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For the second year in a row, the story of Samsungs new flagship Galaxy phones isnt about hardware changes. For better or worse, the Galaxy S25 features few material changes from its predecessor, and many of the most substantive enhancements come courtesy of new AI features Samsung has built into One UI. The highlight of those is something Samsung is calling the Personal Data Engine. Over time, One UI 7 will collect and analyze data about how you use your S25 to personalize the software experience. This customization will be most visible in two new features called Now Brief and Now Bar. The former will generate morning, midday and evening summaries of information that might be relevant to you. For instance, in a morning brief, you might see the days weather, a calendar of your upcoming meetings, and news stories that might interest you. The latter, on the other hand, is a new interface element you can access from both the S25s lock screen and just below the digital clock when the phone is unlocked. The Now Bar will automatically generate a Rolodex of reminders you can flip through throughout the day. One widget might include directions from Google Maps, while another could feature the 45-minute timer you set earlier in the day. Its all basic stuff, but Samsung is betting these features and the ones Im about to detail will save S25 users time by reducing the amount of jumping between apps they need to do. According to the company, any usage information the Personal Data Engine records is kept secure and private inside the S25s Knox Vault security enclave. Sam Rutherford for Engadget The Galaxy S25 also includes a series of interconnected features that broadly fall under a concept Samsung is calling AI agents. These agents are powered by multi-modal machine learning models, meaning they can parse images, videos, audio and text. Samsung has deployed these throughout One UI 7, though youre most likely to encounter them through the Samsung sidebar. The most interesting of the new agents is called AI Select. It builds on the Smart Select tool previous Galaxy phones featured. When evoked, AI Select will scan the screen and suggest actions based on what it sees. As mentioned, the model powering this feature is multi-modal, so its not limited to reading just text. For example, say you bring up AI Select while watching a YouTube video. In that context, the tool will offer to create a GIF for you. Again, the idea here is to simplify an action that previously may have required multiple apps and steps. At the same time, Samsung has polished existing AI tools to make them better. Most notably, Sketch to Image, now known as Drawing Assist, is more accurate and detailed and includes the option to import existing images. Separately, the Galaxy S25 series will ship with an improved version of Circle to Search. For the uninitiated, Circle to Search is a way to access Google Search from nearly anywhere on your phone without switching between apps. You activate the feature by long-pressing your phones Home button. Circle to Search arrived at the start of last year, with Galaxy S24 and Pixel 8 owners among the first to get access. The latest version of Circle to Search can recognize phone numbers, emails and URLs, allowing you to call, email or visit a website with a single tap. Additionally, Circle to Search now also includes integration with Googles AI Overviews. These enhancements arent limited to Samsung devices, and Google is in the process of rolling them out to all Android phones.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/samsung-galaxy-ai-becomes-more-personal-and-cohesive-180029521.html?src=rss
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The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will have an S Pen onboard, as is tradition for all Galaxy S Ultra smartphones since the 2022's Galaxy S22 Ultra. What that S Pen won't have anymore is Air Commands, because it turns out barely anyone bothered with them. Air Commands are a feature that allows Galaxy owners to assign various actions to pen gestures made, as the name implies, in the air rather than on the phone's screen. In a briefing, Samsung representatives told members of the media that less than one percent of customers with an S Pen bothered using Air Commands. Those who did mostly used them to trigger camera captures, a thing that can be done pretty easily without the S Pen. For those one percent of users perhaps sad to see Air Commands go, Samsung claims removing support for the gestures as well as Bluetooth LE will increase the pens durability and eliminate some weight. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/samsung-retires-s-pen-air-commands-because-no-one-was-using-them-180021197.html?src=rss
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Samsung has announced the latest version of its flagship device, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, and it will come with more AI-focused features than its predecessors like the other phones in its lineup. It's powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite that was customized specifically for Galaxy devices and comes with a RAM that starts at 12GB. Samsung says the new chip will enable the phone to process AI experiences on-device, including tasks that previously had to be processed on the cloud like Generative Edit, which can reframe shots, delete subjects in the photo and fill in backgrounds. Samsung designed a new heat dissipation structure for the phone, as well, so that on-device AI processes can run smoothly. The new Galaxy S25 devices run One UI 7 on top of Android 15, which Samsung says can turn the phones into a true AI companion. It enables the new phones to understand text, speech, images and videos in a way that allows you to interact with your phone using natural language. You can ask your phone to find a photo or a video by describing certain elements you can remember, for instance, or tell it to change specific settings without having to manually navigate the device. There's also an AI feature called the Now Brief that sends you alerts throughout the day based on your schedule and pattern of activity. Those notifications will be visible on the Now Bar, the devices' new notification system. If you want to access Google's Gemini AI assistant, you can simply press on the phone's side button. And, of course, the phones can use Google AI features, such as Circle to Search. The Galaxy S25 Ultra and S25+, in particular, come with ProScaler. That's a real-time AI upscaling feature that Samsung says can achieve "a 40 percent improvement in image quality" for what's shown the screen, as long as the display is set to QHD+ resolution. When it comes to AI tools for sounds, there's Audio Eraser, which you can use to isolate and erase certain sounds from your recordings, whether it's music, background noise or voices. Samsung says the new phones' Galaxy AI features will be "free through 2025," after which you may have to pay to be able to access some of them. Like the previous Ultra devices, the new Ultra is still bigger than the Galaxy S25 and S25+ with a 6.9-inch display, but it now comes with a more rounded edge for a "comfortable grip." The company describes it as the "slimmest, lightest, and most durable Galaxy Ultra device ever," with a body made of titanium and Corning's Gorilla Armor 2. Corning's new material is composed of a glass ceramic that's treated with a proprietary anti-reflective that can help "ensure advanced drop protection" and scratch resistance. And while the Galaxy S25 Ultra still has a 200MP main camera sensor like the S24 Ultra before it, it has a 50MP ultrawide camera instead of a 12MP one. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will be available in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB variants in Titanium Silverblue, Titanium Whitesilver, Titanium Gray and Titanium Black. You can also get Titanium Pinkgold, Titanium Jetblack or Titanium Jadegreen from Samsung's official website. Its prices begin at $1,300, and it's now available for pre-order. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/the-samsung-galaxy-s25-ultra-is-more-ai-focused-and-tougher-than-before-180018308.html?src=rss
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