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Forget hardware – the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra’s updated OS really shines
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is one of the best phones in Australia, and in 2025 it’ll be a difficult handset to beat as our attention turns to the Google Pixel 10 Pro and the Apple iPhone 17 Pro Max coming later this year. It only improves upon the best cameraphone of 2024, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, and it continues a trend set by the S24. In 2025, software took over the stage almost entirely in San Jose at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event.
Yes, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra received a new rounded design that makes it look more like its standard S25 and S25 Plus counterparts. Samsung also decided to axe Bluetooth features from the S Pen with the S25 Ultra, which enabled users to take photos with the phone’s included stylus (super useful for group shots and selfies, though Samsung said it’s not a popular feature). Hardware undoubtedly changed and indeed the phone did receive its annual CPU/GPU performance buff – but in 2025, Samsung’s more interested in software.
With the launch of One UI 7, Samsung’s app icons, widgets, status bar and other core software features have gotten a refresh. They feel more efficient, space-aware and better in line with the customization that many users crave from their smartphones. When I first received this phone, my colleagues and I were saddened at how limited the ‘Good Lock’ OS-modifying tool had become with One UI 7, but after toying with the operating system, I’ve come to realize 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 the display, and they’re my favorite features of the launch.
Whether or not Samsung’s useful Now Brief page, which generates an AI-assisted snapshot of the rest of your day (or next day), effectively encompasses 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 has been tarnished by the ‘AI’ tag that justifiably puts a bad taste in people’s mouths.
To that end, we can ignore the elephant in the room no longer – the messy state of affairs that is AI on a Samsung phone. Such phones are torn between Galaxy AI tools (many of which function on-device) and Google Gemini, and there’s cause for concern in this discrepancy.
So let’s chat Samsung’s latest OS polish, its handy new tricks, and its spotty AI-fication.
Hello, beautiful
I’ll quickly admit that Samsung’s approach to UI design up until now hasn’t been my favorite. Coming from iOS in 2022, the Google Pixel range won me over with the uniform aesthetic that makes it the closest thing to an iPhone on the Android side of the fence. Samsung’s phones, albeit partly due to their overstuffing of bloatware with a fresh install, tend to have a more tech-savvy aesthetic – showing more icons on a space, settings icons at all times across the settings bar (top of the display) and generally sharing more information than is necessary for a casual user.
That doesn’t seem to be the case with the Samsung Galaxy S25 series and One UI 7. With this launch, subtle but sweeping changes have been made to the home screen, including app icon scale choice, dark icons in dark mode when ‘Color Palette’ is applied to apps, and expanded folders (which you can tap to open apps without opening said folder).
One of my big reservations about Samsung phones up until now has been the cluttered Status Bar, showing oh so many symbols that don’t need to be displayed at all times (for example, the 5G icon, NFC icon and Bluetooth icon, to name a few). These icons have now been relegated to the status bar only when accessing the quick settings and notifications menu (accessed by swiping down), while app notifications continue to persist on the left of the status bar (unless disabled).
How to customize the Galaxy S25’s lock screen and always-on display
Widgets and lock screen/notifications menu pop-ups have also received a glow-up, and are now rounded at the corners and displaying more information on the home screen. However, to activate these notification ‘cards’ on the lock screen, you’ll need to do so in your lock screen settings (switching over from icons to cards).
Beyond that, there are a few ways to customize the always-on display: You can change the wallpaper, clock style, font, color, and add widgets galore. Some widgets might require the Good Lock app for customization, but it’s a simple download that will help you fully customize your phone.
Then there’s the new Now bar; a multi-function widget that appears contextually at the bottom of the lock screen. I really love how it expands when tapped while playing music, displays timers and how it communicates Google Maps info. It’s great having it so low on the screen, so it’s more accessible one-handed. It feels more intuitive than Apple’s Dynamic Island, which it seems inspired by.
Moreover, Now Brief is a genuinely useful addition to the One UI suite of features. In the morning, at mid-day and at night, the phone will produce a ‘Now Brief’ rundown of upcoming events (including weather reports, travel information and calendar notifications) and a recap of your last several hours (including sleep data, missed calls and photos taken).
It’s a useful tool for putting all your contextually appropriate alerts in the one spot for your review, and it pains me that it’s not even more useful. I’d love for it to pull information from more apps – recommending me to continue listening to a podcast, select audiobook or keep watching a Disney+ series. The best it’ll do on these fronts is recommend you a Spotify playlist or push you in the direction of YouTube Shorts.
I’d also like it to be a little less… wrong? After waking up one morning, it recommended me a ‘liquid EDM’ playlist. I’ve been known to l listen to the odd EDM song here or there, but it seems like a wild genre to wake up to.
But it’s in Now Brief that we approach the cluttered state of Samsung’s AI suite.
Samsung’s AI confusion
And then there’s Google Gemini. On One UI 7 and the S25 range, Gemini has replaced the default Google Assistant (Bixby who?), and while I do like Gemini as a virtual assistant, its coexistence with these other AI tools is potentially confusing to a casual user.
That being said, Samsung has added cross-app actions to the S25 range with Google Gemini. You can ask Gemini to perform a complex series of commands, such as finding the information on several businesses online to be added to your Notes app, and it will be done so fluidly (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 genuinely has the potential to help get stuff done quickly.
Erring on the critical side, I think we’re being a bit liberal with what we’re appropriately calling an ‘AI feature’. For example; Google Circle to Search continues to be one of my favorite features of Android phones in 2024. It’s supposedly underpinned by AI, but it’s unclear how AI actually factors into the function of this tool. After all, it’s basically a simple-to-access spin on Google Lens with support for on-screen circling.
Similarly with Now Brief, it’s not clear just how much of it benefits from so-called AI features. A day-to-come or day-passed snapshot is simply a splash screen displaying your upcoming events, weather alerts, a smattering of content recommendations and health figures from throughout the day.
It might seem bereft to criticize AI features on the merit of being ‘AI-powered’, but I have one major concern. Since the launch of the Galaxy S24 range, Samsung has noted that it may, eventually, start to charge for its AI features. At the time of writing, the official company tagline is:
“Fees may apply for AI features at the end of 2025. Certain Galaxy AI features require [a] Samsung and Google Account. [An] internet connection may be required to use some features. AI Features will be provided free of charge until the end of 2025 on supported Samsung Galaxy devices.”
My concern is that access to some of these genuinely useful features will be paywalled alongside the AI tools that many people won’t actually get any use from.
I have no problem paying a subscription for a genuinely useful product or service if I’m actually getting value from it. Between Circle to Search and Now Brief, I now have two AI features that I like.
And I don’t think I could sensibly pay for either.
Samsung needs to steer carefully
While Samsung has spent a fair amount of time beautifying its operating system, its AI software is starting to become a different story altogether. No doubt people are using such features at their own discretion, but so far there hasn’t been a must-have AI tool built into One UI (or any phone OS for that matter).
On the bright side, One UI 7 brings with it a nice aesthetic refresh, and in a hardware lull year, it’s the best I could have wanted from Samsung.
The Samsung Galaxy S25 range is available now.
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