Week of January 15–20, 2024Telecom Intelligence: Week of January 15, 2024
Samsung fired the first shot of the AI-phone war: the Galaxy S24 launched with 'Galaxy AI' — live call translation, generative photo editing, and Google's Gemini built into the camera — making AI the headline feature of a flagship phone for the first time. Microsoft closed the week by disclosing that Midnight Blizzard, the Russian state group behind SolarWinds, had spent weeks reading senior executives' emails after a password-spray attack on a legacy test account with no MFA. And Apple, forced by a patent ruling, began selling Apple Watches in the U.S. with the blood-oxygen sensor switched off — a $3 trillion company shipping deliberately degraded hardware rather than paying a licensing fee.