The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra smooths out some sharp edges

The Galaxy S25 Ultra, announced today, sheds more of its Note roots this year with rounded corners and flat edges that align it more with the rest of the S series. It comes with Qualcomm’s latest chipset, an upgraded ultrawide camera, and not much else, hardware-wise. With no price increase over last year’s model — starting at $1,299 — it’s a light refresh of Samsung’s biggest phone, with a major emphasis on One UI 7.0’s AI upgrades.

Something about the shift from curved edges to flat sides makes the S25 Ultra look hefty in photos, like if the Cybertruck were a phone. But it’s actually slightly smaller and lighter than last year’s device, even with a bigger 6.9-inch screen thanks to slimmer bezels. It’s equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor tuned for Galaxy devices — that’s true for all S25-series phones sold in all regions, which hasn’t been the case recently. And it still comes with one more strong spec: seven years of OS updates and security patches.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

There are some interesting things not on the Ultra this year, though. Bixby is no longer the default virtual assistant. It’s still present and you can summon it through its own app. But Google Gemini will answer when you long-press the wake button on the side of the phone.

The included S Pen, another holdover from the Note era, gets a bit of a downgrade. It no longer supports Bluetooth, so the air gesture controls that previous versions offered are gone. The S25 Ultra’s included S Pen is just a basic stylus, no magic wand tricks up its sleeve. Bummer.

Camera hardware is largely unchanged from the previous model, except for a new 50-megapixel ultrawide, replacing a 12-megapixel module. Samsung claims that an upgrade to the S25’s algorithmic image processing has improved detail in zoomed images. On the video side, Samsung now offers a Galaxy Log profile along with a custom LUT.

Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

The most interesting changes are software-side in One UI 7.0. My colleague Dominic Preston has a good rundown of the new stuff as it also appears on the S25 and S25 Plus models. Unsurprisingly, it all has to do with AI, and much of it we were already familiar with thanks to the One UI 7.0 beta. But a couple of things made me sit up and pay attention.

The first is the ability to use AI across apps to take action, like taking a picture of a flyer and having Gemini add the dates to your calendar and send your spouse an email about it. Maybe this doesn’t sound like much, but some of us have to remember which day is “crazy hair day” at preschool, when conferences are, and the deadline for signing up for this season’s soccer class. A little help would be nice. This will first work across Google Workspace and Samsung native apps, with the addition of WhatsApp and Spotify.

The other thing I’m interested to see in action is suggested routines. In theory, the S25 phones will be able to notice if there are certain settings you tend to use at the same time every day or under certain conditions — like turning Bluetooth on every time you get in the car and turning it off when you get out. When it sees a pattern, it should be able to suggest a routine to take care of those actions for you automatically. You’ll be able to customize the routine parameters to your liking, but you won’t have to go through the tedious work of setting it up from scratch. That could be cool!

The thing is, this stuff isn’t exclusive to the S25 Ultra or even the S25 series. Samsung smartphone product manager Blake Gaiser told me Samsung will bring its new AI features to older devices where possible. The company certainly seems committed to delivering those updates to older phones — but don’t forget that they probably won’t always be free.

We’ll find out soon enough whether this is the AI update that will finally deliver on the promise of AI on our smartphones; the Galaxy S25 Ultra and its S25 siblings ship on February 7th.