Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, S25+ and S25 hands-on review

One UI 7.0 and Galaxy AI

There’s been extensive coverage of One UI 7.0 since the first beta release, so if you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’re likely familiar with the interface updates. However, the new AI features have remained largely under wraps so far.

The Galaxy S25 devices are the first to come out with the new OneUI 7.0. The UI now has a more modern and simplified look while still focusing on AI and personalization.

The handsets will get 7 major Android updates and 7 years of security updates.

Perhaps the most significant new addition is system-wide support for natural language input, enabling features like AI Agents, AI Select, additional Circle to search functionalities, Gallery control and Cross-app Actions.

Starting with AI Select, it's an expanded feature built on the Smart Select functionality, which has been residing in the Side Bar of your Samsung smartphone for a while now. The AI can now analyze the screen's content in more detail and offer actions based on it. It can even create GIFs from Instagram reels or make wallpaper using a photo you have open on the screen.

The Circle to search, which is a very similar feature, can now analyze not just the screen content but listen to an audio that's currently playing and provide information about the music track.

The natural language input allows you to control certain phone aspects. For instance, you can voice search your Gallery and ask the AI assistant to pull out photos from your trip to a particular place. You can even ask it to enlarge the font if it's too small, although this is likely a limited feature to system menus only.

The Cross-app Action is arguably the most exciting feature of them all. Imagine you have a virtual concierge or personal assistant. You can ask it to search for a restaurant nearby, find it on Google Maps and share its location with a friend. You can make notes on the fly, make calls, save calendar events and set up an alarm clock at the appropriate time.

This is quite impressive as the system is now seemingly capable of more complex tasks involving changing system settings and interacting with multiple apps, and all of that works with natural language input.

For now, the feature is available only with Samsung One UI system apps and Google apps, but Samsung promises to introduce support for third-party apps, including WhatsApp and Spotify to name a few.

Some personalized AI features are also at hand, such as Now Brief and Now Bar. The Now Brief offers a summary of your daily schedule. For example, in the morning, it will summarize your last night's sleep, give you a quick brief look at your daily appointments and even let you know whether your favorite podcasters or artists have released new content. It will also come up at noon and in the evening to help you keep on top of things.

The Now Bar has a similar concept, except that it lives on your lockscreen and focuses on current apps and events. It will provide contextual information like what song you are playing, turn-by-turn directions from Google Maps with a suggested departure time so you are not late for your meeting and even keep up to date with live score updates on your favorite sports team.

With all these powerful AI features, the phone collects a lot of personal data, which is then used to improve your experience. Not all of the number-crunching is done in the cloud. So, it's only natural to wonder whether your data is safe. Samsung guarantees the safety of your information using Samsung Knox Matrix and Vault. All the personal information and preferences are stored on the device and encrypted with quantum computing standards in mind.

One UI 7.0

As far as the UI redesign goes, it's fairly subtle. The iconography has changed, so icons are now more 3D-like. You can now hide the labels of apps and widgets placed on your home screen too.

The Quick toggles panel (swipe from the top right) has been separated from the Notifications panel (swipe from the top left) and you get a redesigned Toggles area.

Performance and benchmarks

As we already pointed out, the Snapdragon 8 Elite inside all three Galaxies is no ordinary version. It's a "Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy", meaning the two prime cores are clocked higher (4.47 GHz vs. 4.32 GHz), and the Adreno 830 GPU runs at higher clock speeds. Interestingly, Samsung mentions improvements in the NPU as well, but we don't have the details now.

Here are the first benchmark results we got, but bear in mind we are still dealing with pre-production firmware here.