Does having an additional partition on the phone means you end up getting less usable space on that internal storage?
Probably, but most people don’t use all of their phone storage since it’s so easy to offload photos and video to cloud backup.
This shows how far the market has fallen away from innovation when the big new feature is that you don’t have to do a simple restart (which can be prescheduled for a convenient time) for the very occasional update.
This is a convenience feature available on most android smartphones for years. It’s just now Samsung is bringing it to its smartphones and to just A55. Not even the S24 series has this feature.
The main benefit apart from reduced downtime is reduced chances of a failure making your device inoperable. If the update fails you simply boot the 2nd partition.
As for ground breaking changes and features. Android has become a mature and stable platform compared to before. It’s mostly smoothing the kinks and making incremental changes which benefit the UX. Don’t expect major changes like they used to in android 5, 7, 8, 10, 12.
I for one am OK with incremental changes. I don’t want to learn a new UI unless there’s substantial benefits.
Considering some of their recent updates have bricked some models touch response (notably the Galaxy A53,) I’m not so sure seamless updates is a smart move on their part.