, switching between apps, refreshing the screen, unlocking via fingerprint or Face Unlock, and just about anything I do with it
It is just plain fun to use and different to use - words I have not used about a phone since the original iPhone
Battery life is excellent and it charges super quickly
It’s even a beast in an unexpected specs category - cellular performance and speed. My Pixel 6,7,8 Pro models have had decent-good performance, and sometimes worse than that. Over the weekend I decided to quantify that. The Pixel 8 Pro topped out at around 80Mbps download speed on the T-Mobile network - its best result out of a half dozen speed tests using the Ookla Speedtest app and Google’s own speed test in the Brave browser. The Nothing Phone 2 wasn’t a little better; it was, and is, way better. This is not even its best result in this screenshot - showing 397Mbps download speed:
What are you all looking forward to in GenAI apps or smartphones, or even just tech in general?