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Samsung Galaxy S25 Series is Official!

shane craig

Now that the Galaxy Unpacked Event is over, we finally have all the details on the brand new Galaxy S25 Series of devices. Once again, Samsung focused heavily on the new features powered by AI. Even in a world where hardware changes to flagship devices are fairly minimal year over year, this stands out as being fairly minimal on that front. Other than the slightly more rounded corners of the Ultra model, very, very little has visibly changed.

Let’s take a look at what we’ve got on the hardware side this time around.

Galaxy S25

  • 6.2” 120hz screen

  • 146.9 x 70.4 x 7.2 mm

  • Brightness: 2,600nits

  • 50MP Primary, 10MP 3x Telephoto, 12MP Ultrawide

  • 4,000mAh Battery

  • 25W Wired, 15W Wireless

Galaxy S25+

  • 6.7” 120hz screen

  • 158.4 x 75.8 x 7.3 mm

  • Brightness: 2,600nits

  • 50MP Primary, 10MP 3x Telephoto, 12MP Ultrawide

  • 4,900mAh Battery

  • 45W Wired, 15W Wireless

Galaxy S25 Ultra

  • 6.9” 120hz screen

  • 162.8 x 77.6 x 8.2 mm

  • Brightness: 2,600nits

  • 200MP Primary, 10MP 3x Telephoto, 50MP 5x Telephoto, 50MP Ultrawide

  • 5,000mAh Battery

  • 45W Wired, 25W Wireless

So, What’s New?

Like every year, we are getting the newest Snapdragon SOC - the 8 Elite. One nice thing is that we’re getting 12GB RAM across the board. With all the on-device AI stuff going on, that’s going to come in handy. The Ultra model also did get a new Ultrawide camera, jumping up to a new 50MP sensor which I’m actually looking forward to testing out. We’ve also got Gorilla Glass Armor 2 on the front and a new larger vapor chamber to handle the temps of the Elite chip - both exclusive to the Ultra phone.

One thing that is sure to disappoint is the removal of bluetooth from the Ultra’s S Pen. Why they did this is hard to say, but it’s not likely to make that large of a difference. Basically, Air Actions and Camera Controls are gone. Told you so.

Battery sizes, charging speeds and even screen brightness appear to be unchanged, making this lineup feel very much like a mid-gen upgrade moreso than a full yearly upgrade.

Software

Maybe the biggest change I was happy to see was that the power button no longer triggers Bixby, but instead fires up Google’s Gemini. No more need for a Good Lock module for that anymore. The big difference here is hat Samsung has seemingly modified Gemini to be able to do some Bixby-esque things within their apps. As discussed in this post, Samsung Notes, Calendar and Reminder all seem to have their own extensions that allow Gemini to get in there and make changes. If you use these Samsung apps, that’ll be potentially useful.

One interesting thing they demoed was using natural language in the settings and gallery. The example they gave was “my eyes hurt” and the settings app prompted them to turn on Eye Comfort Shield. A doctor might have been more useful. Similarly, searching for an image in the gallery was done using a natural sentence.

We also have a new AI select option in Edge Panel that allows you to basically Circle to Search an area and it’ll give you the appropriate AI tools for what you selected. Text will get text tools, videos and images will get something more appropriate. Generative edit or drawing assist might appear.

There’s the Now Brief that tries to give you data and tips that are contextually useful based on things like the time of day and your habits. We talked about this a few days back here.

The Now Bar lives on the lock screen and gives you information about ongoing activities like music, navigation, and timers. My only issue with this is that I pretty much never look at my lock screen. Will this change things?

Samsung also now has their very own Audio Magic Eraser clone, which will try to recognize and remove unwanted background noises from your videos. They also seem to have grabbed the Best Take idea which will combine multiple different frames to automatically make sure everyone in the shot was looking at the camera and smiling with their eyes open.

Where to buy

Galaxy S25

Galaxy S25+

Galaxy S25 Ultra

Cases

I’ll dig more into this as times goes on, but two of my favorite case makers have cases available.

Thinborne: https://collabs.shop/kf6lhp (and use code SHANECIRL to save 15%)

Pitaka: https://amzn.to/3Cl17qa

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