Samsung Galaxy S25 review: A small phone without any big ideas

The Samsung Galaxy S25 is one of the least exciting phones I've used in some time. Don't get me wrong: it's good. The hardware's premium, performance is top shelf, and its cameras are fine enough. But Samsung's been in a holding pattern with its flagship phones for a few years now. The S25 is just a little better than the S24 , which was just a little better than the S23 , and so on.

You could say the same about any tech product on its n th iteration, of course, but the S25 is brazen about it. It comes with a beefier chipset, more RAM, and a handful of new software features that (apparently) leverage AI. But otherwise, this is a down-the-middle rehash of the same phone Samsung's been selling us for multiple generations. Depending on how old your current phone is, that may not matter to you — this is, in fact, the best version of the small Samsung flagship template we've come to know over the past several years. But not by much, and certainly not because of AI.

Samsung Galaxy S25

7.5/10

The Galaxy S25 is yet another competent phone from Samsung. If you've been on your current device for a few years and you're shopping for something small and new, it's a fine pick. Still, I wish Samsung had moved the ball forward a little more this year — this is another in a line of very iterative Galaxy updates.

Pros & Cons

• Great compact hardware

• A long overdue RAM upgrade

• Lovely display

• Mediocre battery life

• Cameras struggle in low light

• None of this AI stuff is very compelling

Price, specs, and availability

The base model Samsung Galaxy S25 with 128 gigs of storage space retails for $800; a version with 256GB of storage goes for $60 more. You can get it from your carrier or major smartphone retailer of choice. It comes in Navy, Mint, Icy Blue (picture here), and Silver Shadow. Samsung.com also offers a handful of exclusive, awkwardly named colorways: Blueblack (gray), Coralred (warm pink), and Pinkgold (kind of a fleshy beige).

Specifications

Design and display

The Galaxy S25 looks almost exactly the same as last year's Galaxy S24: same aesthetic, same flat edges, same delightful small size. It's not quite identical; the Galaxy S25 is just a hair smaller and lighter than last year's small S24. The difference isn't enough to really notice without having the two side by side, but this year's hardware is just different enough that cases made for the S24 won't fit correctly.

Coming from the relatively compact Pixel 9 Pro I've been using for the past few months, the S25 is appreciably slimmer and lighter — it actually makes the Pixel feel a bit bulky, particularly around its hallmark camera bar. If you're a small phone person, this hardware will be very comfortable for you.

The display nestled inside the S25's slim bezels is the same as the one in the S24 from last year. It's a 6.2-inch AMOLED panel with a resolution of 2,340 by 1,080, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a peak brightness of 2,600 nits. That all translates to a great viewing experience: colors are vivid (maybe a little too vivid by default), viewing angles are excellent, and because it's an LTPO panel, it supports showing your wallpaper on the always-on display — a feature I'll miss when I eventually move back into my Pixel 9 Pro.

Other hardware and what's in the box

Unlike the Galaxy S25 Ultra , which got an aesthetic update this year that brings it more in line with the lesser S25s, the standard Galaxy S25 looks pretty much exactly the same as the S24 (and the S23, for that matter). Still, it's worth noting that this hardware is quite nice.

Being as thin (7.2 mm) and light (162 g) as it is, the S25 is a joy to hold and interact with. And despite its featherweight status, it still feels solid and sturdy. Haptic vibration is nice and clicky, and can be impressively subtle. On my first day with the S25, I spent a minute or two in Samsung's Clock app just flicking around the digital dials that adjust the time of the alarm, enjoying the satisfying faux tic that comes as each number passes by.

I'm also a fan of the finish Samsung's chosen. Both the glass back and aluminum side rails have a matte texture, which feels nicer and shows fewer fingerprints than glossy surfaces would. Again, this isn't a departure from last year's Galaxy S24, but I think it's an improvement from the S23 series, which came with matte glass and glossy metal.

The S25 comes in a minimal, slim box, along with some startup literature, a USB-C-to-C cable, and a SIM card tool. As you'd expect, there's no power brick included.

Software and performance

Samsung's sales pitch for the Galaxy S25 is largely predicated on AI features. It's got Galaxy AI stuff — adding AI-generated objects to photos, adjusting the tone of your writing, and natural-language settings search — plus deep integration with Google Gemini. I don't think any of these features make a very compelling case for the S25.

Gemini comes pre-installed on the Galaxy S25, and by default, it's mapped to a long press of the power button. Gemini now has integrations with some of Samsung's apps, so you can use it to, for example, create an event in Samsung Calendar, or take a note in Samsung Notes. Gemini also recently gained the ability to take action across multiple apps, so you can ask it to do things like find a list of restaurants of a certain kind, then draft a text message containing that list, without having to issue multiple prompts. This Cross App Action, as Samsung calls it, isn't exclusive to Samsung devices, but it works as well here as it does anywhere else.

There's also the Now Bar and Now Brief, two related features that Samsung lumps in with its suite of AI tricks. Now Bar shows up toward the bottom of the S25's lock screen under certain conditions: it'll show active timers, controls for media, sports scores for teams you follow, the next step in Google Maps navigation — the type of info you'd want at a glance.

The Now Bar is a fine enough idea, if not a wholly new one. In practice, it works a lot like iOS's Live Activities , OnePlus's Live Alerts, and a feature planned for stock Android 16 called Live Updates. It's strange Samsung bills the Now Bar as being somehow AI-powered — if anything requiring AI is going on here, it's not at all clear what it is — but it's a good addition to One UI all the same.

Now Brief, on the other hand, is entirely useless. It pops up several times a day, every day; as I write this, I've got a Now Bar notification for my Midday Brief. Now Brief is meant to show you relevant information about your day as you need it — weather forecasts, calendar events, and the like. Depending on the time of day, it'll also show upcoming alarms, recommend content like news stories and Spotify playlists, and surface "highlights" from your day (that is, pictures you took).

Without opening my Midday Brief, I already know what's in it: the hourly forecast and a message telling me to have a good afternoon. That's what's in all of my Midday Briefs. Throughout the day, I'll also occasionally get recommended playlists that are user-generated and wholly unrelated to my preferences (Samsung doesn't have access to my Spotify account), or news stories about violent crimes that took place somewhere in the world, but never anything that preemptively solves a problem for me — which is what I'd think an AI feature like this should try to do.

Like the Now Bar where it appears, I think it's strange that Samsung classes Now Brief as a Galaxy AI feature. I guess it's possible that the flavor text in the brief is AI-generated, but nothing about showing me weather forecasts or sports scores at regular intervals requires or benefits from AI's involvement. As it is today, Now Brief feels like a watered-down version of an old Google feature called Google Now — which was deprecated almost a decade ago.

Even setting aside the AI stuff, One UI 7 isn't really up my alley. There are a lot of preloaded apps for a premium device — Facebook and LinkedIn have no business preinstalled on this phone, not to mention Samsung's doubling up on functionality with two preloaded internet browsers, two email clients, and two gallery apps. I'm sure every app that's on the S25 out of the box is there for some business reason or other, but that fact doesn't help the user experience any. Bloat is bloat.

I also don't love many of Samsung's unique software design flourishes, like the on-by-default overlay for Edge panel shortcuts or Samsung's paginated, horizontal app drawer. The latest version of One UI does give you the option to organize your apps into one continuous, vertically scrolling list, which I appreciate, but the default is still odd.

New for One UI 7, the notification panel has been separated from device quick settings. You open your notifications by swiping down on most of the top edge of the screen, while quick settings are accessed by swiping down from the top right corner. If I'm using my phone one-handed, my thumb naturally hits that corner when I reach for the top of the screen, so at first, I really hated this setup — I regularly reached for what I thought would be notifications only to find device settings.

I learned later that you can swap between the two views by swiping horizontally, and in the phone's settings, you can change touch targets or even disable the new layout altogether. That all helps things, but the new paradigm here feels like change for change's sake, and it doesn't make me like it any more to know that iOS's settings panel works the same way.

So it's safe to say I'm not enthusiastic about One UI 7. At the very least, I don't mind it as much after making a laundry list of tweaks to Samsung's default settings, and depending on how fluent you are in Samsung software design, you might feel right at home. If you prefer skins that stick closer to AOSP, though, you might find the latest One UI a little frustrating.

What isn't frustrating is performance. The Galaxy S25 has the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite (for Galaxy™) chipset paired with 12 gigs of RAM — that's up from 8GB in the S24 — and it's as fast and fluid as you'd hope. I'm not a very demanding user, but tooling around the internet and playing the odd mobile game (so, most of what people do on phones) feels really snappy. I haven't experienced any performance issues or notable bugs. Samsung promises seven years of OS updates for the S25 family, and with performance so strong, it feels plausible you might actually be able to hold onto this phone for that long, provided you can deal with some nagging downsides.

Cameras

Camera performance is one of those downsides. The S25 has the same camera loadout as the S24 did: on the back, there's a 50-megapixel primary camera (that takes 12MP photos by default), a 12MP ultrawide, and a 10MP 3x telephoto shooter; on the front, a 12MP selfie cam with autofocus. Those cameras deliver the same workmanlike image quality as we've come to expect from Samsung devices in recent years.

You know the score here: in good light, photos often come out great, with sharp detail, lifelike contrast, and vibrant colors. In dimmer settings, sharpness takes a hit, and photos of anything moving in suboptimal light are liable to be blurry.

No camera works as well in the dark as it does in well-lit settings, but rivals have really pulled ahead in this department. Google's Pixel 9 can snap decently sharp photos of my dogs indoors, even with the lights fairly dim. The S25 isn't so reliable. My dog wasn't even moving in the second photo you see above, but the S25's image processing still completely swallowed up the detail in his face. I took the next photo, with the blurry Playhouse Square sign, while I was crossing the street at a leisurely pace. It's typically not worth trying to get a picture of something in motion, unless it's under a spotlight or in the sun.

A bit of a disclaimer here: because Samsung releases its phones in the dead of winter in the US, a lot of my time using these cameras has been in crummy light. All the same, what I've seen from the S25's cameras so far has been broadly decent, but rarely impressive.

Battery and charging

The Galaxy S25 packs a 4,000mAh battery with wired charging up to 25 watts and wireless charging that tops out at 15. That's all the same as last year's S24.

Battery life is okay for a smaller phone. On average, I'm getting five to six hours of active screen time across two days of use. For heavier users, I'd expect a little over six hours during a single day. The similarly priced Pixel 9 can pull about eight hours of screen time out of a full charge. To be fair, Google's phone has a thicker chassis and a larger battery than the S25 does — but that seems like a fine trade-off to me.

Competition

The Galaxy S25 comes in at $800. Positioned as it is, the S25's biggest direct competition must be the non-Pro Pixel 9 , which also retails for $800. Compared to the Pixel, the S25 is thinner, lighter, and a bit smaller overall. It's got a 3x telephoto camera, too — the standard Pixel 9 doesn't have any telephoto lens. The S25 has the Pixel beat when it comes to build quality and raw horsepower, but the Pixel generally takes better photos, even without a telephoto camera. I also prefer Google's flavor of Android to One UI 7.

There's also the OnePlus 13R , if you're in the market for something a little cheaper. At $600, OnePlus's midranger has a bigger display and a much bigger battery that can last a couple days on a charge. Its performance is no slouch, either, with the same 12GB of RAM as the S25, plus last year's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset. Battery life aside, the S25 is a generally the better device — it's a bit faster, takes better photos, and will get OS updates for a few more years than the 13R. Still, that $200 price difference might do a lot to close the gap, depending on your priorities.

Should you buy it?

There are two ways to look at a phone like the Samsung Galaxy S25. On the one hand, and most importantly: is it a viable option for people who only read phone reviews when they're shopping for a phone? By that metric, yes, the Galaxy S25 is solid. If it were me, I'd go for the Pixel 9, which retails for the same price and takes better photos. But if you prefer Samsung or your carrier's offering a good incentive, the Galaxy S25's a very nice little phone. Assuming the phone you're on now is at least a couple of years old, go for it.

More critically, though, I don't think the S25 is a very impressive showing from Samsung. Again, that is not to say it's a bad phone: it does all the smartphone things competently, and it even excels in some areas. The S25 comes with the expected annual bump in processing power, plus 12 gigs of RAM — a sizable improvement from the 8GB that's been standard on Samsung's small flagships since the S20. There's no debate, this is a better phone than the S24 was, and the S24 was already very good.

At the same time, the S25 is another in a string of base-model Galaxy S phones that have been all but identical year over year. Its display is the same as last year's S24; the cameras are unchanged, as well. The battery's the same capacity and doesn't charge any faster. The S25's Snapdragon 8 Elite benchmarks higher than the S24's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, but the S25 doesn't feel tangibly faster than the S24 did. The move to a 3nm chipset hasn't translated to significant battery life gains, either. The formula's not broke, and Samsung didn't fix it. But by sales numbers, Samsung is far and away the leader in the Android space, and ideally, I'd like to see the company trying a little harder to innovate in meaningful ways.

If you've got a phone from 2022 or earlier and you're looking to upgrade to something small and well-made, the Galaxy S25 fits the bill. If you can find an S24 for less, though — or certainly if you have an S24 or S23 already — there's not a whole lot of reason to spring for Samsung's latest this year.

Samsung Galaxy S25

7.5/10

The Galaxy S25 is yet another competent phone from Samsung. If you've been on your current device for a few years and you're shopping for something small and new, it's a fine pick. Still, I wish Samsung had moved the ball forward a little more this year — this is another in a line of very iterative Galaxy updates.