Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus Review

Introduction

For the past couple of years, the ‘Plus’ variant of the Galaxy S series has – to me – been the Goldilocks sweet spot of the range. It offers some select features drawn from the more capable Ultra model, but in a more pocketable and more affordable device. 

Having spent a little time with the Galaxy S25 Plus, it seems that’s not down to change any time soon. It’s got a good combination of features in a larger device than the regular S25, but at a price that starts just below that £1000 mark in the UK. 

Design

• Near-identical to the Galaxy S24 Plus
• Ever-so-slightly thinner and lighter
• Clean, simplistic design

Take a quick glance at the S25 Plus – in fact, take a long glance if you want – and you might just struggle to see any physical change from 2024’s Galaxy S24 Plus. And for good reason: very little has changed physically. 

Samsung has shaved a fraction of a millimetre from the width, height and thickness, and six or seven grams from the weight, but those changes are really hard to perceive. It’s a thin, light-feeling phone just like the S24 Plus. 

Material choices are largely the same too, with flat matte aluminium framing around the edges, joining with the Gorilla Glass Victus 2 front surface at a right angle. 

The one aesthetic change is the redesign of the rings around the individual cameras on the back. Where the last generation had a simple metal ring, these are thicker, textured black rings, ensuring it matches up with the design language of the Galaxy Z Fold 6 from 2024. 

Samsung also remains one of the few Android manufacturers not to build a huge camera island or bar on the back of its phones. Instead, each lens punches through the back, with minimal protrusion, giving it a much more minimalist look than a lot of the Android competition. 

It looks clean, it feels lightweight and nimble, and, as always, it is a larger version of the regular S25 with some hardware benefits. 

Screen, performance and cameras

• Snapdragon 8 Elite power
• 6.7-inch QHD+ screen
• Same triple-camera setup as Galaxy S24 Plus

What’s impressive about this thin and lightweight design is that, inside, it packs a punch. It’s powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm’s most powerful chipset to date, offering significant performance and efficiency gains on its predecessor. 

This is, in fact, arguably the biggest story from the regular and ‘Plus’ variants of the Galaxy S25. Because, unlike the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus, Samsung is rolling this chipset out in all of its phones, in every market. There are no Exynos versions. 

While a lot of the reaction around the Exynos models being shipped to European (and other) markets seemed a little over the top, the Snapdragon variant was, objectively, a better performer when it came to intense, graphically rich games and apps. 

Now Samsung is ensuring there’s parity between the US/Canadian markets and the rest of the world by offering everyone the best version of its phones. It’s also added an extra 4GB to the entry-level variant’s RAM, taking it up to 12GB as standard. This is alongside either 256GB or 512GB storage. 

Otherwise, it borrows from the Ultra model by offering a QHD+ resolution display on the front. It’s 6.7 inches diagonally, and can reach brightness levels up to 2600 nits. It’s also capable of adjusting refresh rates between 1Hz and 120Hz. 

All that means very little in the way of hardware upgrades on the display front, but you’ll get a bright, vivid panel that can conserve battery by reducing all the way down to 1Hz when you’re looking at a static page. 

There’s a ProScaler feature added in the software to artificially boost the resolution of low-quality video. But otherwise, it’s near enough the same Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel we saw on the Galaxy S24 Plus. 

As for battery and charging, it’s the same 4900mAh battery capacity as before with the 45W charging speeds like the Ultra model. 

Like a lot of the phone experience, the cameras are largely the same as last year too. It’s the same triple camera system with the 50MP main camera, 10MP telephoto 3x zoom and 12MP ultrawide camera. 

The upgraded processor should mean better low-light performance and faster shutter response when snapping photos, but otherwise, there’s little hardware change here. 

That charging speed and the QHD+ resolution (apart from size) are the two big upgrades over the standard Galaxy S25. But since the smaller model has a smaller display, the extra resolution isn’t something that makes a huge difference, where the 45W charging speed certainly will, compared to the 25W speeds in the S25. 

Software & AI

• OneUI 7 based on Android 15
• New Galaxy AI features
• Seven years of OS upgrades

Samsung spoke a lot about the AI features being baked into the software in the next generation of smartphones. Almost to the point where this has become the main focus of its effort, as seen by the minimal hardware upgrades on offer this year. 

The company has said the AI is baked into every part of the Samsung One UI experience, and able to understand context in a lot more places while also offering the ability to talk to it in a more natural way. 

It’ll be able to do things like find your favourite team’s fixture list and add them to your calendar, or understand the context of a Smart Select screenshot and offer relevant actions based on the information in the screenshot. 

Sadly, a lot of the AI features weren’t available to try when I got hands-on with the phones, but I did get to play with the Drawing Assist feature that can take sketches or words and turn them into digital art. It’s largely similar to what we’ve seen before from the likes of Apple and Google, but it’s a fun little app that can quickly take a boring, hurried drawing, make it colourful and give it personality. 

Now Briefing is another feature that could potentially be quite useful in daily life. Providing a look at your schedule, the weather and your health stats in Samsung Health, it can prepare you for the day with a morning briefing that’s personal to you. Or, you can get a recap at the end of the day. 

It’s all about taking information from different apps and services, and condensing it into one view that shows all the useful stuff on one screen. So it’ll show you the forecast for the day, along with any details on your sleep last night, or events from your calendar that are coming up. 

As for the conversational AI stuff, that could again be potentially interesting. Being able to ask the Samsung AI to show you photos from your last trip to a specific place, or ask it to change settings in the phone, like making text more visible, are all things you can do just by speaking to your phone. 

This is all baked into the latest version of One UI, built on Android 15. And if you get this phone, you’ll be guaranteed seven major OS upgrades in the future, taking you all the way up to Android 22. 

Full Specifications