Have We Reached Peak Smartphone?

Boone Ashworth: Yes. It was surprisingly light when I held it in the test area afterwards, but I don’t know, maybe I’m just not used to phones. Let’s see they are very similar if you are familiar with the S22, many similar features carried over. The Ultra has this new 200-megapixel camera that’s just insane. It has all that raw photo processing and quad-pixel tech to make your low-light photos better and capture astrophotography-like stuff better. The other cameras also have three lenses on them. You have a telephoto lens, a regular 10x zoom lens, and then an ultrawide, so sort of standard phone stuff.

Michael Kalore: Does it have a headphone jack?

Boone Ashworth: No. Were you surprised to learn it doesn’t have a headphone jack?

Lauren Goode: We should be asking this question again in 2023 with every single phone launch.

Michael Kalore: Totally agree about.

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

Michael Kalore: Samsung stopped putting SD card slots in their phones a few years ago and that was very controversial, almost as controversial as removing the headphone jack.

Boone Ashworth: Yes.

Michael Kalore: So I saw Unpacked here in the office, a mile and a half from the actual event, and it felt like most Samsung press conferences where it was kind of stuffy, not really that fun. It lost steam after about the first 20 minutes, but I’m curious to see how it feels in the room.

Lauren Goode: It’s clubby.

Michael Kalore: Clubby?

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

Michael Kalore: Oh, you mean clumsy?

Lauren Goode: Yes, like clurbby. By the way, about the function room we were in, I have a question for you, Mike.

Michael Kalore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: How do you pronounce where we’ve been?

Michael Kalore: The Masonic Auditorium.

Lauren Goode: Look, he says Moo-sonic. We had this conversation with Alicia Cocchi, our social video producer, who was also present at the Samsung event today. She says her partner calls it Moo-Sonic, and she asked me, and I said, “No, it’s May-Sonic.” She says, “May-Sonic.” Then our Uber driver said, “Moo-sonic.”

Michael Kalore: Yes.

Lauren Goode: So now we think it’s actually split by gender.

Boone Ashworth: I say it’s Moo-Sonic.

Lauren Goode: Any type—

Michael Kalore: The Freemason—