Samsung Galaxy S25+ review

A sleek, minimalist design, that is pretty much a premium glass and metal sandwich. It has a slightly tweaked camera bump, perhaps a bit more integrated, a bit less "look at me, I'm a camera". Colour options? Expect the usual suspects: black, blue, gold, grey and red.

Ergonomics are key, and Samsung nails this. You can expect a comfortable in-hand feel, with well-placed buttons and slightly rounder edges that don’t dig into your hands. Although it is still a very boxy smartphone, and like the iPhone, this too digs into your fingers when using it with one hand. The in-hand feel of the S25 Plus is lightweight but sturdy. This thing feels like it has shed a lot of weight while maintaining last year’s boxy proportions.

Want the best display? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Samsung is the undisputed king of smartphone displays, and the S25 Plus has a 6.7-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display. You’re looking at a QHD+ (3120 x 1440) resolution with 120Hz refresh rate, because why not? And, of course, expect HDR10+ for Netflix as well.

Netflix and other streaming content look great. The brightness on this smartphone is truly the best in the business and there’s no artefacts or blooming in the shadows while watching The Witcher and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix. The colours are punchy, and the speakers have texture and good stereo separation. Samsung has refined the Galaxy S series to a point where it’s impossible to find faults while daily driving it. 

As for protection, the front has Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 to protect the smartphone against accidental oopsies.

Under the hood, the S25 Plus is packing the best Android processor in the market currently, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite. We're talking faster processing speeds, improved graphics performance, and better power efficiency. From smooth multitasking to lag-free gaming, and snappy app performance, this chip is pretty much guaranteed to make your old smartphone feel like an overweight snail.

All the Samsung Galaxy S25 smartphones this year get a standard 12GB of RAM and prices only change for storage options. The Plus here gets 256GB and 512GB storage options while only the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra gets a higher 1TB storage option.

As for gaming, things get a bit toasty under heavy load but the performance drop is not as drastic as earlier models of the Galaxy S series. Games like Monument Valley 2 barely tease the game’s hardware but throw in Genshin Impact and Call of Duty: Mobile and you’ll feel the heat. There’s a slightly bigger cooling chamber over the predecessor which helps keep the games running smoothly. The cooling is not as efficient as the iQOO 13 but good enough for casual gaming. Hapics are much better this time and almost as good as the iPhone and Google Pixel smartphones. Games that take advantage of Samsung’s vibration motors will definitely feel a bit livelier in your palms.

The S25+ and the S25 have the same camera setup, there’s a 50MP main sensor, a 12MP ultra-wide, and a 10MP telephoto with a decent optical zoom. Now, on paper, that's a solid foundation. It's definitely more versatile than the base iPhone 16. Samsung's image processing is getting smarter as well, with improved AI scene optimisation that aims to make your snaps pop without looking overly processed. The outcome is generally vibrant colours, sharp details, and reliable performance across various lighting conditions.

The iPhone 16 Pro has a bit more noise in the shadows compared to the S25+ but the telephoto performance of the iPhone 16 Pro is better than the S25+. This is only noticeable after you go pixel peeping so in reality both smartphones shoot incredible photos so it’s a matter of preferance rather than choice. Flash photography is a bit better on the iPhone since Samsung is a bit too harsh with the light on the subjects. Besides that there’s very little distinction between the Korean and the Cupertino giants. Video has improved on the Samsung as well. The overall sharpness in the scene has reduced which now makes the Samsung a wee-bit more softer and natural which we like. The colours are still muted compared to iPhone.

However, whether it can truly outshine Vivo's portrait wizardry or match the iPhone's unwavering consistency remains to be seen. It'll be a proper camera shootout, and we'll be there with our metaphorical measuring tape, ready to crown the photographic king.

Samsung's One UI, now in its latest iteration, is aiming for that sweet spot: intuitive yet feature-packed. Expect a clean, customisable interface, with all the usual Android bells and whistles, but with a Samsung twist. We’re talking smooth animations, a focus on one-handed usability, and a generally polished experience. This is probably the most customisable Android OS you can find and I absotutely love it.

But the real magic, as always, lies in the AI. Samsung's been ramping up its AI game. We had a 15min long interview with Kedar Kondap, Senior Vice President of Product Management at Qualcomm Technologies, which you can read here, transcribed in under a minute with on-device AI. In practice, the Samsung Voice Recorder app feels like a more feature-rich version of Google Pixel’s Voice Note app.

However, all of Samsung’s marketing points to the generative AI eraser tool in the Gallery app of the smartphone. You can literally erase more than 50% of the scene from a photo and have an AI generate the missing pieces. You cannot prompt with text what you want to be added there like you can in Photoshop but the AI occasionally does an incredible job of reading the overall photo composition and generating things based on the data. This is obviously done on the cloud for the generative content that is a bit complicated and requires asset generation to replace. The cloud has a bigger repository of data to extract and fill into any image. If you choose to do generative AI fill in photos with on-device smarts (which you can), then the final outcome won’t be even half as good as the one done on the cloud. However, AI eraser for removing things in the background that doesn’t require major asset generation, sort of like the masking tool in Photoshop, will work as good as Apple iPhone’s eraser tool. Apple’s AI eraser is closer to Photoshops masking tool than Samsung’s AI Generative eraser which works with cloud. Samsung can do both, while the iPhone can only do AI erase, not generate assets based on composition because Apple iPhone doesn’t use the cloud for any of your photos.

Other aspects of AI infusing into your Samsung is more Machine Learning stuff than generative AI. It can predict your habits and schedules and optimise battery and other stuff for you which it’s been doing since a long time.

If you want to see the full use of generative AI in Gallery app on the Samsung S25+, watch the Reel below.

 

 

 

 

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A post shared by Khumail Thakur (@khumailthakur)

It’s a bit boring isn’t it? The Samsung Galaxy S25+ is without a doubt a fuss-free smartphone. It’s easy to use and packs plenty of tech. It never really veers into anything extra but offers a good mix of premium hardware coupled with the latest software. It’s the best Android smartphone currently, one that doesn’t compromise on anything and delivers almost the perfect smartphone experience.

The S25+ is an easy to recommend Android smartphone for anyone, be it casual or power users, the Galaxy S25+ will be enough.