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Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra first impressions: Charting a new way for smartphones through Agentic AI

Mehul Reuben Das January 23, 2025, 01:25:57 IST

Samsung’s focus is all on Multimodality and Agentic AI for the Galaxy S25 series — essentially, turning Galaxy AI conversational, as close to a human companion as technology would allow today

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Image Credit: Firstpost | Mehul Reuben Das
Image Credit: Firstpost | Mehul Reuben Das

With the Galaxy S24 series, Samsung gave us the Galaxy AI, a set of AI-powered features that set the course of how smartphones, especially premium flagship smartphones would be in 2024. This year, they plan to do the same with what can only be described as Galaxy AI 2.0

This year, Samsung’s focus is all on Multimodality and Agentic AI — essentially, turning Galaxy AI conversational, as close to a human companion as technology would allow today. What Samsung has managed to do, is chart a new course on how we think of interacting with and our smartphones.

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Agentic AI in a smartphone

Picture this — a friend of yours is visiting your city after a long time and you plan to get a cup of coffee together, and follow it up with a movie. Also, since you and your friend became BFFs because of board games, they want to go to a cafe that has a great collection of board games and lets their customers play as much as they want.

Instead of browsing the internet for cafes near you, then filtering out the ones that have board games, and again filtering them out based on ones that are close to a multiplex, and then sending all of that to your friend, you simply speak to your phone, and get the job done.

Yup, Galaxy AI now lets you do just that. Simply, tell Galaxy AI to find a cafe that has board games and is close to a theatre and text or WhatsApp the information to your friend, approve the text that it drafts, and you’re good to go.

What makes this even more interesting is that if you for some reason don’t like the cafe that Galaxy AI selects, simply say “Not this, find another one,” or something to that effect and it will find come up with a different suggestion.

What Samsung has done here is turn Galaxy AI into your personal secretary that you can carry around in your pocket.

Another example of how human-like Samsung has tried to make Galaxy AI can be found in a feature called Now Brief. What this does, is give you a summary of all the things that might be important to you and you might be looking for at particular times throughout the day.

For example, you need to know how a certain international market halfway across the world performed while you were asleep, what all meetings you have throughout the day, whether or not you have any doctor’s appointments, any social commitments, what kind of weather should you expect — things that you would need to plan out your day. You get all of this in a neat little package that can be perused through in just a couple of minutes, instead of you having to go through multiple apps, multiple messages, emails etc.

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Galaxy AI is able to do all of this now thanks to a Personal Data Engine, which generates a knowledge graph based on how you use your phone, what your behaviour patterns are. This may sound scary to some. Samsung says that all data collected by Galaxy AI stays on device, in a specially built area and only AI agents can access them.

There are several other such features, so stay tuned for the full review.

Hardware improvements

All of this is not to say that you don’t get any new hardware changes at all. First and foremost, performance performance too has gone up from previous generation thanks to a variant of Snapdragon 8 Elite that has been specifically tuned and clocked for the Galaxy S25 series. Samsung says that compared to the S24 Ultra, NPU performance is up by 40%, CPU by 37% and GPU by 30%. Vulkan performance is up by 18%, whereas Ray Tracing performance has gone up by 40%. Essentially, we should be seeing some massive uptick in benchmarks and gaming performance.

You get a better and improved set of cameras. The 12MP Ultrawide has now been bumped up to 50MP, and now also doubles up as a Macro camera. In video, we now have support for 10-bit HDR, and also support to record videos LOG, making it more professional friendly. There are some minor improvements in the display technology because of which even low-resolution images and videos look better.

But then some things remain the same. Battery size for example, stays at 5000 mAh, and so does the charging speed.

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Design changes

There are some notable design changes as well. That is the first thing you will note when you pick up the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. Gone are the sharp corners and sharp edges. Instead, we get a frame that is very flat, with rounded edges. This year around, the Ultra variant looks and feels much more closer to its younger siblings.

Image Credit: Firstpost | Mehul Reuben Das

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is also lighter than the Galaxy S24 Ultra, by about 15 grams. This despite the fact that S25 Ultra is carrying a much larger vapour cooler chamber. One thing is for sure — people who were miffed that Samsung did not change the design of the Galaxy S series that much in the last couple of years, should certainly be happy.

Agentic AI for a galactic change

Clearly, this time around the hardware changes are not that big of a priority — Samsung, like most smartphone manufacturers, surely must have come to realise, that there is only so much that you can push into a smartphone package when it comes to hardware. The next place where they need to be investing their resources is software. OneUI 7.0 is a testament to just that. It feels different, in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, as if it was designed from the ground up keeping AI Agents in mind.

All of this boils down to one simple thing — the Galaxy S25 feels more personal, more intuitive and connected to its own user. The Galaxy S24 series for sure changed the way tech enthusiasts see and use smartphones. The Galaxy S25 series, especially the Galaxy S25 Ultra may make

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