Mobile Worlds Conference has wrapped up in Barcelona, and this convention — known for announcing ambitious products that will never come out — lived up to expectations. There were smartphones with AI-powered mood displays on the back, laptops with solar panels, earbuds that double as a magnetic power bank, smartphones with attachable camera lens mounts, a Samsung alternative to the Nintendo Switch that folds in half, and Lenovo laptop whose screen can stretch up into an ultra tall display.
Some companies were honest and said these were concept devices that would never come to market. Others made vague promises about future releases. But perhaps the vaguest announcement of them all came from the most overstretched company in AI, Perplexity.
Perplexity started as an AI-powered search engine, which is what it’s most famous for. Like other chatbots, it will answer your questions with generated replies fuelled by its training data. However, it uniquely adds links to support its points, letting you verify the claims you’re reading and have the reassurance that its summary wasn’t hallucinated. It’s a helpful service, and Perplexity has only made this better with time.
However, the company has also divided its attention in odd ways. Unsatisfied with a good AI search tool, they’ve also announced a new web browser, Comet, and — oddly — a $50 million venture fund to back early AI startups. It’s strange to think that investors have given money to Perplexity, an AI company, so that they would build the future of AI, only for them to turn around and then invest that money in other companies, but alas.
And, unsatisfied with just doing these, Perplexity has announced that they are partnering with German carrier Deutsche Telekom to build a new “AI Phone” with a new Perplexity-powered assistant app, Magenta AI. The phone will go on sale next year, starting at under $1000, and Deutsche Telekom previewed it with some confidence-eroding low-resolution renders available on their website.
That’s all the information we have on this phone though. Neither company has said whether the phone will run Android or a custom operating system; what hardware the company will use; whether this will start significantly below the $1,000 target or cost exactly $999; whether this will be available on any other carrier, or outside of Europe generally; or even what it means for something to be an “AI phone.”
Put simply, every new phone is an “AI phone.” AI is everywhere. Google Photos has AI editing features. My search engine of choice, Kagi, has AI summaries. Spotify has AI-made recommendation lists. Google Assistant is now merged with their AI Gemini; and if you aren’t happy with that, you can use any other assistant on your smartphone, be that ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, all of which have home screen widgets. I write about tech for a living, and I don’t actually understand how an “AI phone” would be different from any other phone.
The one possibility is that you don’t use the phone like an ordinary one — going through apps and typing requests — and that everything will be controlled through Perplexity. If you want to search the web, book a flight, send someone money through your banking app, or send a selfie on Snapchat, you’ll ask it to do so through a message or voice request, and it will control these apps for you.
If that’s what the phone is, I’m seriously unconvinced that customers would be interested in using it. But if it’s anything less than that, why would you buy their phone over a “normal” phone from an established phone manufacturer? We’ll find out when it releases next year; if it comes out, that is.
