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Winners and Losers: Google One gets new perks as the Galaxy S24 proves less powerful in the UK
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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 flagshipMomentum True Wirelessearbuds, while Nothing released the affordableNothing Phone (2a). Meanwhile, Apple surprised us all with two new M3-powered MacBook Air models, theMacBook 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 introducedtwo major incentivesto join itsGoogle OnePremium plan – with one slight caveat.
According to oneGoogle One subscriber on Reddit, Google reached out via email to notify them that they now have access toFitbit Premiumat no additional cost. The news was reported by9to5Googlewho 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, whileNest Awareintroduces 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 giveApple Onea 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 theGalaxy S24is 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 QualcommSnapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy, while Europe is given theExynos 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 devicesand 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 theGalaxy 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 orS24 Plus, this performance disparity is certainly something to be aware of – especially if you reside outside of the US.
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Hannah joined Trusted Reviews as a staff writer in 2019 after graduating with a degree in English from Royal Holloway, University of London. She’s also worked and studied in the US, holding positions …
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Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.
Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.
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.
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.
