Not everyone requires the ultra-premium Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra with its S Pen. Then some want a display and battery larger than what Galaxy S25 offers. Samsung Galaxy S25+ is the middle child of the series, coming with plenty of premium features. This year, the South Korean company has made more changes to the software side than on the hardware front. Let’s dive in.

Screen sparkle

Galaxy S24+ already had a squared-off design that continues into the Galaxy S25+. The phone itself is slightly thinner and lighter than last year’s model. Both the front and the back are protected by Gorilla Victus 2. Armed with an IP68 rating, the rain won’t play a spoiler for the phone.

The gorgeous OLED display is the same as what we saw last year. It’s a 6.7-inch 1440p OLED display with an adaptive 120Hz refresh rate. The only thing missing is the anti-reflective display coating, which is restricted to the Ultra model. The high resolution translates into extra sharpness on the large screen real estate. It’s among the best panels in the market.

As expected on a flagship phone, there are two fine-tuned stereo speakers with support for Dolby Atmos. The speakers can be loud without compromising quality. Plus, there is plenty of bass.

Galaxy S25+ (left) versus iPhone 16 Pro Max.

AI-driven features

The software on the phone is Samsung’s OneUI 7.0 built on top of Android 15. The major updates to the phone are in this section with plenty of artificial intelligence magic. Here’s an overview.

The first AI newcomer is Now Brief. You wake up, and the phone will summarise the weather and news… it kind of learns your behaviour and shows you what it thinks is relevant. It’s also a widget on the home screen that you can tap into. There is also a kind of end-of-day daily diary that will show the photos you took and a summary of events and meetings. Also shown are things like your favourite game begins in 30 minutes or if you missed a game, then the scorecard.

Last year we had Circle to Search, which was an impressive feature. How can it be extended? You can search for audio as well. If you are watching a video and want to know more about the music that’s playing, just press and hold the bottom of your phone and then tap the audio button. It can identify the music.

Samsung has added another feature within Circle to Search; it’s called AI Select. If you swipe over from the left side, you get a little panel where you can tap on AI Select. It allows you to highlight different parts of the screen and make a little screen recording or turn a part of a video into GIF.

You can also have your writing tools pulled up to summarise and translate… or search through screenshots.

Third, AI Search through the photo gallery, which is an expected feature. We see that on other phones but a natural language search is helpful. If you have a lot of photos and you ask for pictures of, say, burgers that you had six months ago, the phone can find it.

The phone beautifully handles colours even under uneven lighting.

Next, integrated AI platform. If you long press the power button you access Gemini. It is going to do a lot more now, so think of better integration with apps on your phone, you could ask when an upcoming sporting event is and add it to your calendar, and you could ask to summarise videos and put them in Samsung Notes, you could find restaurants and text the list to friends… the possibilities are endless.

A lot of the AI features are very impressive. Your phone feels more personalised than before. The Personal Data Engine, in essence, is supposed to learn from user info about Internet usage, Gallery content, health, wallet, calendar and files. It’s all done on the device. These insights enable tailored experiences such as searching for an old photo in the Gallery using natural language or being guided through the day with Now Brief.

The AI biggie here is Audio Eraser. After you take a video, AI can detect several categories of sound, like wind, environmental noise and so on. The machine will delineate those and allow you to adjust the volume of each of those independently and then put them back together. So you can remove the wind or even voice. It’s quite impressive. Now you can recover a video shot in a windy environment and get away with it.

Galaxy S25+ has a great battery life, which is important since it comes with power-hungry AI features.

Making all the AI features work (and in the blink of an eye) is the processor — Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform for Galaxy chipset. The chip can deliver a performance boost of 40 per cent in NPU, 37 per cent in CPU and 30 per cent in GPU compared to the previous generation. This power fuels the Galaxy S25 series’ ability to process more AI experiences on-device without any compromise, including previously Cloud-based AI tasks such as Generative Edit. The S25+ does considerably better than last year’s model.

Make the call

The phone, once again, comes with a 4,900 mAh battery. The battery life has improved substantially. Even after using the phone to take plenty of videos, use GPS, watch videos on YouTube and play a few games, the battery easily offered over seven hours of screen-on time and I could end the day with around 20 per cent charge remaining. The phone also supports wireless charging.

The camera bumps don't jut out too much on the Galaxy S25+.

The cameras on the phone haven’t changed but the processing technique has improved. On the back, there is the 50MP main camera, 12MP ultra-wide and 10MP 3x telephoto. Most of the updates are because of the new chipset. Overall, colours are punchy and not over the top. Where the camera shines is at night when very little noise is captured. And my favourite among the cameras is the telephoto, which matches the performance of the main camera. The zoom camera turns in good shots under uneven lighting. Further, the main camera can shoot 8K videos. We will do a full camera review in a separate article. Given the mix of features, Samsung Galaxy S25+ can become the default Android phone to buy.

Mathures Paul

At a glance

Device: Samsung Galaxy S25+

Price: Upwards of ₹99,999

High notes

• Excellent set of AI features

• Smooth performance

• Dependable camera

• Good battery life and design

Muffled note

• Anti-reflective screen option could have been there

• Facebook, Netflix and Spotify are pre-installed