Meet Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series, designed to set new standards for AI-powered smartphones

The first thing to say about this new Galaxy cluster is that there’s no earth-shaking innovation at hand, certainly not in terms of industrial design. Like all the premium manufacturers, Samsung has had a decade or so to refine this familiar slab of glass and titanium to perfection, with tolerances and technologies that would have been considered impossible in the plasticky, low-res era of the first multimedia phones.

So power, convenience and style are taken for granted. It’s not that the Galaxy S25, S25+ and Galaxy S25 Ultra disappoint in any way, certainly not in the way the devices feel in the hand. The heft and smoothness of a modern high-end smartphone never disappoints, with detailing that attains the level of a watchmaking atelier, but just like an automatic wristwatch, the real intrigue is within.

Samsung is second only to Google in the great race to embed AI in every facet of its devices, with Apple racing to catch up. The company claims to have shipped more than 200 million Galaxy AI-enabled phones worldwide and the S25 range is claimed, unsurprisingly, to have the most seamless and sophisticated deployment of all.

So what does that mean? The S25 series comes with a weighty processor, memory quota and storage as standard – AI is nothing if not computationally intense. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite was developed specifically for this phone. As well as improved gaming performance, the devices can also upscale video using AI, turning a blurry YouTube clip into something a bit more legible.

The other chief innovation is contextual awareness, with an onboard assistant that works across numerous apps. Say you want to plan a route to a meeting and save the time to your diary; theoretically, with a few spoken commands, the AI will silently rifle through your calendar, update your contacts and save a suitable route, hopping between apps with ease.

In this respect, Samsung wants you to see the S25 as a kind of personal concierge, capable of stacking up different sets of information in order to resolve complex requests. One side benefit is that the phones can generate briefings for you, based on your preferences and proposed schedule, with all the various information served up in the morning, afternoon or evening.

On top of the benefits brought by this ‘personal data engine’, the latest Galaxy phones also have the now familiar tranche of gimmicky generative AI tools – turn photographs into sketches, turn sketches into dubious pictures, etc. The ‘magic eraser’ function on the Ultra was truly stunning, removing some objects from a shelf and creating a seamlessly retouched photograph in seconds.

It’s the kind of thing that a talented Photoshop user could have done in a couple of minutes, and the evisceration of this skillset in order to automate a task that’s now simultaneously trivial and sinister, doesn’t feel like the greatest trade-off. But that’s the general deal with AI tools, especially generative ones. Are there any convincing use cases in day-to-day life?

The three phones come with a 6.2-inch, 6.7-inch and 6.9-inch screen respectively for the S25, S25+ and S25 Ultra, with the latter also including Samsung’s slender S Pen stylus, with slots into the base on the phone. This makes note-taking (with handwriting assistance), scribbling and generally navigating around the huge screen a pleasure.

What’s less pleasurable is the inevitable need to bolster the edges of those impressive screens with some kind of case; even new Corning Gorilla Armour 2 glass won’t save your phone when it slips onto a concrete floor. It’s a shame but a necessary one and compromises the S25’s ultra-thin profile – at 7.2mm it’s the company’s thinnest ever device.

Samsung’s latest version of the Android OS is dubbed One UI 7. There’s a lot of cross-over with Google’s own Gemini, as well as its updated Circle To Search function, which recognises elements like phone numbers and email addresses within photos, or can locate signs on a map. This new generation of phones is better at understanding natural language as well, one benefit of the intensive training that AIs undergo on vast databases of language and text. A six-month subscription of Gemini Advanced is bundled with each S25.

And all this is done on device, thanks in part to the power of the processor, but also for reasons of privacy and security. The sense of giving over more and more of our personal information to machines so that they can chew it up and spit out lifestyle hacks and daily shortcuts doesn’t always feel like the greatest exchange, but Samsung, and its rivals, are trying to reassure us to go all in to get the best out of these new devices.

Elsewhere, you get an excellent suite of cameras, including a 50MP Wide camera, 12MP Ultra-Wide camera, 10MP Telephoto camera and 12MP front camera. Uprated HDR recording bolsters the hues to Technicolor levels, whilst low light performance keeps getting magically better, both in video and audio. Another AI assist has crept in, in the form of Audio Eraser, which does for scratchy soundtracks and background noise what AI delete does to photo-bombers. RAW format is also available.

The S25 should be good for seven years, as that’s the amount of time Samsung promises to support the device with software and security upgrades. Recycled materials, most notably in the battery (which includes 50 per cent recycled cobalt), are more prominent, although they’ve yet to manifest themselves on the glossy exterior.

Progress? Perhaps, just as long as you're happy getting ever closer to the heart of the machine.

The new Samsung Galaxy series, available at Samsung.com

Samsung Galaxy S25: £799 (128GB) / £859 (256GB) / £979 (512GB)

Samsung Galaxy S25+: £999 (256GB) / £1,099 (512GB)

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: £1,249 (256GB) / £1,349 (512GB) / £1,549 (1TB)