Last night, Samsung unveiled its latest flagship series of devices at a satellite launch event held in the newly renovated Wits Anglo America Digital Dome. We’ll definitely have to revisit this venue, as it holds some pretty spectacular technology, but the star of the show last night was undoubtedly the Samsung S25 Series.
The latest series of devices from the Korean tech giant includes several functional, aesthetic, and performance upgrades that have me very excited. While it may be difficult to justify yearly upgrades if you already have a Galaxy S23 or S24 series device, the latest flagship phones from Samsung offer a compelling value offering. Not only are the Galaxy S25 series devices cheaper than last year’s Galaxy S24 series, but if you are a mobile gamer or content creator, you will greatly benefit from the upgraded features in its hardware and software.
Before I share my favourite new features, a few additional specifications stood out when I compared the Galaxy S25 series to the S24 series. Most notable is that all devices in the series now have 12GB of RAM, and there are no 8GB options like last year. Also of note is that Samsung dropped the Exynos SoC variants from the line-up, meaning all devices in the series sports the impressive Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. This is great news for gamers.
Another change is the S pen on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. It no longer supports Bluetooth, so using it as a remote camera shutter for Air Gestures is no longer possible. While this will affect some users, I believe these features were dropped due to waning customer interest.
Lastly, Samsung also teased the Galaxy S25 Edge. While not much information was given on this device, the S25 Edge will be an ultra-slim version of the Galaxy S25 and will compete with the Apple iPhone 17 Air, rumoured to be launched later this year.
Not that I care too much for that one, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will get my money. Here is why:
Game Performance with the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile SoC
If you want to start the year with the best-performing phone in your hands, then the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC should be the reason to upgrade. This latest chipset from Qualcomm boasts an unbelievable 3nm manufacturing process and transistor density. Samsung’s exclusive version of this chipset features overclocked prime cores, running 4,47GHz over the standard 4,32GHz on the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. Qualcomm says this is the world’s fastest second-generation custom Qualcomm Oryon CPU that features the Qualcomm Adreno GPU and a new Qualcomm Hexagon NPU (Neural Processing Unit) to improve performance with local AI calculations. Samsung claims up to 40% improvement in gaming performance and up to 40% improvement in Ray Tracing improvements over the base version of this chipset, but I’ll reserve my final comments until I put it through its paces myself. Interestingly, the new Snapdragon 8 Elite also supports narrowband NTN, which means that support is built-in to send messages via satellite. Called Snapdragon Satellite, this feature will need local service and support, something that has not been announced for our market yet, but it is pretty awesome to see this function on an Android phone. This feature was also not talked about in the keynote and I hope we hear something about it in the near future.
Gemini AI Software
Samsung’s close relationship with Android has resulted in a lot of added value for Samsung customers over the years. For one thing, you get up to seven years of Android platform updates, which is unheard of in the smartphone world. Another thing that makes Galaxy S25 series phones stand out is its One UI 7 software and tight integration with Google Gemini. Last year’s iteration of this software on the Galaxy S24 series featured AI functions like Circle to search, Live Translation and chat assist to name a few. This year’s update sees a much deeper integration of Gemini into the device’s operating system and app ecosystem. More specifically, using natural language understanding on this device means you can now talk to your phone much more naturally to search for something on your phone, manage your phone’s operation, and even create better content.
Regarding privacy, all of these personalised AI tasks are managed on the Galaxy S25’s Personal Data Engine, which keeps your data on the device and does not need cloud access to work. Of course, you can unlock even more functionality using the various available AI cloud services. The tight integration of apps and AI services on the Galaxy S25 series means your phone will become a real intelligent digital companion. To help you make the best use of all this power, Samsung developed Now Brief, an AI-driven personal assistant that helps you manage your daily tasks. Each morning, you’ll get personalised briefings for the day, and it stays updated to keep you informed.
Shooting in LOG
We’ve had RAW capabilities on Galaxy phones for a while now, but the Galaxy S25 series is the first to support Log Video. Just like RAW is to photography, Galaxy LOG is a feature that lets you capture the raw data of a scene so that you can get the best from your colour grading in post production. At 10-bit, LOG Video files are large, but if you shoot video for a living, you just unlocked your next best video camera.
Audio Eraser tool
The one feature I am really looking forward to is the new AI audio tools, which will help you eliminate background noise from your video. I use external mics or third-party AI audio tools to get good audio for my videos but this feature will save me a lot of time and effort. Samsung Audio Eraser is a new AI tool that lets you isolate and remove background noise across various category sliders. This means you can minimise wind noise while increasing the volume of crowd noise for example. If you are a vlogger or Tik Tok creator you will love the fact that you’ll now have full control over voice isolation in post-production; and you can drop the volume on everything else you don’t want on your video’s audio track.
Helping to improve gaming
The Samsung Galaxy S25 series features a 40% larger Vapour champer to better dissipate heat to help the chipset run optimally and keep the device cooler over those long gaming sessions. This, in conjunction with the improved performance of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset, means the Galaxy S25 series is gearing up to be the best gaming phone commercially available in South Africa. Do we have another Phone of the Year contender on our hands? It certainly looks so, but I’ll give a full report back once our review units arrive.
