Have We Reached Peak Smartphone?

Boone Ashworth: Yeah. It was surprisingly light when I held it in the testing area afterward, but I don’t know, maybe I’m just not used to phones. Let’s see, they’re very similar, if you are familiar with the S22, a lot of similar features that have carried over. The Ultra has this new 200-megapixel camera, which is just insane. It has all this raw photo processing and quad pixel technology to make your photos better in low light and better taking astrophotography-type stuff. The other cameras also have three lenses on them. They’ve got a telephoto lens, a regular lens that has 10X zoom on it, and then an ultrawide, so kind of standard phone stuff.

Michael Heat: Does it have a headphone jack?

Boone Ashworth: No. Were you surprised to learn that it does not have a headphone jack?

Lauren Goode: We should bring that question back in 2023, every single phone launch.

Michael Heat: Completely agree.

Boone Ashworth: Honestly, that’s one of my things. If I want phones to get better, just give me a headphone jack back. Give me a headphone jack. Give me a microSD card slot so I can put … If I want to upgrade to get a new phone to get a terabyte of storage, I’ll just put my own little card in there. Anyway—

Michael Heat: Samsung stopped putting SD card slots in its phones a couple years ago, and that was very contentious, almost as a contentious move as the removal of the headphone jack.

Boone Ashworth: Yeah.

Michael Heat: So I watched Unpacked here at the office, a mile and a half away from the actual event, and it felt like most Samsung press conferences, where it was kind of stiff, not really that fun. It lost its steam after about the first 20 minutes, but I’m curious as to what it felt like in the room.

Lauren Goode: It’s clubby.

Michael Heat: Clubby?

Lauren Goode: Yeah. So Samsung events are always clubby. They have very dark, dramatic lighting. It’s a lot of unts, unts, unts, unts—

Michael Heat: Oh, you mean clurbby?

Lauren Goode: Yeah, like clurbby. By the way, about the event space that we were at, I have a question for you, Mike.

Michael Heat: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: How do you pronounce where we were?

Michael Heat: The Masonic Auditorium.

Lauren Goode: See, he says Muh-sonic. We were having this conversation with Alicia Cocchi, our social video producer, who also joined us at the Samsung event today. She says her partner calls it the Muh-sonic, and she asked me and I said, “No, it’s the May-sonic.” She says, “May-sonic.” Then our Uber driver said, “Muh-sonic.”

Michael Heat: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: So now we’re thinking it’s actually divided along gender lines.

Boone Ashworth: I say it’s Moo-sonic.

Lauren Goode: Every guy—

Michael Heat: The Mason—