The Now Bar debuted on the S25 series earlier this year and uses on-device AI to process your data and present contextual information that is supposed to help you throughout the day. Samsung has expanded the apps and services that support the Now Bar and its constantly updating Now Brief, but we haven’t noticed much difference.
Credit:
Ryan Whitwam
Samsung’s AI-powered Now Brief still isn’t very useful, but it talks to you now. Umm, thanks?
Credit:
Ryan Whitwam
Nine times out of ten, the Now Bar doesn’t provide any useful notifications, and the Brief is quite repetitive. It often includes just weather, calendar appointments, and a couple of clickbait-y news stories and YouTube videos—this is the case even with all the possible data sources enabled. On a few occasions, the Now Bar correctly cited an appointment and suggested a route, but its timing was off by about 30 minutes. Google Now did this better a decade ago. Samsung has also added an AI-fueled audio version of the Now Brief, but we found this pretty tedious and unnecessary when there’s so little information in the report to begin with.
So the Now Bar is still a Now Bummer, but Galaxy AI also includes a cornucopia of other common AI features. It can rewrite text for you, summarize notes or webpages, do live translation, make generative edits to photos, remove background noise from videos, and more. These features work as well as they do on any other modern smartphone. Whether or not you get any benefit from them depends on how you use the phone.
However, we appreciate that Samsung included a toggle under the Galaxy AI settings to process data only on your device, eliminating the privacy concerns of using AI in the cloud. This reduces the number of operational AI features, but that may be a desirable feature all on its own.
Credit:
Ryan Whitwam
You can’t beat Samsung’s multitasking system.
Credit:
Ryan Whitwam
Samsung tends to overload its phones with apps and features. Those are here, too, making the Z Fold 7 a bit frustrating at times. Some of the latest One UI interface tweaks, like separating the quick settings and notifications, fall flat. Luckily, One UI is also quite customizable. For example, you can have your cover screen and foldable home screens mirrored like Pixels, or you can have a distinct layout for each mode. With some tweaking and removing pre-loaded apps, you can get the experience you want.
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