Introduction
Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S25 during its Unpacked event on January 22, 2025 in San Jose, California. The new lineup brings several key changes, including a minor design refresh, a powerful chipset, and One UI 7.0.
Samsung's focus has been on refinement this time around, ensuring that it provides a premium user experience to customers, while fully leaning into the AI phone revolution that it helped kickstart with the Galaxy S24 in 2024.
Design
They both use an Armor Aluminum frame with flat sides and rounded corners. Gorilla Glass Victus 2 has been applied on the display to enhance drop protection. Both phones have an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance and stereo speakers.
Measuring 70.5 x 146.9 x 7.2mm at 162g, the Galaxy S25 is both thinner and lighter than its predecessor. It feels so much nicer to hold than the model it succeeds, which is a great change for customers.
Specifications
The Galaxy S25 is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy globally. There's no Exynos variant for this series, which is going to please many fans. The chipset delivers some impressive gains, including 37% of the CPU, 30% for the GPU, and 40% for the NPU.
A 15% larger vapor chamber has been developed to help keep the chipset cool under intense loads. All models feature 12GB of RAM as standard. The handset can be purchased in 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB storage variants. The 4,000mAh battery is the same as the outgoing model and so is the support for 25W charging.
Display
Samsung has equipped the Galaxy S25 with a 6.2-inch FHD+ resolution Dynamic AMOLED 2X Display that supports a super smooth 1 – 120Hz variable refresh rate. The bezels around the display panel have been slimmed down and that allows for a much better viewing experience.
The display panel's brightness is at a commendable 2,600 nits. It also supports Samsung's Vision booster and Adaptive color tone technologies for more vibrant pictures, improved color reproduction, and contrast.
Camera
The camera setup on the Galaxy S25 has remained largely the same as the model it takes over from. There's a 50-megapixel primary sensor with OIS and f/1.8 aperture, a 12-megapixel f/2.2 ultra-wide camera, and a 10-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom. There's a 12-megapixel camera on the front.
One advantage of using the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset across the entire lineup is that all of the new camera features are now available on all devices, this includes support for Log video recording as well. It doesn't miss out on any of the finer camera features that previously were on the Ultra primarily because of the Snapdragon/Exynos split.
Even as the hardware remains the same, the processing technologies have been improved. Samsung has upgraded the ProVisual Engine, added Spatial Temporal Filter and Double Analysis Noise Removal to improve vibrancy and colors while reducing noise. Nightography has been enhanced as well and the Galaxy S25 is capable of capturing images and videos with better detail and lower noise.
Software and features
The Galaxy S25 comes with Android 15 and One UI 7.0 out of the box. Some of the new features include the Now Bar which is a dynamic UI element that can display relevant information based on what the user is doing. There's also a built-in video editor and Audio Eraser which helps remove unwanted sounds from video clips.
More Galaxy AI features are capable of performing their artificial intelligence magic on-device rather than having to hand it off to the cloud. The Galaxy S25 also has support for more languages in features like Chat Assist and Live Translate.
As you'd expect, the Galaxy S25 is supported for seven years of Android OS and seven years of security updates.
Availability and price
Pre-orders for the Galaxy S25 were opened on January 22, 2025, with the release set for February 7, 2025. Prices start at $799 with Navy, Silver Shadow, Icyblue and Mint color options.
