Last year, the Galaxy S24 Ultra made AI more than a buzzword, and within a year, Galaxy AI has established itself as the headline feature for the Galaxy S25 Ultra. At Galaxy Unpacked in San Jose, Samsung gave us a first look at its new flagship. While the Galaxy S25 Ultra doesn’t pack cutting-edge hardware upgrades, it offers more contextual AI features that can potentially change the way you interact with your phone.
Contextual AI Is Here To Change The Way You Use Your Phone—Or Is It?
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra’s biggest upgrades are part of the software and include features that get better as you use them. For example, there’s a new Now Brief that delivers informative summaries at 9 PM and 6 AM every day. It’s based on details like your schedule, weather, and data from Samsung Health, providing insights into your sleeping patterns, exercises, and more.
I was told by one of the Samsung representatives that it can understand your health stats and suggest if you need to take the day slow or how ready you are for the day. As someone who forgets to open Health apps to sync my smart ring or smartwatch, I like this feature for putting my data front and center. Now Brief can also include updates like new content from your favorite artists, sports fixtures, scores, and more.
This information can be displayed in a dedicated widget or in the Now Bar. For context, Now Bar is a software-driven feature that’s part of One UI 7.0. It resides at the bottom of the lock screen and functions like the Dynamic Island, but better. In my demo, I triggered the stopwatch and started an exercise—both of these appeared as cards at the bottom of the screen stacked on top of each other.
You can interact with them by waking up the phone (without unlocking it) and swiping up to change the cards. It appears to be genuinely helpful, and it’ll also roll out to the Galaxy S24 Ultra with the One UI 7.0 update.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra can also identify more context in photos when searching for them in the Gallery app. It is said to work offline and uses on-device learning to understand and show results. Similarly, in the Settings menu, you can ask it to “make text visible,” and the phone will display options like High Contrast Mode, Font Size, and Text Reader—basically everything that’ll help you see the text better—instead of showing options that only have the word “text” in them.
Samsung is also changing Smart Select to AI Select, which understands what’s on your screen and suggests actions based on it. For example, if there’s a date in an email or web invite, you can highlight it with AI Select, and it’ll suggest Add to Calendar to automatically add the date, time, and location to your Calendar.
Other party tricks include making GIFs by selecting a part from an on-screen video, summarizing whatever’s on the screen from a wall of text, and more. Samsung has also improved Generative Edit’s accuracy and efficiency for removing unwanted people and objects from your pictures. You no longer need to wait 15-20 seconds for it to process and load the result. It can also detect and remove shadows of these unwanted objects to give you the photo of your dreams.
One of the best new Galaxy AI features is Audio Eraser. It works like the iPhone 16’s Audio Mix, where it can detect six different categories of noises like Voices, Wind, Nature, Crowd, Background, and Speaker. You can select, single out, and edit the ones you’d like to keep in your video. It worked surprisingly well in the demo, and I can see it being genuinely useful for content creators.
First Impressions Of The Galaxy S25 Ultra Hardware
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is bigger, thinner, and lighter than its predecessor. It sports a 6.9-inch screen in a 218-gram (down from 232 grams) and 8.2mm (previously 8.6mm) body. It’s one of the lightest big-screen flagships right now.
The weight loss is apparent when you hold it alongside the Galaxy S24 Ultra, but that doesn’t translate to a more comfortable in-hand feel due to the flatter sides. In my short duration with the device, the flatter sides felt like they negated the thinner design because they feel sharp.
But the Galaxy S25 Ultra also feels better than its predecessor in some instances. It’s got rounded corners, so the phone body doesn’t dig into your palm like the Galaxy S24 Ultra. But as a result of the rounded corners, the S Pen doesn’t sit flush inside the device.
Talking about the S Pen, Samsung has removed the shutter button functionality. You can no longer use the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s stylus to click photos or switch between cameras. I’m disappointed because it was one of my major use cases since the S22 Ultra.
The AMOLED display features the same sharp look with a QHD+ resolution and dynamic 120Hz refresh rate. It lies under a more scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Armor 2 glass, which retains my favorite feature of the Galaxy S24 Ultra: the anti-reflective coating for better outdoor legibility.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset, which is said to be better optimized for the Galaxy AI features. It is paired with 12GB of RAM and comes in three storage variants: 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. You get the same 5,000mAh battery with support for 45W fast charging.
Unlike the Vivo X200 Pro, OnePlus 13 and Oppo Find X8 Pro, Samsung hasn’t embraced silicon-carbon battery tech on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, which is disappointing, but the company is promising better battery efficiency than its predecessor.
As for the optics, Samsung is relying on the chipset for better results across the camera system. The Galaxy S25 Ultra retains the 200MP primary camera, a 50MP telephoto sensor with 5x optical zoom, and a 10MP telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom, while the ultrawide-angle camera has been upgraded from 12MP to a new 50MP sensor. The optics are said to have been improved in terms of details, clarity, and shutter speed.
The camera software also features a slew of tiny changes like support for a virtual aperture mode when using Expert RAW, better noise reduction, 10-bit HDR, new generative AI features, and more. I can’t comment on the quality yet, but Samsung seems to have addressed the shortcomings.
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will go on sale starting February 7 for $1,299. I have mixed feelings about this phone as of now, but I’m looking forward to using it because, for the first time, I feel like AI can help make my life easier. All of the aforementioned contextual AI features look promising, and I hope they work as well as they did in the demo.
