AI Really Can Make Smartphones Better, Just Not Like This

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The AI hype train is in full swing, and it dominates the conversation around smartphones. I truly do think that AI can make smartphones better and more interesting, but there’s a right way to go about it… and a wrong way.

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You can’t spend a minute talking about tech in 2025 without talking about AI. And, like it or not, that’s for good reason. Generative AI truly does have limitless potential, and it’s getting better and more useful every day. Personally, I’m more of an AI skeptic than I am a user, but implementations such as Google’s Gemini integration across its apps, the use of AI to summarize conversations or generate action items, and more is all pretty enticing, and as mentioned, getting better all of the time.

In many cases, AI truly is making out smartphones better.

A great example of that is last year’s Pixel 9 series. On a software level, Google’s Gemini models unlock new features such as a smarter Weather app, handy Call Notes, and the Pixel Screenshots app which can make screenshots even more useful, and is adding more proactive features too. The Nothing Phone (3a) similarly leverages its “Essential Space” to turn screenshots and voice memos into action items with less work. Even when ignoring these features, on-device AI has pushed forward actual hardware specs such as 16GB of RAM as standard on Pixel 9 Pro, and slightly strong mid-range chipsets too.

But for every great implementation of AI into a smartphone, there’s also a mess.

On the iPhone side of things, Apple Intelligence has truly been a disaster of delays, overpromises, and more. It is perhaps the poster child for how to do AI the wrong way, to the point that Apple has been told to remove references to those features from its website.

While it’s not the same situation, I think Motorola recently showed another example of how to do AI the wrong way, by putting too much focus on it.

With the recent launch of the 2025 Razr series, Motorola spent the bulk of its launch event talking about AI and its various partnerships. Out of the 1 hour and ten minute launch event, barely 10 minutes were spent talking about the actual devices, and that’s bad enough before you consider that most of the AI features had been announced several months prior to that keynote. To Motorola’s credit, this mistake was mostly limited to this event. The announcement post had a much better balance of AI to smartphone, but it is still clear that AI is the main focus for this generation.

This isn’t to say Motorola’s actual features fall short. Moto AI does have some genuinely interesting features on board, but we’ve yet to see how they work in real life. It’s clear out of the gate, though, that the needed balance between AI and smartphone is out of whack here. The Motorola Razr Ultra is a genuinely impressive device, as it’s the overpowered flip phone that fans have been demanding, but all of that has been overshadowed by AI features that aren’t exactly groundbreaking. Beyond that, AI is a feature, it shouldn’t be the whole experience. Frankly, it’s far from even being able to be the whole experience. No matter who’s powering it, all of these AI experiences are still not particularly trustworthy due to the occasional hallucination or simple inability to reason correctly, all while often presenting factually incorrect information with confidence that it’s true.

Motorola isn’t the only brand that’s fallen into this trap. Google I/O 2024 was similarly too heavy on AI, and one could argue that Google’s Pixel launch events are also a bit strong on that aspect. Samsung similarly heavily focuses on Galaxy AI, but I do feel that both brands strike a better balance here, and have also traditionally done a better job of showing how these features work and might be useful in real life.

What do you think about AI in smartphone marketing? Is it too much? Where should the balance be struck? Let’s discuss!

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