This week’s Unpacked might have been Samsung’s most successful launch in ages. Both the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Galaxy Z Flip 7 offer some pretty substantial improvements over their direct predecessors, with slimmer builds and larger displays — exactly what fans have been asking for. And while neither device is perfect, they each go a long way in quelling discussions around Samsung’s recent output.

The Galaxy Z Flip 7 is an undersung achievement in Samsung’s latest foldable portfolio, with the flip phone delivering the first significant hardware improvement in years. It’s arguably as big of an update as the Fold 7, but Samsung’s stubborn refusal to give in has left that upgrade with an annoying asterisk.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Flip 7 appear to be what Samsung fans and critics alike have been demanding from the company for generations. Slimmer builds, larger displays, and even more powerful chipsets — what’s not to like? But ironically enough, Samsung might be hoping its latest Z-series lineup is enough to convince anyone with an aging Note device to make the plunge, even as S Pen compatibility is ripped away from that big, foldable display.

The Nothing Phone (3) isn’t the company’s first real foray into the US — that’d be 2023’s $600 Nothing Phone (2) — but it does feel like it’s the first time the brand is taking this market seriously. I’m not sure it’s the right device.

With less than two weeks to go until Unpacked, every Galaxy Z Flip 7 leak seems to agree on one thing: Samsung is finally delivering on a larger cover screen for its 2025 flip phone. It’s what Samsung fans have been asking for since the Moto Razr+ launch last year — and the arrival of Motorola’s successor models last month. This change should feel like as large of a leap forward as you can find in smartphones, and yet, without some crucial changes to One UI, I’m not sure it’s going to be enough to steal back the Razr’s flip phone crown.

The Galaxy Z Fold 7 is (officially, finally) around the corner, and all of the most recent leaks have pointed to a pretty substantial upgrade. That’s a big change for Samsung, who have allowed its lead in the foldable race to diminish fairly rapidly since, say, the days of the Galaxy Z Fold 3.

Google spent years selling the Pixel on the premise of its camera but nowadays, it just doesn’t stand out to the same degree. Earlier this week, I was looking back at some old Pixel photos and couldn’t help but miss the days when the Pixel camera really shone at its brightest.

Yesterday, a bombshell report alleged that Samsung found itself “shocked” by Google’s switch to TSMC foundries for the upcoming Pixel 10 series rumored to arrive later this summer. According to reporting from The Bell, the Tensor G5 swap is being called “the Google incident” internally, with this drama apparently serving as some sort of wake-up call to the company as a whole.

Anticipation was high for Samsung’s One UI 7, and even when all of the delays and original issues with the new OS are ignored, it’s still pretty clear that some portions of Samsung’s software are lacking. The Now Bar might be one of Samsung’s biggest disappointments, not because of what it could have been, but because it fell far too short.

Android users have embraced Google’s Find My Device network, and it’s proven to be effective. As far as hardware is concerned, there are still only a handful of trackers available for Google’s FMD network. Google, for some reason, hasn’t developed its own tracker for a network it designed. There are a few reasons why it needs to design a Find My Device Tracker for Pixel.

The Galaxy S25 series has been a surprisingly exciting addition to Samsung’s similar yet barely different lineup of phones, and Now Brief is a big part of that. The function acts as a way for you to catch up on the day, with pertinent information summarized in one place. There’s just one problem — it’s incredibly bland.

Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 series is unsurprisingly not particularly colorful, but what’s more annoying than that is the new naming scheme the company has gone with which leave truly bizarre descriptions of the various colors at the very least, and feel like a failed attempt to capture the charm of past Pixels.

When Google launched the Pixel 9, one of the AI features that caused some concern and copyright problems was Pixel Studio. Since then, it has been tamed, but Pixel Studio needs a new home inside Gboard.

The early Made by Google event felt like a play to get ahead of the fruit company. Now that the iPhone 16 series has been unveiled — to less than usual fanfare — it proves that Google was right to bring forward the Pixel 9 launch, but let’s delve into the ‘why.’

Google announced this week that, effective immediately, Google TV will no longer allow users to buy new TV shows through the platform or the app on mobile, instead shifting that over to YouTube going forward. It’s a bizarre move but, in my eyes, Google has always been an awful place to buy TV shows anyway, so it’s probably not the worst idea to do away with it altogether.

The Oura Ring is currently in generation three and brings an impressive set of features for an ultra-thin wearable, but right on its heels is Samsung’s own version – the Galaxy Ring. The Galaxy Ring is going to have to be almost perfect to be a viable replacement for the Oura Ring.

Last week, Google announced that it would soon shut down the VPN service included with Google One. The company pointed to it only being used by a fraction of subscribers, and I wonder if part of that is due to a lack of consumer trust.

Earlier this year, Google announced that it would shut down its Google Podcasts app in 2024, moving users to YouTube Music. Unfortunately, YouTube Music misses the point of why I used Google Podcasts in the first place: simplicity.

If you were wondering if Google would be able to outsmart artificial intelligence, the early answers are certainly not looking good. Anecdotally, bot sites that have existed long before generative AI are likely going to embrace the new wave of technology to speed up their plagiarism, thus more robustly fooling Google into thinking that they are actual news sites, leading to Google promoting these stolen articles through the wildly popular and widely used Google News.

The Pixel Fold has bezels. As hinted at in previous leaks and now confirmed in the first hands-on one, Google’s foldable will have bigger-than-average bezels along the top and bottom. Here’s why that might not be the worst thing.

In the broadest sense, Pixel phones are differentiated by AI and ML-powered features. The Pixel Watch — in the modern era* — is Made by Google’s third form factor with “Pixel” branding. As a first-generation device, its claim to that name is somewhat more tenuous.