AI phone and tablet: Telekom and Perplexity sell hardware

Instead of having to search for and select an app on your smartphone, with Deutsche Telekom’s AI Phone, you can simply use the AI assistant to do what you previously had to open the various apps for. The AI assistant comes from Perplexity, but in classic magenta. The two companies have been working together for a while. The AI Phone costs 149 euros. An AI Tablet is also coming onto the market. Price and scope should make the difference to the well-known competition.

The Perplexity Assistant recognizes text, speech, screen content and understands objects in front of the camera as well as links. So much for AI assistants, which Google also has up its sleeve with Gemini or OpenAI with ChatGPT Agent, as well as Apple with Apple Intelligence, for example.

To select the AI assistant on the AI Phone, simply double-click the “Power” or Magenta button. Perplexity then uses the existing apps in the background. In reality, these can still be found on the device. And not all of them can be operated by the assistant. However, according to Deutsche Telekom, the AI assistant still helps with the operation of—with “intelligent suggestions,” for example.

Metas Llama 2 and the French Mistral 7B work in the background of the AI assistant. Deutsche Telekom warns: “No AI is error-free, source checking remains important.” A press release also points out that issues relating to data protection, transparency, and control still need to be fundamentally clarified. There is no information on data processing.

KI Phone comes with a Perplexity license

A Perplexity account is not required. However, if you have one, you can access the assistant across all devices. The Perplexity Pro license is free for 18 months after purchasing the KI Phone. In addition to the Perplexity integration, there is also one with Picsart, the AI tool for the camera and image editing – here Telekom offers a three-month Pro subscription with limited credits as a bonus.

The KI Phone itself has a 6.6-inch display with full-HD resolution, a 5000 mAh battery, and uses a Snapdragon 6 Gen 3. The KI Tablet comes with a 10.1-inch display and a T-Pen as well as TCL NXTPAPER, an eye-friendly display that should make reading on the tablet more comfortable. In both cases, the battery life is said to have improved compared to its predecessors, the T devices. According to Telekom, both devices are also manufactured in a particularly sustainable way.

(emw)