Samsung S25 series: Is it really an upgrade?

NV Tech Reviews by B S Rout / Tech Specialist

Samsung Galaxy S25/Ultra Impressions: We are late in this race to report about this lineup but we thoroughly went through the company flagship launch to inform… you should you buy it or not.

it’s the same as last year. It’s last year’s phone with a new name. Nothing changed. There are a few things usually that are at least worth talking about. But with this phone, I can honestly say there is nothing. Nothing dramatically new about the S25. very familiar on the outside With the standard phones,  I honestly don’t think I could tell the difference between this and last year. Same 6.2-inch and 6.7-inch sizes, same flat sides, same old design. Think ring outside the camera ring and that’s your tell that you’re holding the new model. But all the changes are gonna be on the inside.

It’s rocking the new Snapdragon 8 Elite with a slightly upgraded vapour chamber, and 12gb of base RAM across the board now. The S25 Ultra did get a little bit of a cosmetic update. Same battery size and, the same port and button layout, but this time, the sides are just a bit more squared off and rectangular, and the rings around the camera bumps are all a bit bigger. So the bezels are a little bit smaller on the front, about 15% smaller. So that counts as a design update, I guess. And it’s also upgraded to the newest Gorilla Glass at the front. And there’s a new 50-megapixel ultra-wide camera, replacing the 12-megapixel. Otherwise, the rest of the cameras and the rest of the specs from the battery to the brightness are all the same. Everything else new here is software.

According to MKBHD- when phones used to do just the S update every other year? They would have a big jump and then a small jump. And that small jump was like a spec bump in the same design. This is the purest form of just going back to that. This is basically a Galaxy S24S. And  Like the S24 line sold really well for them. People loved those phones. so stick with the formula, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. But on the other hand, that phone was also really similar to the year before that, which was similar to the year before that. So after a while, the design does feel kind of stale.

So there’s a long list of new Galaxy AI features launching on the S25 series, which have a range of usefulness, So the biggest one is this new assistant that’s triggers when you hold the power button, and it looks like this. Now you can actually see it says, “Ask Gemini,” in the box, but it’s not actually pure Gemini. It’s more of a hybrid of Google Gemini and Bixby. So combining the best of both worlds.

But every once in a while, you can ask it something specific, like adding an event to your calendar, and then you can see it take action and dig in and actually do it for you instead of just opening an app and asking you to do it. And that’s genuinely useful.

Some people are gonna build their whole lives around that, I’m sure. It’s kind of funny. It doesn’t seem like you’re able to pull it up with a voice command trigger. Like you can’t just say, “Bixby,” and it comes up, or, “Google,” because it’s both. So that’s kind of weird. You do have to trigger it by holding down the power button. It’s basically Gemini with some extensions.

Next you swipe over from the edge panel or take a screenshot and invoke AI Select, and it’ll use context to let you select whatever’s on your screen and do something more useful with it. So if there’s a bunch of text and you’re reading an article, AI Select will surface writing tools, and then you can summarize that text, or at least the text that’s currently on your page.

Or if you’re watching a video, you can pull up AI Select, and there’s a tool to make a GIF of whatever’s on your screen. So you can select the video and a few seconds of it, and make a GIF super easily. But, yeah, now making a GIF is easy whenever you want. There’s also now natural language processing in the Settings and Gallery search. So you can just search using regular sentences, and it’ll actually find what you’re looking for by understanding you. That I think is pretty cool.

Samsung has been really good about software updates lately. They’re promising like seven years of software updates on their newest flagships, most of the new stuff on this phone is this software and the AI stuff and most of the stuff is going to be available on s24 very soon. I would suggest skipping this upgrade if you want to save some money by buying the s24 series which is already on sale.

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