Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Pocket rocket

Crazy as it may sound to call a phone with a 6.2-inch display compact, it's the best choice you have today. There’s a touch of sameness in Samsung’s design if you’ve seen last year’s flagship S24, even as the S25 is a touch smaller, thinner and lighter—then again if you’re using an S24, the incremental nature of upgrades and plain ol’ common sense should mean you should hold on to your still-excellent phone for another couple of years. 

Design language

For everyone else, consider this—the S25 measures 146.9 x 70.5 x 7.2 mm and weighs just 162 grams, which doesn’t quite convey how much thinner and lighter it feels compared to the iPhone 16 or the Pixel, both of which are larger in every dimension and weigh more. The sharp flat side rails that occasionally dug into the palms on the heavier S25 Ultra aren’t an issue on the much lighter S25, and it’s small enough to hold in one hand without having to constant readjust your grip, while practically disappearing equally easily into tighter jeans pockets. It’s a likeable design in a world obsessed with large glass-metal slabs. You still get the same IP68-rating for dust and water resistance, Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protecting the front and back, and the new pronounced lens covers that now unify the Galaxy S and Z foldable series. As with the S25+, the S25 skips the titanium frame and the anti-reflective Gorilla Armor that remains exclusive to the S25 Ultra.

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Around the front, razor thin bezels surround the 6.2-inch Dynamic AMOLED display, which offers a 1Hz-120Hz variable refresh rate and HDR10+ content support. You get an adequately sharp (given the screen size), full HD+ resolution (1080x2340 pixels), which means the fancy tech that upscales lower-quality content on the Plus and Ultra models isn’t available on the base model. It’s a stunning display, color, contrast and details wise, but the maximum brightness leaves a bit to be desired, particularly when used outdoors. Coupled with the speakers that offer good clarity and bass, watching streaming content on the S25 is surprisingly good despite its somewhat diminutive size. Of course, it’s not ideal for poring over spreadsheets—a bigger screen like the S25+ is far better.

Nuts and bolts

Every model in the Galaxy S25 lineup worldwide uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset in its boosted ‘for Galaxy’ avatar, and all models share the same 12GB of memory and start with 256GB of storage. Expectedly, there’s a big boost in performance, as with most 8 Elite phones we’ve seen, and aided no doubt by a 15% larger vapor chamber that helps regulate interior temperatures for better sustained performance. The S25 runs One UI 7 just as fast as its Ultra brethren and other phones with the 8 Elite – realistically, flagship phones have been really fast for a while now, fast enough for most folks to not be able to discern the difference. More importantly, the performance headroom will aid the longevity of the device which, along with the inclusion of the latest Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 standards, lends credence to the seven-year software support promise that Samsung is making.

AI is really where the story is at, and Samsung has doubled down after its head start with the S24 lineup’s Galaxy AI to further the number of useful AI use cases on the S25 lineup. The best bit is that unlike the first wave of AI— helping you write or summarize text—AI is far more useful in the S25 series, enabled no doubt by a strong collaboration between Samsung and Google. 

Over the span of using the S25, I often found myself leaning on Gemini to interact with Samsung and Google applications at launch. I could, for instance, ask it to search for a specific settings option (Bluetooth, screen visibility) by just talking to it, or rather than just asking it trivia questions, I could now ask it to add events to my calendars and send messages—all as the output of a query I had posed Gemini in the same utterance. “Send Sidharth a message with the list of Chinese restaurants nearby" is actually a thing now, and while it’s not flawless, it’s a compelling reason to continue using Galaxy AI for that a-ha moment when consumer conversational AI finally comes of age. 

Elsewhere, there’s the new Now Brief feature, which uses AI to give you a quick summary depending on the time of day, helpfully including stuff like weather information, calendar events, activity counts and more. Right now, what impressed the most was the AI Select, which can not only look at your screen and search the web for content on your screen or translate content but also reimagine your screenshot with AI-erasers and AI-enhanced object addition. Or the Audio Eraser feature, for that matter, that uses AI to remove wind or traffic noise from your videos.

Charging point

The bit that baffles me is Samsung’s choices when it comes to batteries, particularly when the competition is packing in large, high-density 6000mAh batteries. With the S25, you get the same 4000mAh battery as the S24, and it charges painfully slow at 25W wired and 15W wireless. Battery life is not for the extreme endurance types—you can use it conservatively past a day or about 6 hours of screen-time if you don’t tax the device much. You can use an optional case with internal magnets if you want to leverage the built-in Qi2.1 charging support and use it with MagSafe accessories, but it feels like a step back to use a case on a phone this compact.

On camera 

The camera hardware hasn’t seen much change either, with Samsung reusing the same setup as it has existed for the past couple of years—a 50MP main sensor, a 12MP ultrawide with a 120-degree field of view, and a 12MP, telephoto lens with 3x optical zoom. Including a telephoto with actual optical zoom (and none of that sensor crop 2x zoom) is a good move, but the hardware shows its age. Samsung has boosted performance with improvements in computational photography and the image signal processor advances with the 8 Elite, which show up in better details and reduced shutter lag as well. Overall, you’re not buying the S25 for the camera system, but it’s no pushover either, besting the likes of the OnePlus 13 in both color accuracy and in delivering more natural looking low-light images.

About the S25+

Aside from the larger 6.7-inch display, 4900mAH battery and 190g weight, there’s little to tell the S25+ (Rs. 99,999) from its base S25 model. The size does bring benefits in media consumption – the full 3120×1440 pixel resolution does put it ahead of the Ultra for pixel density, plus it gets the ProScaler tech for added details using machine learning. It also gets slightly better battery life than the base model, plus 45W wired charging speeds which aren’t stellar but certainly better than the S25. Even so, the phone remains a bit of a hard sell, with far more rivals at the increased price point, and sans the form factor benefits that the S25 has going for it.

Verdict

Sticking to the tried-and-tested formula with the S25/S25+ and adding a dash of AI has allowed Samsung to keep loyalists happy, particularly those upgrading from 3–4-year-old Samsung flagships. In that respect, the S25 is in a party of one in its appeal for a section of the audience that has the money to spend but doesn’t want to spend it on an ungainly large phone. One does wish Samsung had paid more attention to a few areas – cameras and battery – to give its base model more of a fighting chance.

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