Samsung sure did break a lot of hearts today when it announced that One UI 7.0 will arrive early next year with the new Galaxy S series of flagship phones. We've become quite used to Samsung's major update arriving as a Christmas gift, so this new timeline is bound to make some fans less than happy, to put it mildly.
As luck would have it, today is also the day we got our first interaction with what appears to be a very early build of One UI 7.0 on a device at the Samsung Developers Conference 2024 in San Jose. A brief scroll through the menus reveals the existence of a new feature called Galaxy AI.
Galaxy Avatar is one of the new One UI 7.0 features
We've already put up several videos of this One UI 7.0 build. There are noticeable user interface changes, Samsung had confirmed that much during its keynote today, but it's also clear as day that this is an early build and there likely would be more changes made to it ahead of its launch next year.
This Galaxy Avatar feature has been spotted in the Advanced Features menu. It doesn't reveal much information about the feature itself, other than that it will have an Avatar Stickers and Avatar Camera option, along with the ability to design new clothes for your avatar. It remains to be seen whether this is an entirely new approach to a digital avatar or whether a rebadging of Samsung's existing AR Emoji feature.
There's likely going to be a lot more that gets added to One UI 7.0 down the line as Samsung continues to work on it internally. The company has said that this is going to be a significant upgrade, particularly from a user interface perspective.
Samsung has confirmed that it's going to release the developer beta of One UI 7.0 before the end of this year, so we'll know more then.
