The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is one of the best phones in Australia, and in 2025, it’s going to be hard to beat the fact that our attention is turning to the Google Pixel 10 Pro and Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max coming later this year. It only improves on the best camera phone of 2024, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and continues the trend set by the S24. In 2025, software took almost the entire stage in San Jose at Samsung’s unpacked Galaxy event.
Yes, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has received a new rounded design that makes it look more like its standard S25 and S25 Plus counterparts. Samsung also decided to include the Bluetooth features of the S Pen with the S25 Ultra, which allowed users to take photos using the phone’s built-in stylus (very useful for group shots and selfies, though Samsung said it wasn’t a popular feature). The hardware has certainly changed, and the phone actually received an annual CPU/GPU performance buff – but in 2025, Samsung is paying attention to software.
With the launch of One UI 7, Samsung’s app icons, launchers, status bar, and other core software features have received a refresh. They feel more efficient, more visually appealing, and better in line with the customization many users crave from their smartphones. When I first received this phone, my colleagues and I were saddened by how limited the “good lock” OS tweaking tool was with One UI 7, but after playing around with the OS, I realized that I could finally get by without it.
Better yet, the introduction of the Now Bar and the all-new Now Brief are actually useful productivity features that look good on screen, and they're my favorite features of the launch.
Whether it’s Samsung’s now-useful Now page, which creates an AI-assisted snapshot of the rest of your day (or the next), effectively encompassing what has become the popular perception of AI (incorporating the use of large language models and the like) feels beside the point. This is a genuinely useful feature and to some extent, I’m disappointed that it’s been subjected to the “AI” tag that puts a bad taste in people’s mouths.
To that end, we can ignore the elephant in the room—the mess that is AI on a Samsung phone. Phones like these are torn between Galaxy AI tools (many of which run on-device) and Google Gemini, and there’s cause for concern in that discrepancy.
So let's talk about Samsung's latest OS polish, its handy new tricks, and its slick AI science.
Hello, beautiful
I’ll quickly admit that Samsung’s approach to UI design so far hasn’t been my favorite. Coming from iOS in 2022, the Google Pixel lineup has a uniform aesthetic that makes it the closest thing to an iPhone on the Android side of the fence. Samsung phones, albeit in part due to their over-the-top tweaking, tend to have a more cluttered aesthetic—one that features more icons for space, settings icons all the way across the settings bar (at the top of the screen) and generally sharing more information than is necessary for the casual user.
This doesn’t seem to be the case with the Samsung Galaxy S25 series and UI 7. With this launch, subtle but comprehensive changes have been made to the home screen, including app icon scale selection, dark icons in Dark Mode when the ‘Color Palette’ is applied to apps, and expanded folders (which you can tap to open apps without opening said folder).
One of my big gripes with Samsung phones so far has been the cluttered status bar, which shows OH a lot of icons that don’t need to be displayed at all times (e.g. the 5G icon, the NFC icon, and the Bluetooth icon, to name a few). These icons are now relegated to the status bar only when accessing the settings menu and quick notifications (which are accessed by swiping down), while app notifications continue to persist to the left of the status bar (unless disabled).
The mini menu and pop-up menu/notifications menu have also received a makeover, being rounded at the corners and displaying more information on the home screen. However, to enable these notification “cards” on the lock screen, you’ll need to do so in your lock screen settings (switch from icons to cards).
It’s the little things that add up, surrounding the introduction of two big things. The bar now comes first; it’s a multi-functional UI element that shows context at the bottom of the lock screen. I really like how it expands when used while playing music, showing timers and how it plugs in Google Maps information. It’s great that it’s so low on the screen, so it can be reached with one hand. It feels much more intuitive than Apple’s Dynamic Island that it seems to be inspired by.
What’s more, Now Briefing is a really useful addition to the One UI suite of features. In the morning, midday, and at night, the phone will produce a “Now Briefing” of upcoming events (including weather reports, travel information, and calendar notifications) and a summary of your past few hours (including sleep data, missed calls, and photos taken).
It's a useful tool for putting all the relevant alerts in context in one place for your review, and it hurts that this isn't even more Helpful. I like it for pulling information from more apps – recommending I continue listening to a podcast, checking out an AudiObook, or continuing watching a Disney+ series. The best it’ll do on those fronts is recommend a Spotify playlist or nudge you in the direction of YouTube Shorts.
I also like it to be a little less… After waking up one morning, he recommended me a playlist of “Liquid EDM.” I’ve been known to listen to the odd EDM song here or there, but this monster genre seemed to wake me up.
But now briefly now that we are approaching Samsung's AI Suite.
Samsung AI Jamming
Then there's Google Gemini. On the One UI 7 and S25 range, Gemini has replaced Google's virtual assistant (Bixby who?), and while I love Gemini as a virtual assistant, its coexistence with this last AI tools can be confusing to a casual user.
However, Samsung has added app-based actions to the S25 range with Google Gemini. You can ask Gemini to perform a complex series of commands, such as finding information on various companies online to add to your Notes app, and it will do so (as demonstrated by our friends at Tom's Guide). The only third-party apps currently supported are WhatsApp and Spotify, but this awesome time-saving feature really has the potential to help you get things done quickly.
Erring on the critical side, I think we’re a bit too liberal with what we appropriately call “AI features.” For example; Google’s Circle to Search is still one of my favorite Android phone features in 2024. It’s supposed to be powered by AI, but it’s unclear how much AI actually plays into the functionality of this tool. After all, it’s basically a simple-access spin on Google Lens with support for on-screen rotation.
Likewise with the Now feed, it’s not clear how much of it benefits from the so-called AI features. The daily or daily swipe snapshot is just a splash screen that shows your upcoming events, weather alerts, a slew of content recommendations, and health numbers from the day.
It may seem tempting to single out AI features for their “AI-powered” merits, but I have a major concern. Since the launch of the Galaxy S24 series, Samsung has indicated that it will, eventually, start charging for AI features. At the time of writing, Official company description line He is:
“Fees may apply for AI features through the end of 2025. Some Galaxy AI features require (a) Samsung and Google Accounts. (an) Internet connection may be required to use some features. AI features will be provided free of charge through the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices.”
What worries me is that access to some of these really useful features will be walled off along with AI tools that many people won't actually take advantage of.
I have no problem paying for a subscription for a product or service that is actually useful if I actually get value from it. Between Circle to Search and Low Lrief, I now have two AI features that I like.
I don't think I could afford either of them.
Samsung needs to be guided carefully.
While Samsung has spent a fair amount of time beautifying its operating system, its AI software is starting to become a completely different story. People certainly use such features at their own discretion, but until now there hasn’t been a must-have AI tool built into One UI (or any phone OS for that matter).
On the bright side, the One UI 7 brings with it a nice aesthetic update, and in a quiet year for hardware, it's the best I could have wanted from Samsung.
The Samsung Galaxy S25 series is now available.
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