Samsung Galaxy S25 review

Display

The Galaxy S25 has an identical display to the Galaxy S24 - a 6.2-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel with 1,080 x 2,300 pixels, up to 120Hz refresh rate, and HDR10+ support.

The screen has a small punch hole and is shielded with a Gorilla Glass Victus 2 sheet.

According to Samsung, the maximum peak brightness is also unchanged since last year - 2,600 nits.

Well, our display measurements unfortunately confirmed that there are no surprises, and nothing has changed since the Galaxy S24.

The maximum brightness when controlling it manually was 438 nits without boost and 747 nits with the extra brightness boost. This is slightly lower than the Galaxy S24 and S23 screens.

The maximum automatic brightness we captured on the Galaxy S25 was 1,395 nits, about the same as on the Galaxy S24 and higher than the Galaxy S23.

The minimum brightness at point white was 1 nit, which is great.

The Galaxy S25 offers two refresh rate modes - Adaptive and Standard. Do not let these descriptions fool you, as, in fact, both modes are adaptive and will continuously switch refresh rates, but only the Adaptive one maxes out at 120Hz, while Standard is limited to 60Hz.

The Adaptive mode is, well, more adaptive by trying to better match Hz to the fps of the currently playing videos, while Standard will fix the refresh rate at either 30Hz or 60Hz for most videos.

The screen drops to the minimum of 1Hz for static content, no matter the mode. And it will work at 120Hz in compatible games.

Finally, the small Galaxy S25 supports HDR10 and HDR10+ - no Dolby Vision video here, as usual. YouTube served us HDR streams and so did Netflix, in FullHD too, thanks to the Widevine L1 compliance.

The Galaxy S25 also supports the Android Ultra HDR standard and will boost highlights for metadata-enhanced photos taken on it, or on other standard-abiding handsets. It works in the in-house Gallery, as well as Google Photos and Chrome.

Battery life

The Samsung Galaxy S25 draws power from the same 4,000 mAh battery as last year and uses the same 6.2-inch OLED display. The only change from a hardware perspective is the chipset, now supposedly with a more efficient Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy. And, of course, One UI 7.0 software, which is also touted as more efficient too.

However, battery life as we measure it hasn't changed much. The video playback runtime is pretty solid and so is the call runtime, but the web browsing score leaves more to be desired. With an Active Use Score of 12:21h, the Galaxy S25 is far from impressive, but it's not too far from the average in its price and size class.

Charging speed

There's no change in the charging protocol coming from the Galaxy S24, or the S23, or the S22 for that matter. You get a maximum of 25W using a compatible Power Delivery 3.0 charger with PPS.

The wireless charging is still 15W, but Samsung updated it to be Qi 2.1 ready, which means you get support for magnetic wireless charging accessories, but there are no magnets inside the phone (hence the Ready part) so to use the feature you need a case that has magnets built-in.

Compared to other smartphones on the market that are not Pixels and iPhones, the Galaxy S25 is extremely slow to charge, taking well over 1 hour to top up the battery.

Speakers

The Galaxy S24 features a hybrid stereo speaker setup, with one speaker positioned at the bottom and the earpiece serving as the second. In typical fashion for hybrid pairs, the earpiece outputs quieter sound emphasizing high and mid-range frequencies, while the bottom speaker delivers rich bass along with clear vocals.

According to our tests, the S25's speakers are a bit quieter than the S24, now achieving a Good -26.1 LUFS loudness score.

We were also able to distinguish some changes in how the Galaxy S25 speakers sound now compared to the S24. We like this year's tuning better, as Samsung brought out more bass. As a result, music tracks sound deeper and fuller than before, but without muffling the mids and highs. Vocals are still very prominent, but the overall sound is richer.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.