During its latest Unpacked event, Samsung dished all the details on the Galaxy S25 lineup. The Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus start at $799.99 and $999.99, respectively, while the S25 Ultra runs a cool $1299.99 in its entry-level configuration. You can preorder the phones ahead of their launch on February 7th, but before you do, you’re probably wondering what’s new.

The phones don’t look or feel much different, save for the slightly curvier Galaxy S25 Ultra. The Snapdragon Elite 8 is perhaps the S25 family’s most notable hardware upgrade, which is up to 40 percent faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and comes with a new neural processing unit to support Samsung’s expanded Galaxy AI experience. The company introduced multimodal and generative AI improvements, after all, and the Galaxy S25 line will be among the first to usher in new Google Gemini features.

Our reviews are still forthcoming, and it’s much too early for us to determine whether any of these phones are actually worth upgrading for. But that doesn’t mean we can’t distill their differences to help you determine which device you’d rather buy. Keep reading for a full breakdown of all of the hardware and software changes, the unique traits of each Galaxy S25 device, and a closer look at their specs — plus their counterparts from last year.

In terms of shape and size, it’s hard to tell the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus from their last-gen counterparts. But the S25 Ultra looks a bit different than the S24 Ultra with its subtly rounded corners and flat edges, which are more visually aligned with the smaller phones. It’s the thinnest and lightest Ultra yet, even if only by a hair. And the Ultra-exclusive S Pen is back, albeit without gestures and the remote shutter feature.

Samsung says the aluminum frame on the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus features at least one recycled component. Both sandwich their components between slabs of Corning’s Gorilla Glass Victus 2, but the Ultra uses a titanium frame and a display that’s protected by Corning Gorilla Armor 2. It’s a ceramic-infused material said to be stronger than typical tempered glass with antireflective and scratch-resistant properties. (The rear still uses Victus 2.)

Samsung also tweaked the design of the camera modules on all three phones, adding a thicker bordering hump with a bolder aesthetic. The S25 and S25 Plus come in several new color options, too, including an “icy” blue and a new mint green to help them stand apart, as well as navy and silver for a more traditional aesthetic. Three more colors will be available exclusively from Samsung.com: black, red, and rose gold.

The Ultra has its own set of titanium colors, including black, gray, and silverish hues of blue and white. If you order the Ultra from Samsung.com, you’ll also be able to choose from rose gold, black, and green.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 series is available with largely the same memory and storage options as the previous models, except all three models now start with 12GB of RAM. You can get the base Galaxy S25 with 128GB or 256GB of storage, while the Plus starts with 256GB of storage with a 512GB option. The Ultra, meanwhile, offers the same starting configurations as the Plus, along with a 1TB configuration.

All three Galaxy S25 phones use a Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset — no matter where in the world you’re purchasing from. The processor uses an Oryon CPU similar to the ones you’ll find in newer Qualcomm laptops.

The 3nm chip has two “prime” cores and six performance cores with a dedicated “Hexagon” neural processing unit that supports multimodal AI capabilities with 40 percent faster efficiency compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. The added headroom allows support for more on-device AI functions, including Generative Edit. Many of these features should generally work faster without the added overhead of server-side processing.

Overall, Samsung claims the Snapdragon 8 Elite offers 37 percent faster CPU performance and 30 percent faster GPU performance for gaming, at least compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 it’s replacing. That being said, we can’t yet discern how that translates in practice.

The Dynamic AMOLED displays on the Galaxy S25 smartphones are largely unchanged compared to the previous generation. The base Galaxy S25 still has a 6.2-inch Full HD Plus display, while the 6.7-inch display on the Galaxy S25 Plus remains Quad HD Plus.

The S25 Ultra’s display is slightly larger than last year’s at 6.9 inches — a 0.1-inch increase to make up for the slight curve — with the same QHD Plus resolution. All three still support a maximum 120Hz variable refresh rate.

The Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus have the same three rear cameras, including a 50-megapixel wide sensor, a 12-megapixel ultrawide option, and a 10-megapixel telephoto sensor. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S25 Ultra offers four total rear cameras, including a main 200-megapixel wide-angle camera, a new 50-megapixel ultrawide camera with macro mode (up from the S24 Ultra’s 12-megapixel), a 50-megapixel telephoto sensor with 5x optical zoom, and a 12-megapixel sensor for 3x zoom. All still use the same 12-megapixel front camera.

Recording options are largely similar across the board, with all three Galaxy S25 models supporting 8K resolution at up to 30 frames per second on their main wide-angle sensors and 4K at up to 60 frames per second for all cameras. However, the Galaxy S25 Ultra supports 4K at up to 120 frames per second.

Samsung now enables 10-bit HDR recording by default on all S25 phones, and they retain the Log color profile option for advanced color grading. The cameras picked up other software-enabled tricks, too, including the Audio Eraser feature first seen in Pixel phones. That feature lets you choose and isolate specific sounds — including voices, music, and wind — with the option to lower the rest or mute them entirely.

There’s also a new Virtual Aperture feature in Expert RAW, allowing you to adjust your footage’s depth of field after recording. There’s a new suite of filters inspired by iconic film looks, too.

Samsung says its new ProScaler feature on the Galaxy S25 Plus and Ultra offers 40 percent better upscaling compared to the Galaxy S24’s based on its signal-to-noise ratio. Since that feature requires QHD Plus resolution, you won’t find it on the base Galaxy S25.

Like the Galaxy S24 line, the Galaxy S25, S25 Plus, and S25 Ultra use 4,000mAh, 4,900mAh, and 5,000mAh batteries, respectively. That being said, Samsung says they offer the longest battery life of any Galaxy phones to date, largely thanks to hardware and software efficiency improvements.

Fast charging over USB-C returns in all three, of course, but they’re now also “Qi2 Ready.” That means there are no magnets embedded directly in the devices — which is the case with Apple’s latest handsets — but you will be able to obtain 15W wireless charging speeds when paired with Samsung’s magnetic Qi2 Ready cases. That should effectively enable you to use magnetic Qi2 chargers with Samsung Galaxy S25 devices.

The Galaxy S25’s launch is less about the hardware and more an opportunity to introduce One UI 7, its AI-heavy take on Android 15. While there are several visual tweaks, the bigger change is in Galaxy AI’s expanded granularity and cohesiveness.

Both Samsung and Google are introducing new multimodal AI features with the Galaxy S25’s launch. Google Gemini Live will launch first on the Galaxy S25, for example, though it will eventually come to the Galaxy S24 and Google Pixel 9. It’s a full-fledged conversational AI companion that’s now the default assistant when long-pressing the home button. (Bixby is still available in its own app.)

Gemini Live supports natural language commands for generative tasks and on-device functions. You can feed it images and files to facilitate requests, and it can dive into multiple apps to help complete them.

You can also get more personalized daily summaries with Now Brief, which is accessible directly from the lockscreen’s new Now Bar (which feels similar to the iPhone’s Dynamic Island). You’ll also notice a redesigned AI Select menu (which you may remember as Smart Select), 20 supported languages for on-device translations, call transcriptions directly within the dialer, and more. Most of these changes should port to older Galaxy flagships, but we’re not yet sure whether all of them will.

No, you’re not experiencing deja vu — the Galaxy S25 smartphones feel largely familiar on paper, as our comparison chart below illustrates. Outside the processor bump, the hardware differences are pretty minor compared to Samsung’s last-gen phones.

The software changes are the most significant upgrades this year, but many of those features will come to older phones, too, thanks to the now-customary seven years of OS updates you’ll get when purchasing a flagship Galaxy phone. Check out the full specs below to see how exactly these devices compare.

One of the most important changes in Samsung’s new phones is a simple one: when you long-press the side button on your phone, instead of activating Samsung’s own Bixby assistant by default, you’ll get Google Gemini. 

This is probably a good thing. Bixby was never a very good virtual assistant — Samsung originally built it primarily as a way to more simply navigate device settings, not to get information from the internet. It has gotten better since and can now do standard assistant things like performing visual searches and setting timers, but it never managed to catch up to the likes of Alexa, Google Assistant, and now, even Siri. So, if you’re a Samsung user, this is good news! Your assistant is probably better now. (And if, for some unknown reason, you really do truly love Bixby, don’t worry: there’s still an app.)

The switch to Gemini is an even bigger deal for Google. Google was caught off guard a couple of years ago when ChatGPT launched but has caught up in a big way. According to recent reporting from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sundar Pichai now believes Gemini has surpassed ChatGPT, and he wants Google to have 500 million users by the end of this year. It might just get there one Samsung phone at a time.

Gemini is now a front-and-center feature on the world’s most popular Android phones, and millions upon millions of people will likely start to use it more — or use it at all — now that it’s so accessible. For Google, which is essentially betting that Gemini is the future of every single one of its products, that brings a hugely important new set of users and interactions. All that data makes Gemini better, which makes it more useful, which makes it more popular. Which makes it better again.

Right now, Google appears to be well ahead of its competitors in one important way: Gemini is the most capable virtual assistant on the market right now, and it’s not particularly close. It’s not that Gemini is specifically great; it’s just that it has more access to more information and more users than anyone else. This race is still in its early stages, and no AI product is very good yet — but Google knows better than anyone that if you can be everywhere, you can get good really fast. That worked so well with search that it got Google into antitrust trouble. This time, at least so far, it seems like Google’s going to have an even easier time taking over the market.

For years, there were three meaningful players in the virtual assistant space. Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Assistant, and Apple’s Siri all offered similar features and were similarly accessible through speakers and phones and wearables. But now? The much-hyped, AI-first “Remarkable Alexa” is, by all accounts, massively delayed and massively underpowered. The latest versions of Siri shipped with a wackier animation and seemingly no new smarts or capabilities. 

There are other ascendant AI assistants, of course. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Copilot all have strong underlying models, and some share the same multimodal capabilities as Gemini. There are lots of good reasons to pick them or even something like Perplexity over Gemini. But they’re missing the most important thing: distribution. They’re apps you have to download, log in to, and open every time. Gemini is a button you can press — and that’s a big difference. There’s a reason OpenAI is reportedly working on everything from a web browser to a Jony Ive-designed ChatGPT gadget: the built-in options usually win.

The built-in options are also the ones that tend to have the best integration across the platform, which might be the whole ball game. Gemini can already change settings on your phone and, with new upgrades, can even do things across apps — grabbing information from your email and dumping it into a text message draft, just to name one example. Because of the way iOS and Android are architected, no other assistant has this kind of access — and again, there’s no indication that Siri’s ever going to be as good as it needs to be. If the future of assistants is this kind of agentic, using-your-apps-for-you behavior, Google’s inherent advantage might be insurmountable. 

Meanwhile, Google is practically spoiled for places to put Gemini. The company recently announced that all paying Workspace customers will get Gemini access. You can access Gemini with one click from your Gmail inbox or summon it with one keystroke in Docs. And the underlying tech is even more pervasive. You can use Gemini to find stuff on YouTube and in Drive, and practically every time you search, a Gemini-powered AI Overview appears at the top of your results. “Today, all seven of our products and platforms with more than two billion monthly users use Gemini models,” Pichai said on Google’s earnings call last fall. (Fun fact: the word “gemini” appears 29 times in that earnings call transcript, only three fewer than “search.”) 

When it comes to how people actually encounter and interact with these models, though, the phone is still the AI device of choice. And that’s where Google has maybe its largest advantage. “Gemini’s deep integration is improving Android,” Pichai said on that earnings call. “For example, Gemini Live lets you have free-flowing conversations with Gemini; people love it.” For now, smartphones are the most compelling AI devices, and Google can integrate its systems unlike any other. Apple, scrambling to play catch-up with the iPhone, had to launch an awkward handoff with ChatGPT just so Siri could answer more questions. 

All of these assistants, including Gemini, still have lots of limitations. They lie; they misunderstand; they lack the necessary integrations to do even some of the basic things Alexa and Assistant have been able to do for years. The Gemini models still occasionally do ridiculous, deal-breaking things like tell people to eat rocks and generate diverse founding fathers. But if you believe the AI era is coming, or is maybe even here, then there is nothing more important right now than getting your AI platform in front of users. People are developing new habits, learning new systems, developing new relationships with their virtual assistants. The more entrenched we become, the less likely we will be to dump our AI friend for another one. 

ChatGPT had the first-mover advantage and captured the world’s imagination by showing just how compelling an AI chatbot could be. But Google has the distribution. It can put its sparkly icon in front of practically the entire population of the internet every single day, across a huge range of products, and get the kind of data and feedback it needs to eventually do this well. Even as it fights in court over how powerful its default status made it in search, Google is executing the same playbook with AI. And it’s working again.