It’s a phone eat phone world out there, and manufacturers are deathly afraid of announcing a device without it having three bombastic new features. What happens when the tech isn’t there, the evolution hasn’t reached the next step, and there are just not that many things to upgrade for your annual refresh? Well, this is the time to throw spaghetti at the wall, oversell them, and see if they stick!While this may sound like another ode to modern day AI features on smartphones, it’s not. But it is, indeed, inspired by the most recent Galaxy S25 Ultra launch.
Samsung proudly showed us a smart-ish search in settings, apparently powered by AI, new photo filters, and the new design of the Galaxy S25 Ultra. What was not mentioned on stage was that the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s S Pen no longer connects via Bluetooth, meaning you can’t use it as a remote for music playback, selfies, or as a magic wand to navigate your phone’s interface.
Wait, you could do that?
Oh, yes. Back when the Galaxy Note 9 launched, the S Pen had hit that dreaded peak, where it was good enough at what it does, so Samsung “had to” figure out other things you could do with the S Pen.
The technology it’s based on — Wacom’s digitizer and stylus tech — is excellent exactly because it doesn’t need a battery to have palm rejection and extreme precision. Samsung thought that adding Bluetooth connectivity, and ergo — a battery — would be an excellent thing to move the S Pen to the next level.
Since then, the S Pen has had the so-called Air Actions. You hold the button on the stylus and you wave it, drawing a specific shape in the air. For your trouble, you would be able to navigate the interface — go Back, Home, open Notifications, or open a favorite app of your choosing. No, it didn’t work reliably, it wasn’t used by most people, and I’m pretty sure most didn’t know of or entirely forgot about it.
Arguably, being able to control presentation slides, your music playback, and the camera shutter by pressing the S Pen button remotely does sound like it can have some limited use. Maybe for people who lead presentations off their phone, people who are too busy drawing to reach of a play/pause button, or those that like to take selfies. Oh, wait, what’s that? You can trigger the camera shutter by just waving at it with your hand? Scratch that, then.
Obviously, there’s no need to spend extra money on a tiny battery and Bluetooth antenna when nobody uses the features. Samsung has the stats, they know how their devices are being used, so the choice to axe Bluetooth for the S Pen was made.
But here’s the interesting part —
How Samsung announced the removal of the feature
Well, they didn’t. That’s how it usually goes — look the other way and whistle a happy tune, we can’t admit the feature wasn’t as great as advertised, or that it wasn’t a good idea. But fate had other plans.
The rumor mill had already prepared us for this omission, and digging through specs sheets on retailer websites is how you would find out about “the downgrade”.
But here’s the funny part. A few days after the Galaxy S25 Ultra announcement, an official Samsung blog post about the new phone had the line “Bluetooth-enabled S Pens sold separately”.
Quickly after this post became a controversial hit in the tech blogosphere, Samsung came out and corrected itself. There were mistakes in the original post, and mentions of Bluetooth have now been deleted.
But still, thanks to just one line in a blog, Samsung was forced to a) talk openly that the S Pen has had Bluetooth removed and b) admit that someone, at some point, thought it would be a great idea to remove the feature and then sell it as a separate purchase. What a blunder.
The good news is that Samsung didn’t go with that idea in the end — good call.
But here’s another nugget that all of this reminded me of –
The ill-fated Apple 3D Touch
While Samsung prefers to just not talk about something it decides to game-end, Apple has a slightly different marketing strategy — just replace it with a new bombastic expression that doesn’t mean much of anything.
Wondering what I am talking about? Well, tell me, what do the words “Haptic Touch” mean to you? Yeah…
Haptic Touch was born from the ashes of 3D Touch — an iPhone feature that actually had the potential to be very good.
3D Touch was introduced with the iPhone 6s. It allowed you to literally press into the display to interact with the interface. Press on an app icon, and you get a menu of shortcuts for the app (for example — launch camera straight into selfie mode). Or, you could press on an email and see it open up in a preview window. Same with photos and websites.
At this point, you are probably wondering, “Wait, isn’t that just tap-and-hold?”. You are correct, yes it is, kind of. At the time of launching 3D Touch, Apple was criticized and memed online for adding such a complex pressure-sensitive controller in order to get… long press on iOS.
Admittedly, I really liked 3D Touch specifically for gaming — you could set up some FPS games to read 3D Touch presses as a button for “fire” or “jump”, so it made it easier and more enjoyable to actually game on an iPhone. Outside that very niche need, it was basically long press with pleasing animations and a vibration response.
But, Apple has the stats, it can read how people are using iPhones en masse. And year after year, it became apparent — people are just not using 3D Touch. No, not the tech geeks that we are, but the millions and millions of “normal” people that buy iPhones. Personally, I had two acquaintances that had no idea that they could press the screens of iPhones.
How do we remove it? Double down!
So, Apple decided to remove 3D Touch — barely anybody used it (statistically), yet it drove manufacturing costs up, and was a nightmare to build into phones, especially since the iPhone X design with its all-screen front.
Problem: iOS has been designed to have all of those press-in interactions, and we are in the modern age — you can’t exactly remove them and call it a day, that would hamper the UI.
Even worse: Apple could just add long-press as a gesture, but that would mean it’s kind of admitting that the critics were right 5 years ago.
Solution: Don’t call it long-press. Call it Haptic Touch!
Essentially, Haptic Touch means tapping and holding on an icon, email, picture, et cetera until you feel a small vibration from the iPhone. You let go, and the contextual menu pops out. The eradication of 3D Touch began with the iPhone XR, and since then — every phone to remove it had “Haptic Touch” proudly listed in its specs”. And just like that, 3D Touch was forgotten.
What to do when the spaghetti didn’t stick
So, am I offering a better way, or am I just here to poke fun? Mostly the latter. It’s just been kind of weird over the years, to watch manufacturers talk up some obscure new feature like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Then treat it as an unwanted stepchild some years down the line.LG definitely holds the record for this. The LG G5 was launched as a modular smartphone that was supposed to have its own ecosystem of 3rd party modules dubbed “The LG Playground”. It only took a year — when the LG G6 came out, the Playground idea was dead, and there were no modules, it was just a regular smartphone.
It is this jaded view that has prevented me from ever adopting a first-gen device, especially if its uses aren’t immediately apparent. And probably the reason why I am super-skeptical and not impressed by the current AI trend. Maybe I should try and use it to rephrase my article to a more cheerful and #socialmedia tone. Hold on, be right back.
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