Other Samsung Phones to Consider

If you don’t see a Samsung phone mentioned in this guide, that might be because it’s not sold in the US and is a little harder to source for testing. But here are a few other Samsung phones I’ve tested to consider.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge for $1,220: Have you ever wanted a really thin and lightweight phone? No? Well, Samsung has an option for you anyway. The Galaxy S25 Edge (6/10, WIRED Review) sits in the middle of Samsung’s flagship lineup and matches several features of the Galaxy S25 Ultra, like a titanium frame, stronger front glass, and 4K 120 frames per second video recording. All the cameras even have autofocus. But it made several sacrifices to achieve its amazingly slim 5.8-mm frame (for context, the S25 Ultra is 8.2 mm thick). There’s no stylus, no telephoto camera, and worst of all, the battery capacity has been slashed. We’ve seen this before—thin phones have always compromised on battery life, and that’s no different here. I constantly had to baby this phone’s 3,900-mAh battery with average to heavy usage, and that’s just not acceptable. (The iPhone Air did it better.) If you find yourself constantly near a power source and you think you’ll enjoy the slim and light design, then go for it. Rumors suggest that the Edge did not perform well, and it may not see a successor in 2026.

Galaxy A17 5G.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy A17 5G for $200: On paper, the Galaxy A17 (5/10, WIRED Review) seems like a really great deal. Six years of software support, an AMOLED screen, expandable storage, and a decent camera. Unfortunately, it’s held back by lackluster performance. The problem is specifically the very limited 4 GB of RAM in the US model, which severely ruins the entire experience of using the phone. If you had to use your smartphone in an emergency, I would not trust the A17 to be reliable. But if your needs are extremely minimal, it may suffice.

Galaxy A36.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy A36 5G for $395: The Galaxy A36 (6/10, WIRED Review) doesn’t quite measure up to its peers from Nothing and Motorola. Performance is just too choppy, and that’s not acceptable at this price. It’s manageable—it’s not so slow that it will frustrate—but you can do better. If your needs are very minimal, it’s an OK phone, and the camera system is good, with day-long battery life, a nice AMOLED screen, and 6 years of software updates.

Galaxy Z Fold6 and Flip6.

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold6 or Galaxy Z Flip6: If you don’t want to pay a premium for a new folding phone, then consider 2024’s Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip7 (7/10, WIRED Review). The Fold6 has a close to “normal” smartphone experience on the exterior 6.3-inch screen. Open the phone up, and there’s a vast 7.6-inch AMOLED screen staring at your face, turning this folding phone into a tiny tablet. The Flip6 isn’t as nice as the newer Flip7—the bigger and brighter cover screen on the latest model is a step up—but it’s worth considering over the new Galaxy Z Flip7 FE. Technically, it’s nearly identical to that phone, but the FE uses a Samsung Exynos chip instead of a Qualcomm processor, and performance may not be as smooth. The main drawback? Battery life isn’t great. Make sure you don’t pay MSRP for these 2024 phones.

If you’re looking to save some cash, it’s fine to buy Samsung’s Galaxy S23 range or the Galaxy S23 FE from 2023, as long as the prices are a good deal lower than the original MSRP. (They’re hard to find at most major retailers.) These phones will still get support for a while, and they’re pretty great. I don’t think it’s worth buying anything older.

Should You Invest in Samsung’s Ecosystem?

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

Samsung is one of the few smartphone manufacturers that can match Apple in its hardware ecosystem. Not only does the company make smartphones, but you can also expand your experience by adding on a Galaxy Watch8 smartwatch, Galaxy Buds3 Pro earbuds, Galaxy Ring fitness ring, Galaxy Tab S11, and even a Windows-powered Galaxy laptop.

There are certain perks to this, like how some features on the Galaxy Ring and Watch8 are only available when paired with a Samsung phone, and its earbuds will automatically switch between Samsung devices based on what you’re using. There’s not much in the way of exclusive features when using a Galaxy phone with a Galaxy laptop, but features like Quick Share let you speedily send photos and documents between your devices.

Again, it’s not necessary, and these other devices might not be the right ones for you within their respective categories, but if you’re chasing hardware parity, you have that option with Samsung.

What Is Galaxy AI?

Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

With the Galaxy S24 series, Samsung launched “Galaxy AI,” a selection of artificial intelligence features, many of which are powered by Google’s Gemini large language models. These enable smart features that may be helpful day to day, like real-time translations during phone calls, real-time transcriptions in Samsung’s Voice Recorder app, the ability to summarize long paragraphs of text in the Samsung Notes app, or change a sentence’s tone with the Samsung Keyboard.

In the Galaxy S25 series, Galaxy AI expanded to include Gemini as the default voice assistant and the ability for Gemini to work with multiple apps simultaneously. It also debuted Drawing Assist, which lets you sketch or enter a prompt and get an AI-generated image. Now, you can also use video in real-time with Gemini, even from the cover screen of the Galaxy Z Flip7.

You can find many of these features by heading to Settings > Galaxy AI to toggle them on or off. We have an explainer on how to limit Galaxy AI to on-device processing, too.

What Is Samsung DeX?

Courtesy of David Nield

Samsung’s DeX (short for “desktop experience”) launched in 2017, and it’s a way to plug in your Samsung phone to an external monitor and trigger a desktop version of the Android OS, all completely powered by the phone. You can find a list of compatible Samsung phones here—the Flip7 is the first Galaxy Flip to support DeX—and you’ll need a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, plus a cable to connect the phone to the monitor. (You can also cast DeX to select screens wirelessly.)

When in DeX mode, you can resize Android apps and have them all open in separate windows. It’s a proper computing platform, though you probably won’t want to use this as a permanent laptop replacement or anything of the sort. It’s great if you’re visiting another office, or working out of a coffee shop or airplane (if you have a portable display). We have a whole guide to setting up and using DeX here.

How I Test Phones

I’ve been reviewing smartphones for a decade, but one of my earliest smart devices was a Samsung Galaxy Captivate, which I got for “free” from my carrier at the time. After working during college, I finally saved enough cash for a Galaxy S3, my first flagship. I’ve spent years using Samsung phones in my personal life and began reviewing them for work not too long after.

With each Samsung smartphone, I always put my personal SIM card inside and spend as long as I can (a few weeks) using the phone as my own. I do camera testing and compare the results with similarly priced devices, I benchmark performance and play graphically demanding games to see how they fare, I try out all the new features, and even take calls to make sure that ol’ function still works fine.

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Threat actors are now abusing DNS queries as part of ClickFix social engineering attacks to deliver malware, making this the first known use of DNS as a channel in these campaigns.

ClickFix attacks typically trick users into manually executing malicious commands under the guise of fixing errors, installing updates, or enabling functionality.

However, this new variant uses a novel technique in which an attacker-controlled DNS server delivers the second-stage payload via DNS lookups.

DNS queries deliver a malicious PowerShell script

In a new ClickFix campaign seen by Microsoft, victims are instructed to run the nslookup command that queries an attacker-controlled DNS server instead of the system’s default DNS server.

The command returns a query containing a malicious PowerShell script that is then executed on the device to install malware.

“Microsoft Defender researchers observed attackers using yet another evasion approach to the ClickFix technique: Asking targets to run a command that executes a custom DNS lookup and parses the Name: response to receive the next-stage payload for execution,” reads an X post from Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

While it is unclear what the lure is to trick users into running the command, Microsoft says the ClickFix attack instructs users to run the command in the Windows Run dialog box.

This command will issue a DNS lookup for the hostname “example.com” against the threat actor’s DNS server at 84[.]21.189[.]20 and then execute the resulting response via the Windows command interpreter (cmd.exe).

This DNS response returns a “NAME:” field that contains the second PowerShell payload that is executed on the device.

While this server is no longer available, Microsoft says that the second-stage PowerShell command downloaded additional malware from attacker-controlled infrastructure.

This attack ultimately downloads a ZIP archive containing a Python runtime executable and malicious scripts that perform reconnaissance on the infected device and domain.

The attack then establishes persistence by creating %APPDATA%\WPy64-31401\python\script.vbs and a %STARTUP%\MonitoringService.lnk shortcut to launch the VBScript file on startup.

The final payload is a remote access trojan known as ModeloRAT, which allows attackers to control compromised systems remotely.

Unlike the usual ClickFix attacks, which commonly retrieve payloads via HTTP, this technique uses DNS as a communication and staging channel.

By using DNS responses to deliver malicious PowerShell scripts, attackers can modify payloads on the fly while blending in with normal DNS traffic.

ClickFix attacks rapidly evolving

ClickFix attacks have rapidly evolved over the past year, with threat actors experimenting with new delivery tactics and payload types that target a wide variety of operating systems.

Previously reported ClickFix campaigns relied on convincing users to execute PowerShell or shell commands directly on their operating systems to install malware.

In more recent campaigns, attackers have expanded their techniques beyond traditional malware payload delivery over the web.

For example, a recent ClickFix attack called “ConsentFix” abuses the Azure CLI OAuth app to hijack Microsoft accounts without a password and bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA).

With the rise in popularity of AI LLMs for everyday use, threat actors have begun using shared ChatGPT and Grok pages, as well as Claude Artifact pages, to promote fake guides for ClickFix attacks.

BleepingComputer also reported today about a novel ClickFix attack promoted through Pastebin comments that tricked cryptocurrency users into executing malicious JavaScript directly in their browser while visiting a cryptocurrency exchange to hijack transactions. 

This is one of the first ClickFix campaigns designed to execute JavaScript in the browser and hijack web application functionality rather than deploy malware.

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The Pentagon is pushing AI companies to allow the U.S. military to use their technology for “all lawful purposes,” but Anthropic is pushing back, according to a new report in Axios.

The government is reportedly making the same demand to OpenAI, Google, and xAI. An anonymous Trump administration official told Axios that one of those companies has agreed, while the other two have supposedly shown some flexibility.

Anthropic, meanwhile, has reportedly been the most resistant. In response, the Pentagon is apparently threatening to pull the plug on its $200 million contract with the AI company.

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that there was significant disagreement between Anthropic and Defense Department officials over how its Claude models could be used. The WSJ subsequently said that Claude was used in the U.S. military’s operation to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

A company spokesperson told Axios that the company has “not discussed the use of Claude for specific operations with the Department of War” but is instead “focused on a specific set of Usage Policy questions — namely, our hard limits around fully autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance.”

A new three-part Netflix docuseries will cover the chaos and complicated legacy of the hit reality series, America’s Next Top Model. 

ANTM premiered in 2003 and ran for 24 seasons, helping launch the careers of contestants like Eva Marcille, Lio Tipton and Yaya DaCosta. Netflix’s synopsis describes the new doc as the definitive chronicle of the modeling competition, which “became a pop-culture juggernaut defined by explosive drama, public meltdowns and controversies that still fuel viral moments today.” 

Former contestants, judges and producers — including host and creator Tyra Banks — took part in Netflix’s series, Reality Check, which you can stream shortly. 

When to watch Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model on Netflix

Netflix will drop its three-episode doc on the modeling competition series in the early morning hours on Monday, Feb. 16 (3 a.m. ET, to be exact).

Like many other streaming services, Netflix’s cheapest tier is ad-supported, and you can opt for a pricier tier to avoid commercials. You can subscribe to Standard with ads for $8 per month, Standard for $18 per month or Premium for $25 per month.

For ad-free streaming and access to every title Netflix offers, you should opt for the streamer’s Standard or Premium tiers. The Standard with ads tier comes with some limits on what you can watch due to licensing restrictions. Netflix’s website lets you compare the simultaneous streams, downloads and extra member slots you get with each tier.

​From miles away across the desert, the Great Pyramid looks like a perfect, smooth geometry — a sleek triangle pointing to the stars. Stand at the base, however, and the illusion of smoothness vanishes. You see massive, jagged blocks of limestone. It is not a slope; it is a staircase.

​Remember this the next time you hear futurists talking about exponential growth.

​Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore (Moore’s Law) is famously quoted for saying in 1965 that the transistor count on a microchip would double every year. Another Intel executive, David House, later revised this statement to “compute power doubling every 18 months.” For a while, Intel’s CPUs were the poster child of this law. That is, until the growth in CPU performance flattened out like a block of limestone.

​If you zoom out, though, the next limestone block was already there — the growth in compute merely shifted from CPUs to the world of GPUs. Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s CEO, played a long game and came out a strong winner, building his own stepping stones initially with gaming, then computer visioniand recently, generative AI.

​The illusion of smooth growth

​Technology growth is full of sprints and plateaus, and gen AI is not immune. The current wave is driven by transformer architecture. To quote Anthropic’s President and co-founder Dario Amodei: “The exponential continues until it doesn’t. And every year we’ve been like, ‘Well, this can’t possibly be the case that things will continue on the exponential’ — and then every year it has.”

​But just as the CPU plateaued and GPUs took the lead, we are seeing signs that LLM growth is shifting paradigms again. For example, late in 2024, DeepSeek surprised the world by training a world-class model on an impossibly small budget, in part by using the MoE technique.

​Do you remember where you recently saw this technique mentioned? Nvidia’s Rubin press release: The technology includes “…the latest generations of Nvidia NVLink interconnect technology… to accelerate agentic AI, advanced reasoning and massive-scale MoE model inference at up to 10x lower cost per token.”

​Jensen knows that achieving that coveted exponential growth in compute doesn’t come from pure brute force anymore. Sometimes you need to shift the architecture entirely to place the next stepping stone.

​The latency crisis: Where Groq fits in

​This long introduction brings us to Groq.

​The biggest gains in AI reasoning capabilities in 2025 were driven by “inference time compute” — or, in lay terms, “letting the model think for a longer period of time.” But time is money. Consumers and businesses do not like waiting.

​Groq comes into play here with its lightning-speed inference. If you bring together the architectural efficiency of models like DeepSeek and the sheer throughput of Groq, you get frontier intelligence at your fingertips. By executing inference faster, you can “out-reason” competitive models, offering a “smarter” system to customers without the penalty of lag.

​From universal chip to inference optimization

​For the last decade, the GPU has been the universal hammer for every AI nail. You use H100s to train the model; you use H100s (or trimmed-down versions) to run the model. But as models shift toward “System 2” thinking — where the AI reasons, self-corrects and iterates before answering — the computational workload changes.

​Training requires massive parallel brute force. Inference, especially for reasoning models, requires faster sequential processing. It must generate tokens instantly to facilitate complex chains of thought without the user waiting minutes for an answer. ​Groq’s LPU (Language Processing Unit) architecture removes the memory bandwidth bottleneck that plagues GPUs during small-batch inference, delivering lightning-fast inference.

​The engine for the next wave of growth

​For the C-Suite, this potential convergence solves the “thinking time” latency crisis. Consider the expectations from AI agents: We want them to autonomously book flights, code entire apps and research legal precedent. To do this reliably, a model might need to generate 10,000 internal “thought tokens” to verify its own work before it outputs a single word to the user.

• ​On a standard GPU: 10,000 thought tokens might take 20 to 40 seconds. The user gets bored and leaves.

• ​On Groq: That same chain of thought happens in less than 2 seconds.

​If Nvidia integrates Groq’s technology, they solve the “waiting for the robot to think” problem. They preserve the magic of AI. Just as they moved from rendering pixels (gaming) to rendering intelligence (gen AI), they would now move to rendering reasoning in real-time.

​Furthermore, this creates a formidable software moat. Groq’s biggest hurdle has always been the software stack; Nvidia’s biggest asset is CUDA. If Nvidia wraps its ecosystem around Groq’s hardware, they effectively dig a moat so wide that competitors cannot cross it. They would offer the universal platform: The best environment to train and the most efficient environment to run (Groq/LPU).

Consider what happens when you couple that raw inference power with a next-generation open source model (like the rumored DeepSeek 4): You get an offering that would rival today’s frontier models in cost, performance and speed. That opens up opportunities for Nvidia, from directly entering the inference business with its own cloud offering, to continuing to power a growing number of exponentially growing customers.

​The next step on the pyramid

​Returning to our opening metaphor: The “exponential” growth of AI is not a smooth line of raw FLOPs; it is a staircase of bottlenecks being smashed.

• ​Block 1: We couldn’t calculate fast enough. Solution: The GPU.

• ​Block 2: We couldn’t train deep enough. Solution: Transformer architecture.

• ​Block 3: We can’t “think” fast enough. Solution: Groq’s LPU.

​Jensen Huang has never been afraid to cannibalize his own product lines to own the future. By validating Groq, Nvidia wouldn’t just be buying a faster chip; they would be bringing next-generation intelligence to the masses.

Andrew Filev, founder and CEO of Zencoder

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Hideki Sato, who led the design of Sega’s beloved consoles from the ’80s and ’90s, died on Friday, according to the Japanese gaming site Beep21. He was 77. Sato worked with Sega from 1971 until the early 2000s, but he’s best known for his involvement in the development of the Sega arcade games and home consoles that defined many late Gen X and early millennial childhoods, starting with the SG-1000 to the Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast.

Sato went on to serve as Sega’s president from 2001 to 2003. In the post announcing his death, Beep21, which interviewed Sato numerous times over the years, wrote (translated from Japanese), “He was truly a great figure who shaped Japanese gaming history and captivated Sega fans all around the world. The excitement and pioneering spirit of that era will remain forever in the hearts and memories of countless fans, for all eternity.” Sato’s passing comes just a few months after that of Sega co-founder David Rosen, who died in December at age 95. 

Peter Steinberger, who created the AI personal assistant now known as OpenClaw, has joined OpenAI.

Previously known as Clawdbot, then Moltbot, OpenClaw achieved viral popularity over the past few weeks with its promise to be the “AI that actually does things,” whether that’s managing your calendar, booking flights, or even joining a social network full of other AI assistants. (The name changed the first time after Anthropic threatened legal action over its similarity to Claude, then changed again because Steinberger liked the new name better.)

In a blog post announcing his decision to join OpenAI, the Austrian developer said that while he might have been able to turn OpenClaw into a huge company, “It’s not really exciting for me.”

“What I want is to change the world, not build a large company[,] and teaming up with OpenAI is the fastest way to bring this to everyone,” Steinberger said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that in his new role, Steinberger will “drive the next generation of personal agents.” As for OpenClaw, Altman said it will “live in a foundation as an open source project that OpenAI will continue to support”