Samsung Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus hands-on: Almost the same

If the Galaxy S24 series heralds a victory for Galaxy AI, the S25 and S25 Plus may be a bit of a setback. more Smarter and sometimes slightly faster AI. You better like it because that’s all you get.

Samsung has made as few changes as possible with the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus, which were announced today along with the significantly redesigned Galaxy S25 Ultra. Moving to a new chipset is a must, in this case Qualcomm’s custom-tuned Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, which is now in phones around the world. There’s also the welcome decision to offer 12GB of RAM as standard on all S25 phones, pulling the base. Same model as others.

The display is the same as last year. It measures 6.2 inches for the S25 and 6.7 inches for the S25 Plus, with a maximum brightness of 2,600 nits and a refresh rate of 120Hz. The same goes for the camera. There’s a 50-megapixel main camera, an ultra-wide-angle camera, a 3x telephoto camera, and the familiar 12-megapixel selfie shooter on the front.

If you’re upgrading from last year’s Galaxy S24 Plus to this year’s model, the only spec that will change is the chipset. That and the fact that the new phone is “Qi2 Ready.” It doesn’t come with the magnets required for Qi2 certification, but when paired with Samsung’s official Qi2 Ready magnetic case, it can charge up to 15W with a Qi2 charger. .

Maybe I’m being a little unfair. At least Samsung hasn’t raised prices. The S25 starts at $799.99 and the Plus model starts at $999.99, and is available for pre-order now ahead of its full launch on February 7th. We also maintain our promise of 7 generations of Android updates and 7 years of security support.

Both phones are lighter and about half a millimeter thinner than their predecessors. This should ease the disappointment of those who were hoping for the release of the rumored S25 Slim, which is currently said to not be available in the US at all. But the inevitable conclusion remains difficult to avoid. In other words, this year is not a hardware update, but a software update.

The new Galaxy phones are packed with AI-branded features, and Samsung says they’ll be free again this year, but plans beyond that are unclear. Many of them have been around since last year, including Google’s Circle to Search and generative photo editing tools that let you draw elements on photos or remove distracting people or objects. Get better results in less time with improved AI models and a move to Snapdragon 8 Elite, which handles more AI processing on-device, including previously cloud-based tasks like generative editing. It has become.

Audio Eraser is a built-in tool for video editing. It allows you to remove or reduce certain categories of video noise, such as voices, music, wind, crowds, etc., to focus on the sounds you are interested in. This works well, but it’s just new for Samsung. Google Pixel smartphones have been able to do the same thing since Pixel 8 through Audio Magic Eraser.

Other AI capabilities are equally well known, but we didn’t always refer to them as AI. For example, AI Select, accessible from Samsung’s Edge panel, offers “suggested actions” such as cropping and sharing a screenshot, creating a GIF from a video, and adding an event to your calendar. This replaces Smart Select, which did most of that, but with a different design.

The S25 phone also provides a daily summary called Now Brief. This lets you know what’s on your calendar and what your commute looks like that day, bringing Google Now back in 2012 full circle. Now Bar, on the other hand, is Samsung’s answer to Apple’s Dynamic Island. A lock screen element that can display sports scores, Google Maps navigation instructions, or tell you what song is playing. It seems convenient, but is it AI? Apple didn’t think so.

Some of the new features represent more meaningful advances. Your phone’s AI assistant (based on Google Gemini by default and now accessed via an app by Samsung’s own Bixby) can control your phone with natural language requests. If you ask it to make the text bigger or search for photos from a recent vacation, it’ll probably do it for you. Gemini can now work across multiple apps in a single operation, but this upgrade isn’t limited to Samsung. You can also search for delicious restaurants and share them with friends, or search for sports matches and add them to your calendar.

The problem for me is that most of these features work because I’m attending a launch event using a phone that isn’t mine, has very few apps installed, isn’t signed into an account, and It is difficult to test in detail when there is a possibility that it has just been configured. I woke up for the first time that morning. After actually running the S25 and S25 Plus for an extended period of time in our review, we’ll get a better idea of ​​how effective Samsung’s new AI features are.

The problem for Samsung is that until then, it’s not clear what will entice people to upgrade. Many of these AI and software features are built into One UI 7 itself and will soon be rolled out to owners of S24 and earlier models. If the hardware rarely changes and the software is delivered to your phone anyway, what’s the incentive to upgrade?

Yesterday, my colleague Alison Johnson wrote that Samsung needs to give us a reason to care about new phones every year. Considering the strengths of the S25 and S25 Plus, I think it’s safe to say that wasn’t the case.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge