Roh Tae-moon, president and head of Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division, introduces the Galaxy S25 series during an unveiling event at SAP Center in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday (local time). Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
Samsung Electronics unveiled its new Galaxy S25 smartphone family during a Galaxy Unpacked event, Wednesday (local time), highlighting the smartphone's function as an artificial intelligence (AI) assistant.
The latest smartphone bears extra significance not only for Samsung but also for other IT companies, as the Korean tech giant set AI experiences as the next breakthrough in the global smartphone market, which has been failing to provide innovations that can wow consumers for years.
“Following its launch of the world's first AI-powered smartphone last year, Samsung Electronics has been making relentless efforts to innovate the mobile AI market,” Roh Tae-moon, president and head of Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division, said during the event.
“The newly unveiled Galaxy S25 series promises to deliver the most advanced and intuitive AI experience yet, and innovate the users' daily lives through its AI optimal One UI 7 platform.”
Seen above are the Galaxy S25 series. From left are the Galaxy S25 Ultra, S25 Plus and S25. Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
The S25 family will be operating on the One UI 7 user interface, which is powered by multimodal AI to understand and analyze the user's natural language, context and intention to facilitate individualized AI experiences.
One of the key improvements in the S25 series is that the phone can now execute complex tasks requiring multiple apps on a single voice command.
For example, if a user wants to check the schedule of their favorite sports team and save it to the calendar, this previously required using multiple apps like search and calendar. However, the S25 series can execute this with a single voice command, such as, "Find the schedule for the team's games next week and add it to my calendar."
Circle to Search, a function that was first introduced in the previous Galaxy S24 in collaboration with Google, was also upgraded. Previously, the function allowed users to search by drawing a circle on an image or text, but now it enables users to also search sounds that the phone is playing.
Live Translate, which also first debuted in the previous S24 series, now supports 20 languages, enabling real-time communication without language barriers.
Other updates include Call Transcript, which transcribes calls into texts, and Call Summary, which simplifies and summarizes key points from the conversation.
Samsung Electronics will begin the global release of the Galaxy S25 series on Feb. 7. In Korea, preorders will be available from Jan. 24 to Feb. 3.
For the Galaxy S25 series, Samsung has maintained the price range the same as the previous Galaxy S24 in Korea. The flagship S25 Ultra ranges between 1.7 million won ($1,184) to 2.25 million won, depending on memory and storage, while the S25 Plus are priced at between 1.35 million won to 1.5 million won. The cheapest model will be the S25 with 12 gigabytes of memory and 256 gigabytes of storage, which will be sold at 1.16 million won.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra Titanium / Courtesy of Samsung Electronics
Galaxy without Samsung's AP, memory
As anticipated earlier, the Galaxy S25 will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite for the Galaxy application processor (AP), instead of Samsung's in-house Exynos 2500. An AP is a chipset that works as the brain of a smartphone, combining functions of central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and other core components like modem, memory controller and power management unit.
Samsung said that compared to its predecessor, the Galaxy Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the latest AP shows respective increases of 37 percent and 30 percent in CPU and GPU performance, while showcasing a 40 percent improvement in neural processing unit.
For memory, Micron's LPDDR5X DRAM was used instead of the company's in-house mobile DRAM. The previous Galaxy S24 standard model featured 8 gigabytes of memory, but all S25 devices will be equipped with 12 gigabytes to support AI functions.
The S25 came as a signal showing that Samsung's smartphone and chip divisions are increasingly separating, due largely to questions lingering on the manufacturing yield of Samsung's APs and memory chips using advanced nanometer processes.
Since using outside suppliers' components costs more than using in-house components, the S25 series' production is assumed to be more expensive than earlier models. Despite the higher production costs, Samsung has not raised prices for the S25 family, in a strategy to expand Galaxy smartphones' global market share while its main rival Apple struggles to expand its AI platform, Apple Intelligence.
According to market tracker Counterpoint, Samsung ranked first in global smartphone market share last year with 19 percent, but suffered a 1 percentage point drop from the previous year. Apple followed in second place with an 18 percent market share.
Meanwhile, Chinese firms expanded their presence even in the premium segment. Xiaomi was No. 3 with 14 percent, followed by Oppo and Vivo each with 8 percent.