MWC has officially wrapped up in Barcelona, giving us a short break from the chaos of mobile announcements as we step into March.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t hear any news this week. Sennheiser announced its latest pair of flagship Momentum True Wireless earbuds, while Nothing released the affordable Nothing Phone (2a). Meanwhile, Apple surprised us all with two new M3-powered MacBook Air models, the MacBook Air M3 13-inch and the MacBook Air M3 15-inch.
Keep reading to learn who we named our winner and loser this week.
Winner: Google
Our winner this week is Google after the company introduced two major incentives to join its Google One Premium plan – with one slight caveat.
According to one Google One subscriber on Reddit, Google reached out via email to notify them that they now have access to Fitbit Premium at no additional cost. The news was reported by 9to5Google who soon received confirmation from Google that “Fitbit Premium & Nest Aware are currently available with Google One Premium plans in the UK”.
Fitbit Premium gives users access to a range of health and fitness features for wearables, including daily readiness scores, video workouts from expert trainers and deeper sleep stats, while Nest Aware introduces features like 30 days of video event recording, familiar face recognition and smoke alarm alerts for Nest cameras, doorbells and more.
Fitbit Premium typically costs subscribers £7.99/month, while Nest Aware starts at £6/month. This means that users currently paying £13.99/month for both services could switch over to the £7.99/month Premium plan and receive all the perks of Google One Premium, including 2TB of storage, more Google Photos editing features, Google Workspace premium features and a VPN, for £6 less overall.
Of course, there is a small caveat to all of this. Fitbit Premium and Nest Aware are only included with Google One Premium in the UK right now, which means that users outside of the region will need to wait to see if Google introduces these added perks globally.
However, adding Fitbit Premium and Nest Aware to Google One Premium gives users a major incentive to upgrade to the top-tier cloud storage plan, and could even give Apple One a run for its money.
Loser: Samsung
If our winner this week was in favour of UK users, our loser is the exact opposite as we saw undeniable proof that the Galaxy S24 is more powerful in the US than it is in the UK and Europe.
With the S24 launch, Samsung returned to its long-running trend of offering two different chipsets in the US and Europe. The US gets the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, while Europe is given the Exynos 2400 for Galaxy.
Despite Samsung reassuring our Mobile Editor Lewis Painter that the Exynos-equipped Galaxy S24 was on par with the Snapdragon-powered model in terms of both power and battery efficiency at the company’s briefing event, it seems that this is not quite the case.
We recently ran several benchmarking tests on both devices and found that the US-exclusive model that features the Snapdragon chip outscored the Exynos-powered phone in all GPU tests. The US version of the S24 also beat out the European model in CPU performance, however the results were much closer. The battery life, meanwhile, seems to be in line across the two devices.
All of the above means that the difference in chipsets will likely be most apparent when gaming on the two phones.
If you’re considering picking up the Galaxy S24 Ultra, the chipset split isn’t something you need to worry about as the phone packs the Snapdragon chip globally. However, for Galaxy fans thinking about picking up the Galaxy S24 or S24 Plus, this performance disparity is certainly something to be aware of – especially if you reside outside of the US.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
