Samsung and LG release 2024 TV models

tech guide editor Stephen Fenwick. Steve, thanks so much for joining us just on that story there. So it's a technology outage. Great news, I guess, because it's not a cyber one, but that's pretty much what we think of first of all, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. Whenever there's some sort of technology glitch and things aren't working as they're supposed to, that's the first assumption, especially for a large company like McDonald's would be a big target for cyber criminals. But the fact that it was across several countries, wasn't it Japan and Australia and other countries that had the similar experience? I'd say that'd be too big to be a cyber threat. It'd be probably more of a big server issue of theirs. That is an issue in itself though, isn't it? Because the more we go online, the more potential issues we're gonna come across. Absolutely, yeah. Every company needs to really safeguard not only their infrastructure, but also their data as well. Data is what the criminals want. They want to get all that information and buy and sell it on the dark web and make money and try to hack different people with that information. So yeah, it's alarming when it happens, but thankfully this one wasn't a cyber attack. And are you surprised being McDonald's a big company, it's worldwide, it's been around for years that this has happened? I am actually, yeah. It is a massive company and yeah, obviously technology is running the back end of the whole business. It just goes to show their reliance on those systems working properly. And if something doesn't happen, you'll probably find in a couple of days, they'll say it was some minor issue with a server in some country somewhere. If something doesn't happen, work as it should, it can bring the whole system down. All right, let's talk about the battle between Samsung and LG on the TV front. It's just begun with the two electronics giants releasing their latest models. That's correct. Yeah, the starter's gun has fired. The 2024 range of TVs are now in the market. Actually, LG entered the market first. Samsung's normally first come off the rank, but Samsung have released an OLED TV ahead of their main Neo QLED. But LG came out pretty strong. I know Juro's gonna take a bit of a deeper dive into the actual tech inside the TVs, but LG with their OLED and their QLED TVs have hit the out of the blocks first. And surprisingly, some of their models are up to 25% cheaper than last year, would you believe? So there is some savings there. Normally I recommend for people to buy last year's models to save a bit of money, but actually LG are gonna have the 2024 models that are gonna be cheaper as well. So Samsung, we're gonna see their OLED, that's gonna be their first model in the range from next week, but then that's gonna be followed by their Neo QLED 4K and 8K TVs, which they've now enhanced by AI. AI is on all these TVs now, LG included. They got really strong processes so they can handle all of that workload to improve and enhance picture and audio quality in real time as well. So it's TV season and plenty to choose from. And plenty to watch. Sky News of course, what about smartphones with Samsung? Yeah, Samsung have just unveiled their Galaxy A series. So we know the Galaxy S series, that's their flagship range, but these are the affordable smartphones that are really popular in that mid tier. They started at $549 for the A35 and $699 for the A55. And for that type of money, you're getting quite, it does punch above its weight in terms of what you're getting. You're getting a 6.6 inch screen, really nice design, triple camera system, great front facing camera, a two day battery. So it is decent value, but you're also getting for the first time on the A series, they got the AI image signal processing, which means really good images in low light. That's normally like a flagship feature. Also there for the first time, including on the A series, the Samsung Vault, the Knox Vault, which is their security. So you'd be confident your data is kept private and also you won't be able to, it'll protect you from downloading apps that may have the malware on board. All right, we have to wrap it up, but Stephen Finney, always great to see you. Thank you very much.