Samsung launched the Galaxy S25 smartphone last month. This has the same 6.2-inch 120Hz LTPO panel, similar camera and the same 4000mAh battery, but gets the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip, more RAM, rings around the camera moudle, and a much sleeker design. Even though it is minor, is this a good upgrade to the Galaxy S24? Let us dive into the review to find out.
| Box Contents |
| Camera |
| Battery Life |
| Conclusion |
Box Contents
- Samsung Galaxy S25 12GB RAM, 256GB storage version in Silver Shadow
colour - USB Type-C to C Cable
- SIM ejector tool
- Quick Start Guide and Warranty information
Display, Hardware and Design
The phone comes with a 6.2-inch Full HD+ Infinity-O Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels at about 415PPI, aspect ratio of 20:9. The display is bright, thanks to 2600 nits peak brightness.
It offers good color reproduction and the sunlight legibility is good as well. The screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2, same as the older models. There are minimal symmetrical bezels around the screen.
It has a 120Hz refresh rate screen that offers a fluid user experience with smoother animations, scrolling and gaming. It uses an LTPO panel for 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate so it can save power, especially if are using AOD. In the gaming mode, it offers 240Hz touch sampling rate.
The phone doesn’t have DC dimming, PWM dimming or any other low brightness anti-flicker mode that is present in some AMOLED screen phones in the price range. I didn’t notice any screen flicker issues in low brightness on the phone. It doesn’t have notification LED, but there is Always on display.
On the top, there is a 12-megapixel camera in the tiny punch-hole that we had seen in the S23 and the S24. The earpiece is present on the top edge that doubles up as a secondary speaker. The punch-hole is small and it is not intrusive.
There is a small bezel below the screen. The phone has an in-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor from Qualcomm that is present towards the middle.
The phone retains the Armor Aluminum frame that has a matte finish. This offers a good grip, and the phone doesn’t slip out of your hands. You can see the antenna bands all around. Coming to the button placements, the power button and the volume rockers are present on the right side. There is nothing on the left side. The dual SIM slot USB Type-C port and the loudspeaker grill are on the bottom. The secondary microphone is on the top.
On the back there is a familiar triple camera module arranged in a single line, but there is a new camera ring. There is a single LED flash next to the module. Even though the phone has a 6.2-inch screen, it is compact to hold. It is 7.2mm thick, making it 0.4mm thinner, and weighs just 167 grams, making it 4g lighter, even though there is no change in the screen or battery size.
In addition to the Silver Shadow colour variant that we have, the phone also comes in Navy, Icyblue, and Mint colours in India. There is also online-exclusive Blueblack, Coralred and Pinkgold colours. This comes with dust and water-resistant in freshwater to a depth of 1.5 meter for up to 30 minutes, with IP68 certification.
Camera
- 50MP main camera with LED Flash, 1/1.57″ Samsung S5KGN3 sensor, f/1.8 aperture, OIS
- 12MP 120° 1/2.55″ Sony IMX564 Ultra Wide sensor, f/2.2 aperture
- 10MP Telephoto lens with 1/3.94″ Samsung S5K3K1 sensor, f/2.4 aperture, 3x optical zoom, OIS
- 12MP front camera with 1/3.2″ Samsung S5K3LU sensor, f/2.2 aperture
There are no changes in the camera sensors compared to the S24. However, you can see changes in the UI. You can choose 50MP option from the aspect ratio settings on the top, and the default output is 12MP instead of 12.5MP after pixel binning. It also has AR stickers, scene optimizer, portrait video, director’s view, hyperlapse and more modes. The Expert RAW mode is now present in the camera app instead of a separate app.
Coming to the image quality, daylight shots are brilliant, and it captures in 12MP resolution after pixel binning. The camera captures a good amount of detail, creates well exposed photos with good dynamic range and detailing, and dynamic range can further be improved enabling HDR mode from the settings, which automatically turns on HDR when needed. Apart from the 3x telephoto zoom camera, the standard digital zoom is also good. The 10x and 20x zoomed photos are good. Autofocus speeds are fast and accurate. Ultra-wide shots from the 12MP camera are good.
There is no macro mode or camera, but you can use 2x from the main camera or use 3x telephoto for close-ups, which is good. Live focus is good at detecting the edges. Low-light performance is good, which can be improved further with Night mode that offers more details. Images with flash is good and is not overpowering.
The 12-megapixel front camera is good, capturing brilliant shots. Wide-angle mode takes images in 12-megapixel resolution, while the normal mode takes images in 8.6-megapixel. Software blur in the live focus mode has good edge detection even in low light. Overall, there are not much changes in the camera quality from the predecessor, even though there is change in the ISP.
Check out the camera samples.
The S25 offers 8K video recording at 30 fps. There is 4K UHD video recording at 60 fps, Super Steady 1080p video at 60 fps, Super Slo-mo 720p video support at 960 fps, slow motion 1080p video support at 240 fps and Hyperlapse 4K video support at 30 fps.
The normal stabilization works with both ultra-wide and main camera, but only the main camera has OIS. You can switch between normal, ultra-wide telephoto and front cameras when video recording is in progress, but only in 4K 30fps or less. There is also HDR10+ recording that is enabled by default, and it supports up to 4K 60 fps.
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the phone runs on Android 15, and it still has December 2024 Android security patch, but we can expect an update soon. Similar to the Galaxy S24 series, this will also get seven generations of OS upgrades and seven years of security updates.
On the top of Android 15, it has the latest Samsung One UI 7 with changes in the UI, multimodal AI agents can interpret text, speech, images, and videos in Gemini. Upgrades to Google’s Circle to Search feature allow for one-tap actions on recognized phone numbers, emails, and URLs. You also get audio eraser that lets you remove external noise from videos. Gallery has Generative edit, Skwtch to image and more.
The devices also facilitate actionable searches with context-aware suggestions and seamless app switching for quick follow-up actions. Natural language understanding is improved, enabling intuitive interactions for tasks like finding photos or adjusting settings.
Galaxy AI tools for communication, productivity, and creativity have been expanded. It still has features like Call Transcript, Writing Assist, and Drawing Assist to offer enhanced functionality and ease of use. There are Now Brief & Now Bar that proactively offers suggestions based on analyzed data, accessible on the lock screen. All the Galaxy S25 series devices will come with 6 months of Gemini Advanced and 2TB of cloud storage at no extra cost, said Samsung.
The Device maintenance option lets you manage your device’s battery life, storage, RAM usage, and security all in one place. It still comes only in 256GB and 512GB options in India with UFS 4.0 storage. The 256GB model which we have has 224GB free space. However, the RAM has been upgraded to 12GB. Out of 12GB LPDDR5X RAM, about 10.86GB is usable and 4.5GB is free when default apps are running in the background.
There is also a RAM Plus feature, which uses the internal memory of the phone to expand the RAM by an extra 8GB, in addition to the existing 12GB of RAM. This is enabled automatically, but can be disabled.
Apart from the usual set of utility apps and Google Apps, the smartphone comes with Facebook, Netflix, Spotify and Microsoft apps – Microsoft 365 Copilot, OneDrive, LinkedIn and Outlook. You get the option to install apps when you are setting up the phone, which you can choose not to. The phone doesn’t have ads, but shows notifications of new Samsung products occasionally.
Fingerprint sensor and Face unlock
The phone has Qualcomm’s in-display Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor Gen 2 (QFS4008), same as the predecessor. This uses acoustic-based technology that reflects the unique features of a user’s individual fingerprint and is engineered to allow the device to detect a larger fingerprint image than the normal optical sensor.
You can add up to 4 fingerprints, and adding fingerprint is easy. It has support for Face recognition, which doesn’t work well if the lighting is poor in the room, if you use hats or sunglasses. Both these are protected by Knox security.
Music Player and Multimedia
YouTube Music is the default music player. It has equalizer, Dolby Atmos, UHQ upscaler, and Adapt that can be enabled from the settings. All these improve the audio when listening through earphones, and Dolby Atmos also works with speakers. It doesn’t have FM Radio support. That said, audio through earphones is good. Loudspeaker output from the stereo speakers is good, but the S25+ and Ultra models have louder speakers.
The phone comes with Widevine L1 support out-of-the-box so that you can enjoy HD content on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming apps. There is also HDR playback support for Netflix and YouTube.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The Galaxy S25 has support for 5G SA, with support for several 5G Network Bands in India. Airtel and Jio 5G works out of the box. There is also 4G Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and support for LTE-A or Carrier Aggregation. The Samsung dialer, similar to other Samsung phones, supports auto call recording.
Other connectivity options include, Wi-Fi 7 802.11 be, Wi-Fi-Calling or Vo-Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3 and GPS with GLONASS. It has support for USB OTG and NFC that works with supported payment apps. This lacks UWB, which are present in S25+ and S25 Ultra models.
The Galaxy S25’s head SAR is at 0.956/Kg which well under the limit in India which is 1.6 W/kg (over 1 g). This is less than the Galaxy S24.
Performance and Benchmarks
Samsung is back to using Snapdragon chips for all the models instead of Exynos. This has Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset which as new 2 + 6 all-big core architecture that uses 2 x Oryon Prime CPU at up to 4.47GHz compared to 4.32GHz in the standard 8 Elite, and has 6 x Oryon Performance CPUs at up to 3.53GHz.
It is fabricated using the TSMC 3nm Process Technology. It promises 37% CPU performance improvements and 30% GPU performance improvements compared to the predecessor. The phone has a larger VC compared to the S24 according to the teardown, but Samsung did not reveal how big it is.
We did not face any issues or frame drops in the graphic-intensive games like COD, BGMI and Genshin Impact. However, there is thermal throttling when gaming, which is common in compact phones. The phone reached maximum 45º in our testing indoors in Wi-Fi, but this might vary outdoors in 5G. In 3D Mark wild life stress test, it scored 44%, which is less than other flagships with the 8 Elite chip. Temperature shot up from 35 to 46 degrees.
That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
As you can see, the scores are better than last year’s Exynos 2400, but it is less in AnTuTu and Geekbench 6 Single-Core scores for other Snapdragon 8 Elite-powered phones.
Battery life
Coming to the battery life, the phone packs a 4000mAh (typical) built-in battery, same as the S24. It lasts for a whole day with 5G, dual SIMs, and heavy use. I got about 5 and half hours of screen on time with close to two days of use with mostly on Wi-Fi, and occasional 5G use in 120Hz, which is good.
It still has 25W fast charging compared to 45W in the S25+ and the S25 Ultra. It takes just over an hour to charge the phone fully using a 25W charger, and 0 to 50% takes about 25 minutes. Most competitors have a bigger battery that can charge in less than half the time. It still has 15W wireless charging and reverse wireless charging.
Conclusion
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S25 is once again a minor upgrade, yet another refinement to the predecessor with the major change being the SoC, and more RAM for the AI features. Wish the company had added the UWB in the S25 as well, and improved the charging speed, which was the same thing that the S24 lacked. This time the price has also increased a bit even though the hardware has not changed much.
Alternatives
The Google Pixel 9 is a good alternative in the similar range, but it lacks a telephoto camera. The iPhone 16 should also be a good alternative.
Availability
The Samsung Galaxy S25 12GB + 256 GB model is priced at Rs. 80,999 and the 12GB + 512GB model is priced at Rs. 92,999. It is available from Samsung online store, Amazon.in, and other online and offline stores.
Pros
- Excellent 120Hz LTPO AMOLED display
- Compact, light-weight body
- Smooth performance
- 7 years OS and security updates
- Dependable cameras
- Impressive battery life
Cons
- Still no UltraWideBand (UWB) support
- Still limited to 25W charging