Samsung doubles down on AI with its latest lineup of smartphonesSamsung doubles down on AI with its latest lineup of smartphones

The Korean firm announced its latest line of phones – which includes the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Galaxy S25+ and Galaxy S25 – at an event called Galaxy Unpacked in San Jose, California this week. The phones set “a new standard as a true AI companion with our most natural and context-aware mobile experiences ever created,” states the release.

It adds: “Introducing multimodal AI agents, the Galaxy S25 series is the first step in Samsung’s vision to change the way users interact with their phone – and with their world.”

Which certainly seems to be laying it on a bit thick – but such is the tenor often adopted by the tech industry when talking about anything, all the way down to a self-opening bin.

Hardware wise, the S25 line comes with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy CPU under the hood, which Samsung says delivers a performance boost of 40% in NPU, 37% in CPU and 30% in GPU compared to previous S24 generation. This allows the phones to process more AI functions on-device, such as previously cloud-based tools like Generative Edit, we’re told.

It also has a 50MP ultrawide camera sensor, upgraded from the previous 12MP, and it also comes loaded with post-quantum cryptography.

But the real star of the show is the AI features accessed through One UI 7 and Google Gemini integration. TM Roh, President and Head of Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics said: “The greatest innovations are a reflection of their users, which is why we evolved Galaxy AI to help everyone interact with their devices more naturally and effortlessly while trusting that their privacy is secured. Galaxy S25 series opens the door to an AI-integrated OS that fundamentally shifts how we use technology and how we live our lives.”

The Galaxy S25 phones can interpret text, speech, images and videos “for interactions that feel natural.” What this means practically includes things like ‘Circle to Search’ recognising phone numbers, email and URLs on your screen, and letting you call, email or visit a website with a tap.

You can also perform actionable searches with ‘context-aware suggestions’ for next steps, and switching between apps for follow-up actions is supposed to be easy. Meanwhile its natural language understanding means you can ask for a specific photo in the gallery or adjust the size of display fonts in settings by talking to it.

“Just press and hold the side button to activate Gemini and perform seamless interaction across Samsung and Google apps, plus third-party apps such as Spotify,” explains the release. “For example, find your favourite sports team’s season schedule and add it to Samsung Calendar – with a single command.”

There are also call transcription and summary features, tools for assisting with writing such as summarising content or automatically formatting notes, and Drawing Assist “unlocks fresh ways to bring ideas to life through combinations of sketches, text or image prompts.”

Analyst Paolo Pescatore said of the launch event: “Last year saw the beginning of AI and we are now seeing this evolve with additional more enhanced features. Samsung is taking a proven strategy of moving first, seeking to gain from an early mover advantage, refine and build as quickly as possible. While, last year certainly threw down the gauntlet to rivals and did raise the benchmark for the next generation of smartphones, it remains unclear whether this line-up will follow suit. The jury is out.

“In general, users remain skeptical of AI and are wary of how it can add value to their lives. However with all the euphoria around AI (for the wrong reasons), they are certainly aware of AI, as it is entrenched in almost every aspect of their daily lives in some shape or form.”

Anisha Bhatia, Senior Technology Analyst at GlobalData added: “The new AI features built into Samsung’s One UI 7 platform, represent a strategic move to prioritize software innovation. Its Personal Data Engine for AI is designed to empower the device with a deeper understanding of user preferences and behaviors, enabling more accurate and helpful AI suggestions without compromising user privacy by keeping the data on the device. Samsung's AI Select agent, powered by a multimodal AI model, is a prime example of the company's efforts to simplify user actions. By scanning the screen and suggesting contextually relevant actions, Samsung reduces the need for users to switch between multiple apps, thereby streamlining the user experience and integrating AI into everyday device interactions.”

As with the S24 line of phones, which at their launch last year much was made of the AI features, a lot of the AI pixie dust is provided by Google, and the processing grunt by Qualcomm.

Google put out a couple of releases of its own in line with the launch. In one it said: “We’re making Gemini even more accessible on Galaxy S25 devices. Just long-press on your side button and Gemini will be right there to assist you or respond to what’s on your screen. Additionally, we’ll start rolling out access to Deep Research in the Gemini mobile app for Advanced users later this week, which can save you hours of research even while you’re on the go. We’re constantly working to make Gemini a more helpful mobile assistant, and we can’t wait for you to put it to work on your Android devices.”

For years now it’s been a little tricky for phone manufacturers to differentiate their new lines from previous ones or from each other – especially in the Google ecosystem which means largely the same OS is used across so many devices on the market. These personalised assistants and various other LLM powered features appear to be providing something new to shout about in the present tech-bubble fervour for all things AI – and Samsung will be hoping that translates to a successful sales pitch for its latest line.

But since a lot of the AI stuff does come from Google, presumably similar looking features are going to eventually crop up across the whole ecosystem. So who knows how much of a differentiator that will end up being, or indeed if they will significantly inform the buying decisions of the average Joe anyway.