"When you ask people about buying a new smartphone, other than because it's got a cracked screen, it's because they want a better camera," he said.
During the one-hour presentation, Samsung showed clips and behind-the-scenes action from two short films made by award-winning directors Sir Ridley Scott and Na Hong-Jin. Each film was shot entirely with Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphones, and so were the promotional shots and interviews shown during the unveiling.
If the newest phone is intended for shooting epic movies, Samsung's newest laptop is intended for editing them. The Galaxy Book 3 Ultra was on display after its unveiling, running Adobe Creative Cloud apps and interacting wirelessly with the latest Galaxy phones and tablets. The $2199, 16-inch laptop weighs almost a pound less than Apple's comparably-sized MacBook Pro, and clearly takes aim at Apple's tightly-integrated ecosystem with some magic tricks of its own.
Seamless interaction between devices is a luxury that's been a competitive advantage for Apple for quite some time, O'Donnell said. And there's a reason it's taken this long for Samsung to catch up: Samsung's phones run Google's Android operating system, while its laptops run Windows, which is made by Microsoft.