It was an unusually eventful fair. This much excitement hasn’t happened in many years. Samsung had an unusually late launch of its S26 series and the past week has been jam-packed with exciting new products and presentations. My collection of press badges from presentations over the past few days speaks volumes and these are just a few of several:
During last year’s expo, 2025 I witnessed many promises of coming AI salvation. Very few of these have been fulfilled. This year, the impression is rather the opposite.
Honor’s AI agent from last year seems to be completely forgotten. Motorola’s Moto AI also seems to have been scrapped, now it is instead Motorola’s and Lenovo’s joint Qira that applies and they seem to be starting from scratch.
It was an unusually eventful fair. This much excitement hasn’t happened in many years. Samsung had an unusually late launch of its S26 series and the past week has been jam-packed with exciting new products and presentations. My collection of press badges from presentations over the past few days speaks volumes and these are just a few of several:
During last year’s expo, 2025 I witnessed many promises of coming AI salvation. Very few of these have been fulfilled. This year, the impression is rather the opposite.
Honor’s AI agent from last year seems to be completely forgotten. Motorola’s Moto AI also seems to have been scrapped, now it is instead Motorola’s and Lenovo’s joint Qira that applies and they seem to be starting from scratch.
And Samsung then. They were and perhaps still are leaders in AI but adding an AI (Perplexity) to the existing Gemini doesn’t feel like a development, rather a sign of insecurity.
I see no demand from consumers, i.e. that someone chooses a phone based on what kind of AI is offered. On the one hand, the three AI assistants Samsung now has (much like the original Moto AI with a messy mix of Meta, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini) seem to immediately counteract easy discovery of the services and instead complicate it. How do I know which AI will do what I want best? Samsung’s approach speaks completely against their statement that they want to highlight the benefit and not the technology itself.
During the fair I saw a lot of robots so it was a clear trend. Most of the time they were completely incompetent so people had to look after them instead of the other way around. But yes, the robots’ presence is a sign of AI’s increased involvement.
Best products during the fair then? Well quite easily Honor Magic v6 and Xiaomi 17 Ultra. The latter has an absolutely phenomenal camera that has almost no limitations and Honor’s foldable v6 surpasses the competition point by point, Incredibly thin and yet with an almost impossibly high battery capacity.
And of course Honor’s Robot Phone must also be mentioned.