I’ve been using the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus for over a week, and I don’t understand why they exist – Android Authority

Affiliate links on Android Authority may earn us a commission. Learn more.Published onFebruary 14, 2025Whenever a new Galaxy S phone comes out, everyone focuses on the Ultra model. It’s the biggest and best, so it’s just Ultra Ultra Ultra. However, we shouldn’t forget about the two cheaper models. In 2025, that means the Samsung Galaxy S25 and the Galaxy S25 Plus.The problem, though, is that Samsung itself seems to have forgotten about these phones this year. Both devices are barely upgrades over their predecessors, which begs the question: should these phones even exist?Much has already been said about the design changes of the Galaxy S25 series — or, more appropriately, the lack of many changes at all. The physical makeup of these two phones is nearly identical to what we saw on the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24 Plus. You’ve got the same flat sides made of an aluminum alloy, the same glass back made of Gorilla Glass Victus 2, the same 120Hz displays at 6.2 inches (1080p) for the smaller model and 6.7 inches (1440p) for the Plus — they are the same phones, essentially.The only significant design difference is the cameras. Note that I said “design difference” there, as the camera lenses and sensors themselves have not been updated, which I’ll get to in a bit. Physically, though, the lenses now have chunky black bezels around them, making them look more uniform across the Galaxy S25 family — especially when compared to the Ultra model, which has traditionally had chunkier lenses. It also makes all three Galaxy S25 phones look more similar to the Galaxy Z Fold 6, nicely aligning them with Samsung’s premium foldable flagship. That’s cool and all, but that being the extent of the design update is pretty sad.If you want to get super nitpicky, Samsung also moved the ejection hole to the opposite side of the SIM tray. This might help prevent people from accidentally sticking a SIM tool into the microphone hole. That’s a welcome change but not nearly enough to get excited about.Even though the devices’ physical construction has barely changed, Samsung did bring in some new colors this year. However, the designers figured out a way to make this disappointing, too, as there isn’t nearly enough variety. Navy is the boldest of the four standard colorways, coming in with a nice, deep blue. Meanwhile, Icyblue is a very light blue, Silver Shadow is basically the same color as Icyblue, and Mint is just Silver Shadow with a green tint. Basically, you’re left with the one blue model and then three subtle variations of silver — hardly thrilling, but better than what you get with the S25 Ultra.Thankfully, there are exclusive online colors, including Coralred, Blueblack, and Pinkgold, which inject some much-needed style into this lineup. Unfortunately, you’ll only be able to get them from Samsung.com, leaving anyone who buys their phone through their carrier high and dry. Notably, this includes the overwhelming majority of Americans.Samsung didn’t change much on the outside, but things have changed on the inside, right? Well, yes and no.The most significant change is that all Galaxy S25 phones in every part of the world come with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset. That means no Exynos chips at all this year. As expected, the slightly overclocked version of Qualcomm’s flagship mobile chip is a monster, handily beating other phones with the regular Snapdragon 8 Elite in multi-core benchmarks and holding their own just fine in single-core.Regardless of how the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy compares to the standard 8 Elite, there’s no question that it handily beats the Galaxy S24’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy in CPU-based tests (see graph on the right, above). In the PCMark Work 3.0 productivity benchmark, the HONOR Magic 7 Pro comes slightly ahead of the two Galaxy S25 phones. That said, the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S25 Plus still clobber the OnePlus 13 and ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro in this benchmark.The gains aren’t quite as significant in the GPU stakes generation-over-generation, but they’re still there. The OnePlus 13 remains the king of Snapdragon 8 Elite performance so far, but the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus avoid the overheating pitfalls we’ve seen with some other devices powered by the chip, allowing for a decent enough sustained performance in the demanding 3DMark Wild Life Extreme stress test. This is almost certainly aided by Samsung’s new vapor chamber cooling systems. The ones included in the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S25 Plus are 15% bigger than last year, which is nice to see. I touched the phones while running these benchmarks to see how hot they got, and they were indeed warm, but not excessively so.The basic gist is that, as far as raw performance goes, the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S25 Plus are tangible upgrades compared to the Galaxy S24 series and, obviously, all other prior Galaxy S phones. That’s good!Finally, the last significant change for the internals here is just for the small model. It gets bumped up to 12GB of RAM, which is obviously better than the 8GB we saw last year. This means all three Galaxy S25 phones — vanilla, Plus, and Ultra — have the same 12GB of RAM. However, this is not true globally — some areas of the world will see a 16GB model of the Ultra. In the US, though, all three phones are locked to 12GB of RAM. This is great news for the vanilla model, but the Plus variant is unchanged.Unfortunately, that’s pretty much it for substantial internal upgrades. Wi-Fi got updated to Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth bumped to version 5.4, but those won’t make much of a difference in your life right now unless you’re a power user. Everything else inside these phones is exactly the same as it was in 2024. That means no camera upgrades, no storage upgrades (in the US, anyway), no charging power upgrades (it’s technically Qi2 wireless charging ready, but there are no built-in magnets), and no battery upgrades.The lack of any camera upgrades is incredibly upsetting. The camera hardware comprising the three rear lenses hasn’t been meaningfully upgraded for three years running. That’s right: you’d need to go back to the Galaxy S21 series to see the last time one of these phones had a different camera setup on the back. That’s absolutely insane.Granted, the cameras here aren’t terrible — they’re just not exactly flagship-tier quality anymore. I’ve dumped a bunch of full-res sample photos into this Drive folder if you want to have an in-depth look at performance, but I’ll put some choice shots here.As usual, we see diminishing returns the more you use zoom on the Galaxy S25. We also see slightly different coloring when using the ultrawide lens instead of the primary one.For selfies, things look fine, but there’s nothing special going on:Finally, I grabbed a few night shots. I was especially curious about these because of reports that some night shots on the Galaxy S25 series result in color bands appearing on the image. That didn’t happen with any of my shots, though:Overall, the camera here is fine. However, “fine” doesn’t really cut it for a flagship smartphone that starts at $800 when the competition gets better every year. Samsung needs to upgrade all three lenses on the backs of the Galaxy S26 series or it will fall dangerously behind competitors in this realm.Finally, battery life on both phones has also been — you guessed it — fine. Since both phones have the same battery capacities as last year, you’ll see about the same results. Neither will be a two-day phone, but you can get a full day out of both easily, especially if you turn off the always-on-display and drop the resolution of the Galaxy S25 Plus to 1080p. Even if you don’t do that, though, you should be able to get through a full day and charge the phones while you sleep. I know there are technically slight battery gains thanks to the power efficiency of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but they weren’t enough for me to notice much of a difference, let alone push them to two-day devices.Since Samsung has left so much physically unchanged with these phones, software is the major upgrade. The phones in the Galaxy S25 series come with Android 15 out of the box, skinned over with One UI 7. Currently, these are the only Samsung phones that have this software.In my opinion, the star feature of One UI 7 is the ability to use natural language to search within Gallery and Android settings. In the native gallery app, you can pull up a voice search and simply describe the photo you are looking for, and Galaxy AI will find it for you. You can even use this to filter out multiple photos, such as by asking, “Show me the photos from last year’s cruise,” or “Photos from Chase Center.” It’s fast, accurate enough, and extremely helpful.The real innovation here, though, is being able to search through Android settings using the same system. Samsung’s One UI skin is positively bursting with toggles, sliders, and buttons, so much so that it can be pretty overwhelming, especially for people who aren’t used to it. Now, with the new AI-powered search bar, you can say or type what you’re trying to change about your phone, and Galaxy AI will find the correct setting(s) for you.This will be a game-changing feature. For example, my dad — who currently uses an iPhone — would have no idea that he could use Android’s iOS-like gesture navigation system instead of the three-button system that comes as the default on Galaxy phones. In this scenario, he could just say, “I don’t like the bottom buttons,” and the AI will give him the option of changing to navigation gestures.This makes things so much more intuitive. My dad wouldn’t have known to search for “navigation gestures,” but that doesn’t matter anymore. Now, people can just say what they want (or don’t want) and find the settings they need. This is the kind of stuff that makes AI exciting!Unfortunately, both of these features illuminate a problem developing within One UI: knowing which AI feature works in which spot. For example, neither of these AI search features works with Gemini, which has replaced Bixby as the default digital assistant that appears when you hold down the side key (known on all non-Samsung phones as the power button). In other words, to use the AI search in Android settings on the Galaxy S25, you must be in Android settings and use the new AI search bar that appears there and not anywhere else in the phone’s UI. If Samsung isn’t careful, this kind of feature creep could create a massive mess in which users don’t know where to go to get what they want, making the very concept of what it’s trying to do irrelevant.Another of my favorite Galaxy S25 software features is the new virtual aperture. You need to use the Expert RAW app for this, but it basically gives you a super-powered portrait mode. Usually, when you shoot a photo in portrait mode, the camera software does its best to deduce the subject and then blur the background around it. Sometimes this doesn’t work as well as it should, though. With a virtual aperture, you can control this more accurately, similar to how you would a real camera.Obviously, your results will vary here, and it’s not nearly as convenient as just pointing and shooting in traditional portrait mode. Adding in virtual aperture is also no excuse for not upgrading any of the camera hardware. Still, this is a feature that no other Galaxy phones have, and I really enjoyed playing around with it on the Galaxy S25.There are so many other new Galaxy S25-exclusive features in here, too. The new AI Select function (formerly known as Smart Select) examines what’s happening on your display and adapts itself to that. For example, if you trigger AI Select while watching a video, it will give you the option to make a GIF of that video. If you’re looking at text, it will offer translation options and copy/paste/search options. It’s really useful and a nice upgrade over Smart Select (even if tacking “AI” to the name was wholly unnecessary). The new Now Brief widget gives you updates on weather, news, health stats, photos you’ve taken, and more as you progress through the day. Audio Eraser does exactly what it sounds like, and the new Galaxy Log video format gives videographers more control over color correction in post-production.I will readily admit that these are all useful features, and Samsung’s policy of offering seven years of software upgrades is an incredible commitment. The problem, though, is that they are all strictly software-based and thus only temporarily locked to the Galaxy S25 series. Samsung has already admitted that most of — if not all — these new tricks will come to other Galaxy phones soon. So, that brings me back to my original question: should these phones even exist?The TL;DR here is that the vast majority of people with an already capable phone should not buy the Galaxy S25 or Galaxy S25 Plus. Of course, that won’t stop these phones from selling just fine.You see, I know what Samsung is doing here. These phones are only slightly better than the Galaxy S24 series, but they are much better than the Galaxy S22 series. For example, the Galaxy S22 and Galaxy S22 Plus have smaller displays that aren’t nearly as bright. They also have smaller batteries and weaker selfie cameras. Obviously, they also have weaker processors, especially if you bought one with an Exynos 2200 SoC.What Samsung is assuming here is that the people who have been holding on to a Galaxy S22 (or an even older phone) will see the Galaxy S25 as a significant upgrade. As I mentioned earlier, here in the US, most people upgrade their phone through their carrier, so those folks will just walk into Verizon/T-Mobile/AT&T, say they want the newest Galaxy S device, and then buy one of these phones. And you know what? They will likely love the phone because it will be tangibly better than what they had.While this strategy works for that specific kind of customer, it ignores everyone else. It’s also incredibly complacent. Not significantly upgrading your flagship product because you’re relying on consumers who don’t know any better to buy it blind is not how you win the smartphone game. That’s the kind of thing Apple does and can get away with because the majority of people who buy iPhones don’t care about the broader smartphone market. They just buy iPhones, so there is, quite literally, no competitor for them to bother looking at.But Android fans are different. We know there are options. The Pixel 9 series is filled with winning devices, including the Pixel 9 Pro ($999 at Amazon), which has no equivalent in the Galaxy S series, meaning a compact flagship with all the bells and whistles of the top-of-the-line model. The Pixel 9 Pro XL ($1099 at Amazon) is $100 more expensive than the Galaxy S25 Plus, but that’s OK because it comes with newer camera hardware that includes a periscope telephoto lens, which neither the Galaxy S25 nor Galaxy S25 Plus have. The OnePlus 13 ($899.99 at OnePlus) is basically an Android fan’s dream of a premium smartphone, with a bigger battery, faster charging, and other significant upgrades over its predecessor, not to mention a very competitive price. At an MSRP of $899, the choice between a OnePlus 13 and a Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus isn’t really a choice at all.However, Samsung’s complacency ends up helping you out. Because the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S25 Plus are so similar to what we saw in 2024, you can save plenty of money. If you’re looking at one of these phones, just skip them and get a Galaxy S24 ($859.99 at Amazon) or Galaxy S24 Plus ($1119.99 at Amazon) for a fraction of the cost when on sale. You’ll get basically the same hardware and eventually get most of the software features once One UI 7 rolls out to the wider Galaxy ecosystem. You’ll even get a better selection of colors! If those discounts aren’t deep enough, the Galaxy S24 FE ($552.54 at Amazon) could be an excellent option, too.Even if you don’t heed my warnings and buy a Galaxy S25 or Galaxy S25 Plus, it’s not like you’ll be getting a bad phone. They are good! There’s just no reason to buy them when you have many, many other phones — both from Samsung and elsewhere — that will give you the same bang for far less buck.

Source: https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-s25-plus-review-3522199/