Samsung Unpacked 2025: Samsung’s AI-focused Galaxy S25 Ultra ships February 7 for $1,300 | TechCrunch
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Samsung on Wednesday announced the latest additions to its Galaxy S flagship smartphone line at the company’s annual Samsung Unpacked 2025. As suspected, the defining characteristic of the Galaxy S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra is the company’s continued focus on mobile AI — a fact that hardly distinguishes the consumer electronics giant from the rest of the industry.
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Headlining the trio is the Galaxy S25 Ultra. At $1,300, the stylus-sporting Galaxy Note successor maintains the same price point as last year’s model. The handset sports a 6.9-inch display and quartet of rear-facing cameras: a 50-megapixel ultra-wide, 200-megapixel wide, and a pair of telephoto lenses, with 3x and 5x optical zoom, respectively.
The Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, Qualcomm’s latest flagship — the same chip found in all three S25 tiers. Once again, Samsung has added its own tweaks and accompanying branding to the silicon, as the vanilla version will be powering a majority of flagship smartphones released over the next 12 months.
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Image Credits:Samsung
The company promises a 37% performance boost for CPU processing and a 30% increase on the GPU side. Naturally, the NPU (neural processing unit) gets the biggest boost at 40%, owing to both the relative infancy of the processors and the industry-wide focus on all things both artificial and intelligent.
The S25 Ultra and S25+ have access to ProScaler. The AI image “sharpening” feature apparently requires their QHD+ display resolution to function properly. Gaming graphics enhancements, meanwhile, arrive by way of the Snapdragon’s on-device Vulkan Engine and Ray Tracing features. Device cooling is accomplished by way of a 40% larger vapor chamber.
Google’s AI offerings, meanwhile, have become even more central to the device’s functionality. Gone are the days of quick Home and Bixby access. In their place, Gemini can now be activated with a long press of the device’s side button. Along with Circle to Search, which debuted on the Galaxy line, the devices also have a variety of generative AI-powered writing and drawing features.
The Ultra sports a 5,000mAh battery, coupled with 12GB of RAM and up to 1TB of storage, and it comes in Titanium Silverblue, Titanium Whitesilver, Titanium Gray, Titanium Black, and pink, gold, and green options only available to those who purchase directly through Samsung.
All three S25 models are up for preorder Wednesday, with shipping starting February 7.
