Tantra Analyst

Samsung announced its latest flagship Galaxy S25 series phones at the Unpacked event in San Jose, CA, on Jan 22nd, 2025. I was one of the lucky ones to get a Galaxy S25 Ultra to review. It is an attractive-looking phone with excellent hardware and performance, a slew of useful Agentic Gen AI features usable now, and whose utility will expand and improve over the device’s lifetime.

With extremely attractive discounts and trade-ins, performance, and AI features, the Galaxy S25 phones offer exceptional value compared to equivalent iPhones, making them a no-brainer buy.

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Excellent hardware and performance

First, let’s get the more straightforward part out of the way—the hardware. My views are about Galaxy S25 Ultra, but they should also apply to the other phones in the series with the same specs and features.

I like this first redesign of the Ultra line-up, especially the sharp edges and the slightly textured sides, which give a good grip. Combining that with the titanium body, which makes the phone thin and light, and the rugged Corning Gorilla Armor 2 glass display, dare I say, you could use this phone without a case. The low-glare and bright display (2,600 nits) make the phone highly usable in bright outdoors, especially when reading text.

The new 50MP ultra-wide camera is a nice touch to the Ultra line-up’s already excellent quad-camera system, whose pictures I have always admired. The enhancements to Nitography make low-light videos with moving objects less noisy. Samsung Log features make colors look more real, and the virtual aperture supported in Expert RAW mode gives more control and makes the pictures pro-like. Frankly, I am not a pro photographer. Hence, I didn’t play with them much. But all these features greatly benefit a burgeoning group of freelancing content creators and influences.

I am impressed with the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s long battery life. This is my first truly multi-day battery-life phone. So far, I have only charged it on alternate days/nights and have moved away from the nightly charging routine. We will see how long that goes.     

The phone’s excellent performance is primarily due to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy SoC. Unlike in previous years, Qualcomm has done many Samsung-exclusive hardware and software customizations to this chip (be on the lookout for my Tantra’s Mantra podcast on this). Again, unlike previous generations, the SoC utilizes Qualcomm’s custom cores based on Nuvia microarchitecture design. It boasts a 37% CPU, 30% GPU, and 40% NPU performance increase over its predecessor, which shows up in the phone’s snappy experience, long battery life, and Gen AI features.   

Galaxy AI – Real use cases now, even more and better later

After much talk about Gen AI on devices, we finally have a phone with real-life use cases that benefit most users. Galaxy AI supports Agentic Gen AI, where users interact with “Agents” instead of apps. These agents work across many apps to execute complex, multi-step functions. Adding natural language capabilities to the mix, Agentic AI has the potential to fundamentally upend smartphones’ User Interface (UI) paradigm. Galaxy S25 gives an early flavor of that.

On the back end, Galaxy AI blends Google’s Gemini cloud-based AI models with Samsung’s Personal Data Engine (PDE) device-based models. On the front end, it weaves together Gemini Live, One UI7, and Bixby to create a relatively smooth user experience, hiding all the complexity.

Let’s look at some of these key Galaxy AI features:

Gemini Live: This is the most visible and will probably be the most used Galaxy AI feature. It is activated, by default, by a “long press” of the phone’s side button. The feature works as a voice assistant for complex multi-step agentic functions I mentioned above (along with traditional internet search). I tested the feature quite a bit. Here are a few things I did: Searching my mailbox to find the email with my friend’s address in it, looking for directions and sending them to Google Maps; Sending text messages to many people on my contact list; Opening a specific page from a file in Google Docs; Opening various settings or apps on the phones and more. All this is done just with voice prompts on Gemini Live without going to any apps.

Similarly, with Gemini Live, I could interact live with YouTube videos playing on the phone or images displayed on the phone. I could ask questions about videos or pictures being displayed, create a summary of a long YouTube video without entirely watching it, even hum a tune to search for relevant videos on YouTube, etc. Gemini uses hybrid AI with a mix of cloud and device-based processing.

With Gemini Live, possibilities are endless. However, not all of them are yet possible. Its agentic interaction within Google Apps is the best. For now, it can only open other apps but not interact with them. Hopefully, that will be coming soon.

Now Bar: I call this a passive personal assistant. On the locked screen, it shows your most important, timely, and relevant updates. For example, reminders for an upcoming flight, live scores from big games, forthcoming appointments, etc., all without opening apps.

Now Briefs: These are also passive assistants; they are personalized updates and actionable insights that show up on the main screen throughout the day. They updated a few times a day for me with titles like Good Morning, Morning Brief, Good Day, Tonight’s Brief, Late Night Recap, etc.  Typically, the Morning Briefs include a snapshot of your sleep, weather forecast, top news headlines, your schedule for the day, and important reminders such as birthdays, anniversaries, etc. The Evening Briefs include a review of key activities from the day, photos you took, upcoming travel plans, a wrap-up of the day, reminders for the next day, etc. In my briefs, only a few of these elements showed up, not all of them. I assume these can become richer, more informative, and smarter as we move forward.

Both Now Bar and Now Briefs seem to run on the phone and only fetch information from outside without sending data out of the phone. Currently, you can only select the apps considered for these features, but there is no option to configure what to include, from what sources, etc. Presumably, that will be available in the future.

Photo Gallery Search: If you are like me, who takes tons of pictures, never catalogs them, and vaguely remembers what they contain, this feature is for you. It is integrated into the Samsung Gallery app and activated by voice prompt or typing. You can ask this to search for any content in Samsung Gallery. You can ask to find pictures or videos with specific people, animals, or objects, or from a particular day, event, or almost anything distinct and identifiable. The prompt also allows enough words for the search string. Since I have many pictures on the phone, I had a lot of fun running the queries. Again, the possibilities are limitless. But not all of them are available yet. I am sure that will improve as time progresses. Gallery Search also runs only on the device, with no data leaving the phone.

Since you must use the app’s search function for this, that might create some confusion with Gemini Live, which uses a long press on the side button.  

Modes and Routines: These allow you to change the phone’s settings to suit your context and automate your routines. They were supported on earlier Galaxy phones. However, because of Agentic AI capabilities, they can be significantly improved and almost become ambient actions on the Galaxy S25 series. They could also utilize other Samsung devices, sensors, wearables, and others connected through Smart Things for even better context-based action determination. I am still studying these, and they seem to have a lot of promise. I will probably write a separate article on this.

In addition to the above, there are Audio Erase and Noise Cancellation features, as well as improved versions of existing Gen AI features such as Circle to Search, Generative Edit, Drawing Assist, and others. Like previous phones, there is a master switch to restrict the processing of AI data only on the device.

In closing

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is an excellent flagship smartphone. Thanks to the customized Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, it has stellar hardware and outstanding performance. Some basic Gen AI features are easy to use now, while others might have a slight learning curve. But the beauty of Gen AI is that it can learn user behavior over time and adapt to it. Suffice it to say there is a vast scope for personalization and adaptability during the device’s lifetime.

Samsung and its carrier partners are offering very generous discounts and trade-in offers for new Galaxy S25 Series phones. Utilizing those offers, you could buy these for just a few hundred dollars, which is exceptional value. That’s why I am saying it is a no-brainer buy.

Prakash Sangam is the founder and principal at Tantra Analyst, a leading boutique research and advisory firm. He is a recognized expert in 5G, Wi-Fi, AI, Cloud and IoT. To read articles like this and get an up-to-date analysis of the latest mobile and tech industry news, sign-up for our monthly newsletter at TantraAnalyst.com/Newsletter, or listen to our Tantra’s Mantra podcast.