Hype machines

Artificial intelligence feels gimmicky on the smartphone, even if it is doing some heavy lifting in the background.

- PETER GRIFFIN

Despite AI being splashed across every smartphone launch in 2025, consumers are still waiting for that moment when AI moves from a clever gimmick to a must-have utility – the mythical killer app.

The latest wave of flagship phones from the likes of Apple, Samsung, Oppo and Google are stuffed with features branded as AI, but most of them still feel more like novelty party tricks than daily essentials.

AI has become essential for daily use on my desktop computer, as a sidebar to my email inbox and documents in Google Docs. But the limited screen real estate of the smartphone requires AI to become more embedded in the operating system, and that’s still a work in progress for anything other than single-app uses.

Samsung’s Galaxy S25 touts everything from real-time voice translation to “circle to search”, letting you draw a finger around anything on the screen to immediately hunt for purchases or trivia.