Are we that surprised that OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Sora, is rumored to be fast-tracking development of its very first piece of hardware, a smartphone, for release in the first half of 2027, as reported by Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities with a history of fairly accurate reports on upcoming Apple products.

No doubt that OpenAI plans to pack it so full of ChatGPT that it seeps out of the phone’s eyes. Or whatever counts for a phone’s eyes. Camera lenses, maybe? But if you don’t want to wait for an AI-packed smartphone or just don’t care for ChatGPT, you’re in luck. There are already smartphones out there stuffed to the gills with AI, and from manufacturers with decades of experience building phones. Here are a few.

gemini rules the smartphone ai race

Apple’s lumpy, bumpy rollout of a more clever Siri has been largely a bust, even as it’s leaned increasingly hard on integrating ChatGPT to answer all the queries that Siri can’t. Anthropic’s Claude, while my favorite AI on the market, hasn’t been integrated into any phone yet, beyond a conventional app, and Perplexity is a different sort of AI altogether that’s more like a supercharged search engine.

That leaves Google’s Gemini AI to dominate the smartphone space. And dominate it has. Beyond Google weaving it all throughout its Pixel line of smartphones, which was obvious, Samsung also struck a deal with Google to blend Gemini into its own devices. Surprisingly, Samsung’s even more keen on integrating Gemini into its Galaxy lineup than Google is with its own Pixel lineup.

Take the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, for example. Bixby isn’t gone, but Samsung’s proprietary voice assistant was suitably shifted to the backseat as Samsung struck that deal with Google to use the much more capable Gemini AI as the primary driver of the Galaxy range’s smarts.

On the Galaxy S26 Ultra Gemini can automate certain tasks, such as booking rideshares for you, ordering takeout, and filling out text fields on tediously long form. You can ask Google to search for photos on your screen by circling them with your finger, and Gemini will tell the Google search engine what it is so that it can search for it. And Gemini automates some of the editing process on phones, nipping unwanted people and things out of the background, for example.

Kuo’s May 5, 2026 X.com post follows his April 26, 2026 post that gave some speculative details on just why OpenAI would want to come out with a phone in the first place.

Or maybe all this talk of AI invading your phone has snagged a tripwire in your brain, a last straw of frustration with how smart these smartphones are getting. You could run as far, far away from smartphones as possible, while still keeping a phone on you. Just don’t run past our guide to the Best Dumbphones.

If you like navigation, playing music, snapping decent photos, and using a touchscreen, check out the Light Phone III, which is my favorite dumbphone because it retains so much of what makes a smartphone great that it was actually pretty brilliant. You know, for a dummy.