Inevitably for a phone launched in the year 2025, the Galaxy S25 Plus and S25 go all in on artificial intelligence. This year’s Samsung Unpacked was front-loaded with excited talk of new AI advances, promising that the phone in your pocket can be your personal concierge: shaping your schedule with a morning briefing, summarising your day at bedtime, and on hand to offer help and guidance at any point in between.
The Galaxy S25 Plus and S25 are the standard-tier phones in the Galaxy S-series, sitting beneath the top-of-the-range Galaxy S25 Ultra. Besides their size – one is a dainty 6.2in and the other 6.7in – both phones are essentially identical in terms of features and performance. The larger phone gets a bigger battery, but the larger display offsets any serious difference in battery life. They’re phones for people with big or small pockets.
If the thought of interacting with an AI every day doesn’t stir you, Samsung’s phones give you scant reason to get too excited this year. Tellingly, cameras and chips took a backseat at Samsung Unpacked. Once headline features of any new Galaxy phone, the S25 hardware gets just a bare minimum upgrade and plays second fiddle to a slate of AI improvements instead.
This isn’t the first year Samsung has been banging the AI drum – it says the use of its Galaxy AI features is already skyrocketing – but if you’ve struggled to engage with artificial intelligence in the past, the S25 looks set to try to change that.
How I tested
I spent hours testing the new Samsung Galaxy S25 series phones before their announcement on 22 January, trying out some of the new features. My early verdict is based on limited hands-on time with the phones. I’ll share my full review once I’ve had time to thoroughly test them in the wild.
Why you can trust us
I’m a technology journalist with more than a decade’s experience testing, reviewing and reporting on smartphones and new technology. As IndyBest’s tech writer, I’ve been covering Samsung products for years, making me an expert on how the Galaxy series has changed and improved over time.
Samsung Galaxy S25
This year’s Galaxy S25 phones get a dedicated button on the side of the device that summons your Galaxy AI assistant (rest in peace, Bixby). Like ChatGPT, the assistant understands conversational language, meaning you can speak to it as you would another person and hopefully get the results you’re expecting. Samsung’s example asked it to find a football team’s upcoming games and save them to a calendar: the assistant searched for the information, found the relevant data and interacted with the calendar app to create multiple new events.
It’s similar to how Google’s Gemini works, using extensions to connect the AI to apps, such as the Google Calendar and Google Drive. Samsung’s offering is built on Google’s tech, so it’s similarly capable in terms of features and accuracy. On the Galaxy S25, there’ll be more cross-app support, connecting Google and Galaxy apps with a selection of supported third-party apps like Spotify.
It’s impossible to properly test these AI features in the limited time I spent with the Galaxy S25 ahead of its announcement. Such features include the new “Now Brief” app – which offers you personalised briefings before and after your day – that changes and evolves based on your habits and routines, suggesting Spotify playlists that you enjoy in the morning and offering dynamic directions to the office depending on traffic. Is that technically AI? Nobody seems to care, but it aims to make Galaxy AI on the S25 feel more like a personal assistant and less like a fancy search engine.
The previous tide of Galaxy AI features have all made a return too, and are arguably the more useful application of the tech: instant transcriptions of recorded meeting notes, neatly formatted and headlined with individual speaker tags. Live translation, for the vanishingly few people who might need it. Generative photo editing, which this year promises a big improvement in results – in my short experience with it, the AI-powered editor was noticeably faster, more accurate, and less prone to weird results.
What I can talk about having tested the Galaxy S25 Plus and S25 is just how boringly brilliant Samsung’s flagship continues to be.
The basics might not set investors’ hearts racing, but the S-series phones continue to be some of the best designed pieces of technology in the world. Cribbing from Apple, all three phones return with a flat-edge design and flat front and back glass. Even the 6.7in Galaxy S25 Plus is comfortable to hold one-handed, and the smaller S25 feels ridiculously lightweight with those extra six grams shaved off. You’d think it was a hollow display model, were it not switched on and running.
The upgrade to a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor and 12GB of RAM is a big leap forward, and the phones feel as snappy and responsive as ever when flicking around menus and switching apps. The upgrade is most noticeable when diving in and out of AI tools like the generative photo editor, which feels markedly quicker to load than before.
In terms of cameras, Samsung has likely made the right decision to carry on using the same excellent hardware in the Galaxy S25 as it did in last year’s phone, instead focusing on improvements to its ProVisual image processing engine to achieve better results. It’s another area in which the term “artificial intelligence” has been liberally applied but, however Samsung wants to label it, features like double-analysis noise removal and spatial temporal filters for video promise Samsung’s best camera experience yet.
Buy now £799.00, Samsung.com
The best Samsung Galaxy S25 contract deals
Galaxy S25 (512GB) with 10GB of data: £32.99 per month, £9 up front, Idmobile.co.uk
Here’s the best contract deal we’ve found on the Galaxy S25. This IDMobile plan basically gets you the £799 phone with double the storage and free data for 24 months. The up front fee is just £9, and with monthly payments of £32.99 (not counting the annual increase of a couple of pounds) you’ll pay around £800 over the course of the contract.
Not right for you? Take a look at some other contract deals we’ve found.
Early verdict: Samsung Galaxy S25
Galaxy AI might have hogged the spotlight, but we shouldn’t overlook how plainly excellent the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus phones are underneath all the AI bluster. Top-end cameras, the latest Snapdragon chipset, timeless and durable design, slick software and a range of fun colour options all mark this year’s S-series phones out as Samsung’s new best.
While I wait to be fully convinced by the shiny AI-powered future Samsung insists that we’re all living in, there’s no stronger foundation to pitch from than this year’s Galaxy S25.
