Episode 91 - Samsung's Summer Unpacked Event with new Galaxy Foldables, Watches, Earbuds, and Ring

This week on the Solid State Podcast, we tricked ourselves into thinking this would be a “quick one”… 

See, at first you can’t really blame us… Samsung had their (formerly “Fall”, now very much Summer) Unpacked event focused on their foldable phone hardware plus a smattering of other devices and, on paper at least, it seemed like kind of a snoozer…

Screens got a little bigger, hinges got a little tougher, and some earbuds suddenly got very familiar looking… but other than that “business as usual” sure seemed to be the name of the game this year. 

And honestly, that still might end up being the case, but as we’ve seen happen several other times across the industry and the years, we can’t help but wonder if the sum total of the changes, additions, and updates add up to… I don’t know, “more”! 

Throw in that on top of all that AI keeps shoving itself to the forefront of the “feature list”, and Samsung frankly just lobbed a ring-shaped grenade into Oura’s back yard, yelled YOLO, and added yet another seemingly-compelling reason to pitch your tent in their every-growing walled garden and hope for the best. 

We say it around here all the time, two companies “competing” isn’t a healthy field of competition, but at the very least Apple and Samsung do keep incentivizing each other to do one thing better and better… as long as that thing is “looking more and more alike”…

Again, there might just be more there than meets the eye, or it may be a year to kick back, keep enjoying last year's phone, and hope next time things get a little more interesting. Let’s see if we can find out which one we’ve got on our hands here in 2024…