If the Galaxy S24 collection heralded the triumphant arrival of Galaxy AI, then the S25 and S25 Plus could also be a little bit of a comedown: they promise extra AI that’s smarter and generally barely sooner. You’d higher prefer it as a result of that’s just about all you’re gonna get.
Samsung modified as little because it may on the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus, introduced at the moment alongside the bigger and redesigned Galaxy S25 Ultra. There’s the compulsory soar to a brand new chipset — on this case, Qualcomm’s custom-tuned Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, included in telephones worldwide this time round — and a welcome choice to supply 12GB of RAM as normal on each S25 cellphone, pulling the bottom mannequin according to the others.
The shows are the identical as final 12 months: 6.2 inches on the S25 and 6.7 inches on the S25 Plus, peaking at 2,600 nits of brightness and 120Hz refresh price. The cameras are similar, too. There’s a 50-megapixel most important digicam, an ultrawide, and a 3x telephoto, with a well-recognized 12-megapixel selfie shooter on the entrance.
If you have been to improve from final 12 months’s Galaxy S24 Plus to this 12 months’s mannequin, the one spec that may change is the chipset. Well, that and the truth that the brand new telephones are “Qi2 Ready” — they don’t have the magnets that Qi2 certification requires, however they’ll cost at as much as 15W on a Qi2 charger when paired with Samsung’s official Qi2 Ready magnet instances.
Perhaps I’m being a little bit unfair. Samsung hasn’t elevated its costs no less than — the S25 begins at $799.99 and the Plus mannequin at $999.99, with preorders open now forward of a full launch on February seventh. It’s additionally sustaining its promise of seven generations of Android updates and 7 years of safety help.
Both telephones are lighter than their predecessors and nearly half a millimeter thinner. That ought to ease the frustration of anybody annoyed that Samsung didn’t announce a launch when it teased the even slimmer S25 Edge. But it’s nonetheless laborious to keep away from the inevitable conclusion: this 12 months is a software program replace, not a {hardware} one.
The new Galaxy telephones are awash with AI-branded options — which Samsung says stay free to make use of this 12 months, although its plans are unclear past that. Plenty of them have been right here since final 12 months, like Google’s Circle to Search or generative picture enhancing instruments that allow you to draw parts into images or take away distracting folks and objects. Those now generate higher leads to much less time, helped by enhancements in AI fashions and the transfer to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which handles extra AI processing on-device, together with beforehand cloud-based duties like Generative Edit.
Audio Eraser is a built-in device for video enhancing that allows you to take away or cut back video noise throughout particular classes — suppose voices, music, wind, crowds — to concentrate on whichever sounds you care about. It works nicely, but it surely’s solely new to Samsung: Google Pixel telephones have been in a position to do the identical factor by Audio Magic Eraser for the reason that Pixel 8.
Other AI talents are simply as acquainted, however we didn’t at all times name them AI. Take AI Select, accessed from Samsung’s Edge Panel, which provides “instructed actions” like cropping and sharing screenshots, creating GIFs from movies, or including occasions to your calendar. It replaces Smart Select, which did most of that, too, however with a unique design.
The S25 telephones additionally provide a every day abstract known as Now Brief that allows you to know what’s in your calendar for the day or how your commute seems to be, bringing us again full circle to 2012’s Google Now. Meanwhile, the Now Bar is Samsung’s reply to Apple’s Dynamic Island: a lockscreen ingredient that may present sports activities scores and Google Maps navigation directions or let you know what track is taking part in. It sounds helpful, however is it AI? Apple didn’t suppose so.
Some of the brand new options characterize extra significant progress. The cellphone’s AI assistant — which is now based mostly on Google Gemini by default, with Samsung’s personal Bixby relegated to entry by its app — can management your cellphone with pure language requests. Ask it to make textual content larger or discover photographs out of your final vacation, and it ought to oblige. Gemini can now additionally work throughout a number of apps in a single interplay, although this improve isn’t unique to Samsung. It would possibly lookup restaurant and share it along with your pal or pull up sports activities fixtures and add them to your calendar.
The drawback for me is that almost all of those options are laborious to check in-depth once you’re at a launch occasion utilizing a cellphone that isn’t yours, has few apps put in and no accounts signed in, and may need solely been arrange for the primary time that morning. We’ll have a greater sense of how efficient Samsung’s new AI options are after we can really use the S25 and S25 Plus for an prolonged run in our assessment.
The drawback for Samsung is that, till then, it’s not clear what right here ought to tempt anybody into upgrading. Many of those AI and software program options are baked into One UI 7 itself and will roll out quickly to homeowners of the S24 and older fashions. If the {hardware}’s hardly altering, and the software program’s coming to your cellphone anyway, what’s the motivation to improve?
Yesterday, my colleague Allison Johnson wrote that Samsung wants to provide us a purpose to care about new telephones yearly. On the power of the S25 and S25 Plus, I feel it’s honest to say that it hasn’t.
Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge
Update, January twenty second: Updated to mirror the tease of the Galaxy S25 Edge.
