During the two-hour-plus Galaxy Unpacked event last month, Samsung made its vision for the (near) future clear: AI gets priority over hardware upgrades. The representatives on stage tirelessly promoted new features, including one that, they insisted, surpasses any other advancement we have seen in the field. Samsung’s Now Brief is one of the chief highlights in the new One UI 7 interface and is touted to serve as a personal assistant to those who own a Galaxy S25 series phone. However, those of us with older Samsung flagships may be out of luck.
The reason behind newly added AI features, such as Now Brief, potentially not working on older devices is because it is part of a suite of features called “Personal data engine.” This “engine” is responsible for processing any sensitive data securely on the device itself and stored within an encrypted vault. In the absence of such safeguards, data can be used to trace back to your identity in an event of a leak.
Sally, Hyesoon Jeong, executive VP and head of the Framework R&D department at Samsung’s mobile division, recently spoke about how personalized AI experiences are at the core of Samsung’s approach for the Galaxy S25 and future devices. Since these features process sensitive personal information, they must be processed on the device without being uploaded to the cloud.
While local processing ensures your data is safe in the event of cyberattacks or not fed back to the algorithm for training and fine-tuning, it increases the compute requirements. Therefore, executive stressed that features that rely on on-device processing, including Now Brief, need powerful chipsets, such as the Snapdragon 8 Elite.
The new Galaxy S25 series gets the chipset’s overclocked version, with Samsung and Qualcomm partnering to especially enhance the neural processing capabilities. The intent is to boost features that integrate insights from multiple apps into one and process information as intuitively as possible. Another Samsung executive previously told Digital Trends that Now Brief is designed to offer a “consolidated view” of our lives, fetching data from various system and third-party apps and preparing us (and itself for us) for activities ahead of us.
Samsung pulls an Apple
Unfortunately, Sally hinted the Galaxy S24 or older flagship devices might not satisfy those hardware requirements, and that means Now Brief and other intuitive features that Samsung adds in the future may force you to upgrade to newer models — in a fashion similar to what Apple did with Apple Intelligence. This also makes Samsung’s promise of seven Android updates less enticing, but the executive confirms that other AI features that can rely on cloud-side compute, such as Circle to Search, will continue to work and be upgraded for older devices.
If it’s any consolation, Samsung’s Now Brief initially appears underwhelming and does not match up to the revolutionary claims the company makes. So, your Galaxy S24 or an older S series device should be good — at least for now. If that changes over the coming weeks or months, we will be sure to share an update.
