Samsung is taking its turn in the spotlight as live events return. | Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
It’s a weird time for in-person tech events. On one hand, companies are just champing at the bit to host them after a few years of lockdown livestreams. Samsung is the latest of them, after OnePlus, Apple, and Google all took their turns last year. But on the other hand, the mobile devices on center stage in this new era of live events have been kind of boring and often upstaged by their wearable counterparts. The Apple Watch Ultra was arguably the biggest announcement to come out of the company’s fall event in Cupertino, and the Pixel Watch was (justifiably) all anyone wanted to talk about after Google’s event launching the Pixel 7 series.
That’s just to be expected for a mature product category like smartphones — the year-over-year…