OPINION: It’s a very Samsung heavy article in this week’s Winners and Losers, so read on to find out what went down.
If you didn’t know, this was a particularly busy week for the team as the Trusted Reviews Awards 2024 took place and all the winners have now been unveiled. The Honor Magic 6 Pro took the spot as our favourite phone of the year while the Asus Zenbook S 16 cinched the award for best laptop, just to name a few winners.
Elsewhere in the world, Apple confirmed that a fourth season of Ted Lasso is on the horizon (although we’re a bit stumped as to how that might occur given how the last season ended), while the Oura Ring 4 was unveiled, taking the smart ring market to its next stage with a slimmer design and improved tracking capabilities.
As for our winner and loser picks however, it’s Samsung that takes both mantles this week.
Winner: Samsung (for its new Chromebook)
I’ve said this plenty of times before but it’s a hill I’m happy to die on: Chromebooks are among the most underrated devices out there. Windows laptops are the cultural norm and MacBooks are always tempting for their design and the way they factor into Apple’s wider ecosystem but as far as I’m concerned, Chromebooks are the better buy for most people as they do the basics with incredible speed and they tend to come with a more affordable price tag.
You can imagine how impressed I was then when the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus was announced earlier this week, showing off a sleek, MacBook style design and boasting the slimmest chassis of any Chromebook Plus yet. Weighing just 1.17kg and measuring only 11.8 millimetres thick, this thing could easily be carried around all day without ever noticing its presence.
In spite of its portability, the device still packs a 15.6-inch OLED display with 400 nits of peak brightness, which should be great for multi-window working and streaming entertainment. There’s also a claimed battery life of up to 13-hours which, if true, could make the Galaxy Chromebook Plus a tempting choice for students and professionals alike.
As a final cherry on top, the device, which launches this month, will also benefit from updated Google Gemini features such as the ability to summarise PDFs, as well as a new recorder app that can transcribe and identify multiple speakers in real time. Watch this space to see if the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook Plus lives up to the hype when we get it in for review.
Loser: Samsung (for Android 15 delays)
For those in the know, it isn’t too controversial to say that Android 15 hasn’t had the smoothest of launch periods. Not only is the upcoming Android update not yet publicly available for compatible Google Pixel devices (coming October 15th), but the situation is a bit more dire for Samsung Galaxy users.
In the past, Samsung devices and Google software updates have gone hand in hand (never forget that Galaxy Watches tend to the first to market with the latest version of Wear OS), but something’s gone awry this time around.
After much deliberation behind the scenes, only this week did Samsung confirm that the Android 15 beta would be available to developers before the end of 2024. With that in mind, it now seems highly unlikely that eligible Galaxy users will see a public release of Android 15 until sometime in 2025.
Given that Samsung devices are poised as Android’s prestige brand, nipping at the standards that Apple tries to set for itself, it isn’t a great look to have the next big software update suffer from such a delay, but one can only hope that Android 16 doesn’t suffer the same fate.
