Hands on Samsung Galaxy S25 review: an iterative update on a brilliant formula

The Samsung Galaxy series smartphones have long been at the cutting edge of tech. But given the above early verdict, I don’t think it’s too much of a spolier to say that this year’s lineup is more of an iterative update rather than a ground-up redesign.

Sitting under the range-topping Galaxy S25 Ultra is the S25 which I’ll look at here, as well as the S25+ if you want the standard phone but with a bigger screen.

So let’s check out my recent hands on with the Galaxy S25 – Stuff’s full review will follow very soon. Can Samsung’s mainstream flagship still keep ahead of circling rivals?

You can pre-order the Galaxy S25 now and it will go on general sale on 7 February. It costs $799.99/£799 for the 128GB model, $859.99/£859 for 256GB and $979.99/£979 for 512GB.

Design & display: minute refinements

The design of the S25 is remarkably similar to the Galaxy S24, with more rounded corners than before. Again the display is flat, as is the aluminum frame and rear glass. The cameras are now picked out in black rather than having the same hue as the body.

The display is the same as last year’s too, with a familiar 6.2in Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel as the Galaxy S24. So that’ll give you FHD+ resolution, 1-120Hz dynamic refresh rate and 2600 nits at peak brightness. Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 is used again – a shame that Samsung hasn’t changed things up like on the S25 Ultra with Corning Grolla Armor 2.

As with the S25 Ultra, the S25 is thinner and lighter than the S24 – 6g lighter, with a thickness of 7.2mm instead of 7.6mm. Marginal gains indeed.

The Galaxy S25 will be available in Navy, Ice Blue, Mint and Silver (that’s right, there’s no black!) as well as some Samsung web store online exclusives to come.

Performance: a decent bump

This time around, the S25 Series all have Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy on board, which is a decent upgrade, offering 37 percent better CPU performance, 30 percent better graphics and a 40 percent upflift in neural engine (NPU) performance according to Samsung’s stats. I recently tested the OnePlus 13 and the 8 Elite gave a welcome performance boost there. There are no Samsung Exynos variants for S25.

Another very welcome upgrade is that there’s now 12GB of RAM across the board for all Galaxy S25 handsets.

However, it’s not all great news in terms of the core specs, with a 4000mAh battery on board, plus 25W wired or 5W wireless recharging. That’s quite a poor capacity these days, while vastly faster wireless charging is now pretty normal. Obviously the chipset is more efficient, but I’m still not expecting wonders from this phone when it comes to battery life. I don’t want to prejudge, but this is a disappointment.

Cameras: no hardware changes from before

Talking of disappointments, there are no physical camera upgrades, either. The S25 offers a 50MP main camera with f/1.8 aperture, dual-pixel phase detect autofocus and optical image stabilisation. Then there’s the 12MP, f/2.2 ultrawide (120 degree fov) and 10MP, f/2.4 telephoto with PDAF, OIS and 3x optical zoom which are, again, the same as on the S24.

And again you get 8K/30fps or 4K/60fps video recording with 1080p/240 slow motion recording. There were some software changes to the camera app, but we’ll have to reserve judgement on those until our full review.

This lineup does have Samsung’s next-gen ProVisual Engine for improved picture processing, but I’ll have to wait until my full review to see if it makes a difference.

Software: extra AI improvements

The S25 is running Samsung’s latest One UI 7 software on top of Android 15. I’m a big fan of One UI, which avoids many of the pitfalls that messier software makes. This time around there are some AI refinements, but while these are welcome, they aren’t dealbreaker features. That’s largely down to Galaxy AI having been introduced last year.

A feature called AI Select anticipates your needs and suggests helpful actions using the pop-out Edge panel. The Now brief is personalised to you and learns as you use it, surfacing important info such as smart home alerts from SmartThings or boarding passes for your flight later.

Samsung has also been working on how you can have more natural conversations with the device, similar to what Google is doing with Gemini on the Pixel lineup. It should be able to cope with multi-step tasks so you don’t have to jump between apps to get relatively simple things done.

There are also upgrades to Google’s Circle to Search to make searching your phone screen more useful and faster. In particular, Circle to Search now quickly recognises phone numbers, email addresses and URLs on your screen enabling quicker actions.

Samsung adds that you’ll get seven years of new Android software updates, along with seven years of support.

Samsung Galaxy S25 early verdict

Let’s make no bones about it, you won’t be upgrading to this phone if you have a Galaxy S24, or maybe even if you have a Galaxy S23. Because of the iterative nature of this phone, the feature set will really only appeal to those who have an older handset. There are few changes to the design, and even though the new chipset and 12GB of memory are very welcome, there’s not a lot else here to shout about.

And that’s a great shame, since the Galaxy formula is a great one – it’s just this feels very much like an inbetweener. 2026 is a long time to wait for a genuine next-gen device and it feels like on certain specs the S25 has been left behind. Rivals are circling and the S25 doesn’t do enough to keep ahead.

Samsung Galaxy S25 tech specs