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.
