Samsung Galaxy S25 review: A compact flagship that just about maintains its edge

It’s not unusual to experience a sense of deja vu when you’ve been reviewing smartphones for more than a dozen years but even with that in mind, the Galaxy S25 has given me several Matrix moments over the past week or so. There’s no getting away from it: Samsung’s latest compact flagship smartphone is incredibly similar to the Galaxy S24.

This is real spot the difference stuff, with the company’s hardware team seemingly treading water while it places all its eggs in the AI software basket. Or at least, that’s how it seems at first. When you get down to it though, the Galaxy S25 is a better phone than the Galaxy S24 in a couple of key ways, none of which have anything to do with AI.

Samsung Galaxy S25 review: What you need to know

As familiar as the Galaxy S25 looks and feels, it remains one of the best-equipped and best value compact flagship phones on the market. 

It’s powered by the same Snapdragon 8 Elite chip as the Galaxy S25 Ultra, together with the same 12GB of RAM. From a pure performance standpoint, the wider Galaxy S range has rarely been so consistent. It also runs on a 4,000mAh battery, with 25W wired and 15W wireless charging support.

Fronting the phone is a 6.2in Full HD+ (2,340 x 1,080) AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, which will look very familiar to any Galaxy S24 owners out there. So too will the Galaxy S25’s triple camera set-up, which is once again led by a 50-megapixel main camera, with backup from a 12-megapixel 120-degree ultrawide and a 10-megapixel 3x optical telephoto.

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Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Price and competition

Samsung has held steady on the Galaxy S25’s pricing, with the 128GB model costing the same £799 as the Galaxy S24 did at launch. The step-up 256GB model costs £859, which is a negligible £10 increase over its predecessor. New to the range for 2025 is a 512GB storage option, which costs £959.

This remains a competitive price for the kind of compact flagship package that’s being offered. It’s the same starting price as the Pixel 9 and the iPhone 16, for example, neither of which include a dedicated telephoto camera. Levelling up to the Google Pixel 9 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro (complete with telephoto cameras) will cost you £999.

If you want something similar to the Galaxy S25, but with a larger display and battery, then the Galaxy S25 Plus will set you back £999 with 256GB of storage. Alternatively, the OnePlus 13 is offering arguably the best flagship value right now at £899.

Perhaps the biggest threat to the Galaxy S25, however, could be the Galaxy S24. It’s just £699 at Samsung right now and gives you much the same experience for significantly less money.

Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Design and key features

If we were simply tracking the changes between Samsung models year on year, there would be very little to note in the Galaxy S25’s design column. It’s almost identical to the Galaxy S24, with the same spartan iPhone-derived shape.

This is as unassuming as flagship phones get, with a low key frosted glass finish to the rear. Even the reflective Samsung logo is all but invisible from many angles. The three distinct camera modules each have a darker surround, with a rim that reflects the colour of the body, but that’s about it for design changes.

My model comes in the slightly drab Icyblue colourway but there’s also a handsome-looking Navy option, Silver Shadow and Mint available at all retailers. An online-only Coralred model provides an extra shot of colour, meanwhile, alongside fellow Samsung.com exclusives Blueblack and Pinkgold.

Arguably the main advance here is an even lighter weight of 162g, which is 5g lighter than before, from an even slimmer 7.2mm body. This makes the Galaxy S25 one of the easiest-to-live-with flagship phones on the market. It doesn’t feel cheap or flimsy either, with an Armor aluminum 2 frame, Gorilla Glass Victus 2 to the front and rear and IP68 dust and water resistance.

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Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Display

Samsung appears to have used exactly the same 6.2in OLED display as the Galaxy S24, with an identical 1080 x 2340 (FHD+) resolution and the same 120Hz refresh rate.

Brightness hasn’t been touched but, with a stated peak of 2600 nits, it arguably didn’t need to be. That applies to a limited portion of the screen during HDR content playback. With autobrightness switched off, I recorded a maximum general brightness of about 682cd/m2. That’s actually a little lower than I recorded with the Galaxy S24 (732cd/m2) but the difference could be put down to individual units.

I wasn’t all that impressed with the Galaxy S24’s display colour accuracy and that problem persists with the Galaxy S25. Using the more restrained Natural colour profile, I recorded a 99.4% gamut coverage and a volume of 103.3%, with an average Delta E colour variance score of 2.44.

Given that we’re looking for a Delta E score close to 1, that’s a bit of a disappointment. It’s an issue we had with the Galaxy S25 Ultra, too, so it seems to be a product of Samsung’s calibration. This isn’t a bad display by any means – it’s rich, clear and vibrant – but for similar money, the Pixel 9 goes bigger and brighter while retaining better accuracy.

Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Performance and battery life

The biggest upgrade here by far is the switch to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, especially if you’re not from the US. For most of the world, the Galaxy S24 came with Samsung’s custom Exynos 2400 chip, which lagged behind the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 used in the American model.

Samsung’s use of the same chip around the globe this time is very welcome and it leads to a performance bump that’s much bigger than we’d expect from a typical yearly update.

In the regular Geekbench 6 CPU benchmark test, a single-core score of 3134 represents a 45% increase over the Exynos-powered Galaxy S24, while a multi-core score of 9800 is a 46% improvement. It’s slightly quicker than the OnePlus 13 in multi-core terms and isn’t far off the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s scores. The iPhone 16 and particularly the Pixel 9 are left trailing in its wake.

When it comes to GPU performance, the Galaxy S25 outperforms the S24 by around 37% in our GFX offscreen tests, and is broadly a match for the Galaxy S25 Ultra and the Honor Magic 7 Pro. Neither the Pixel 9 nor the iPhone 16 can get close.

Another beneficiary of this switch to a more efficient 3nm chip is the Galaxy S25’s battery life. In our usual looping video test, the phone lasted for a hugely impressive 31hrs 34mins. That’s a cool four hours longer than the Galaxy S24 and five hours longer than the Pixel 9. Not bad at all for a phone with a relatively diminutive 4000mAh battery.

In practical terms, I was able to get through a day of light to moderate usage, involving 3 hours of screen-on time, with a good 50% left in the tank. On a more intensive day, with 5 hours of screen time in an often substandard network environment, and in which I ran a bunch of benchmark tests, I still got through to bedtime with 22% left. 

It’s a shame Samsung hasn’t improved charging speeds at all. 25W wired charging is supported, though there isn’t a brick in the box. Using an appropriate Samsung laptop charger I had to hand, it took me almost an hour and a quarter to get from empty to full.

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Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Software and AI

Samsung’s pint-sized flagship runs on Android 15 out of the box, with the manufacturer’s custom OneUI 7 layered on top. I still much prefer the less fussy, more stylish stock Android found on Google’s Pixel phones, but Samsung has undoubtedly sharpened up its presentation over the years.

It can still be a bit of a headache navigating through OneUI’s Settings menu and there are lots of little annoyances that you don’t find elsewhere – things like having to download Google Wallet and set it as your default payment system, or the need to go digging for the gesture navigation option. Samsung is pretty much the only manufacturer to insist on horizontal app tray scrolling, too, and the default app ordering system is baffling. Accessing Google Password Manager never seems as intuitive as it should be, either.

On the flip side, Samsung is the only manufacturer to match Google’s stellar seven year software update promise, so props for that. But of course, Samsung isn’t particularly interested in those kinds of things any more. It’s all about AI, and the Galaxy S25 is shot through with the stuff, with varying degrees of effect.

The Now Brief is the most obvious new AI-driven feature here. Whether from the lock screen or the new Home screen widget, this supplies a bespoke summary of upcoming appointments, weather forecasts, sleep tracking data and the like. That’s the idea, anyway. As someone who isn’t particularly wedded to Samsung’s ecosystem, all I ever get is a weather report and my next calendar appointment. It’s presented neatly enough but I doubt I’ll miss it when I move on to a non-Samsung phone.

Elsewhere, Samsung’s AI image editing tools appear to be getting better. Removing an errant boat from the background of a selfie, for example, saw the circle-to-select tool quickly and accurately tracing the outline of the object, and said object then being removed and smoothed over very convincingly indeed.

Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Cameras

Samsung hasn’t done much with the Galaxy S25’s camera hardware. It’s the same set-up as the Galaxy S24 and the Galaxy S23, with a 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main camera, a 12-megapixel (f/2.2) 120-degree ultrawide, and a 10-megapixel (f/2.4) 3x telephoto camera.

It’s a shame that there’s nothing new to note here, though it must be restated that Samsung is the only company to offer a compact flagship phone with a dedicated telephoto camera for less than £800. It’s now a fairly old trick but it remains a good one.

Unsurprisingly, the quality of these zoomed shots is a key strength for this phone, at least compared to the Pixel 9 and the iPhone 16, both of which must crop in on the main sensor to achieve something approximating 3x results. 

You can go beyond that here, right up to 20x or even 30x, but you’re probably best drawing the line at 10x. At lower zoom levels, the Galaxy S25 captures sharp, balanced shots in line with the tone of the main sensor. 

That tone remains a very distinctive Samsung one, with vibrant colours that aren’t exactly what we’d call natural, but which stop just shy of looking distractingly weird. Contrast and dynamic range are decent, with just the odd hint of overexposure on a couple of unseasonably sunny days. 

Night shots continue to be a bit of a weak point relative to the competition. The Galaxy S25 does a decent job at brightening dark scenes, but I spotted a fair amount of noise in some of the skies.

The ultra-wide is clearly weaker than the other two sensors, with inferior levels of contrast and detail, but Samsung’s even colour science at least makes for a reasonably consistent shooting experience. 

The 12-megapixel front camera remains a highlight, with dual pixel autofocus providing crisp, locked-on selfies and rich skin tones in close up or slightly wider focal lengths. Portrait shots are strong across the board, with a satisfyingly artistic separation between subject and background.

Video capture extends to 8K at 30fps or 4K at 60fps. Shooting using the latter produced crisp, stable shots, and you can switch between focal lengths whilst filming with impressive fluidity.

Samsung Galaxy S25 review: Verdict

If you like your phones to be equal parts compact and capable, there still isn’t anything quite like the Samsung Galaxy S25. By today’s standards it feels downright tiny in the hand, yet it packs an outsized level of performance and stamina.

Unlike Apple and Google, Samsung continues to insist that a dedicated telephoto camera should be a baseline flagship specification and, while it would have been nice to have seen some advancement on the hardware, the Galaxy S25 continues to take pleasingly vibrant snaps – if still comfortably short of the best.

Samsung’s AI implementation continues to be among the most extensive on the market, though I remain unconvinced as to the practical usefulness of much of it. It’s still no reason to choose the Galaxy S25 over, say, the Pixel 9 or the iPhone 16 but Samsung’s latest more than holds its own in other respects.