Samsung’s S25 and S25 Plus offer more of the same

If the Galaxy S24 series heralded the triumphant arrival of Galaxy AI, then the S25 and S25 Plus may be a bit of a comedown: they promise more AI that’s smarter and sometimes slightly faster. You’d better like it because that’s pretty much all you’re gonna get.

Samsung changed as little as it could on the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus, announced today alongside the larger and redesigned Galaxy S25 Ultra. There’s the obligatory jump to a new chipset — in this case, Qualcomm’s custom-tuned Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, included in phones worldwide this time around — and a welcome decision to offer 12GB of RAM as standard on every S25 phone, pulling the base model in line with the others.

The displays are the same as last year: 6.2 inches on the S25 and 6.7 inches on the S25 Plus, peaking at 2,600 nits of brightness and 120Hz refresh rate. The cameras are identical, too. There’s a 50-megapixel main camera, an ultrawide, and a 3x telephoto, with a familiar 12-megapixel selfie shooter on the front.

If you were to upgrade from last year’s Galaxy S24 Plus to this year’s model, the only spec that would change is the chipset. Well, that and the fact that the new phones are “Qi2 Ready” — they don’t have the magnets that Qi2 certification requires, but they’ll charge at up to 15W on a Qi2 charger when paired with Samsung’s official Qi2 Ready magnet cases.

Perhaps I’m being a little unfair. Samsung hasn’t increased its prices at least — the S25 starts at $799.99 and the Plus model at $999.99, with preorders open now ahead of a full launch on February 7th. It’s also maintaining its promise of seven generations of Android updates and seven years of security support.

Both phones are lighter than their predecessors and almost half a millimeter thinner. That should ease the disappointment of anyone who’s been hoping for the launch of the rumored S25 Slim, which is now tipped not to launch in the US at all. But it’s still hard to avoid the inevitable conclusion: this year is a software update, not a hardware one.

The new Galaxy phones are awash with AI-branded features — which Samsung says remain free to use this year, though its plans are unclear beyond that. Plenty of them have been here since last year, like Google’s Circle to Search or generative photo editing tools that let you draw elements into photographs or remove distracting people and objects. Those now generate better results in less time, helped by improvements in AI models and the move to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which handles more AI processing on-device, including previously cloud-based tasks like Generative Edit.

Audio Eraser is a built-in tool for video editing that lets you remove or reduce video noise across specific categories — think voices, music, wind, crowds — to focus on whichever sounds you care about. It works well, but it’s only new to Samsung: Google Pixel phones have been able to do the same thing through Audio Magic Eraser since the Pixel 8.

Other AI abilities are just as familiar, but we didn’t always call them AI. Take AI Select, accessed from Samsung’s Edge Panel, which gives “suggested actions” like cropping and sharing screenshots, creating GIFs from videos, or adding events to your calendar. It replaces Smart Select, which did most of that, too, but with a different design.

The S25 phones also offer a daily summary called Now Brief that lets you know what’s on your calendar for the day or how your commute looks, bringing us back full circle to 2012’s Google Now. Meanwhile, the Now Bar is Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Dynamic Island: a lockscreen element that can show sports scores and Google Maps navigation instructions or tell you what song is playing. It sounds useful, but is it AI? Apple didn’t think so.

Some of the new features represent more meaningful progress. The phone’s AI assistant — which is now based on Google Gemini by default, with Samsung’s own Bixby relegated to access through its app — can control your phone with natural language requests. Ask it to make text bigger or find photos from your last holiday, and it should oblige. Gemini can now also work across multiple apps in a single interaction, though this upgrade isn’t exclusive to Samsung. It might look up a good restaurant and share it with your friend or pull up sports fixtures and add them to your calendar.

The problem for me is that most of these features are hard to test in-depth when you’re at a launch event using a phone that isn’t yours, has few apps installed and no accounts signed in, and might have only been set up for the first time that morning. We’ll have a better sense of how effective Samsung’s new AI features are when we can actually use the S25 and S25 Plus for an extended run in our review.

The problem for Samsung is that, until then, it’s not clear what here should tempt anyone into upgrading. Many of these AI and software features are baked into One UI 7 itself and should roll out soon to owners of the S24 and older models. If the hardware’s hardly changing, and the software’s coming to your phone anyway, what’s the incentive to upgrade?

Yesterday, my colleague Allison Johnson wrote that Samsung needs to give us a reason to care about new phones every year. On the strength of the S25 and S25 Plus, I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge