Galaxy Unpacked 2025: everything announced at the January event

During its latest Unpacked event, Samsung dished all the details on the Galaxy S25 lineup. The Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus start at $799.99 and $999.99, respectively, while the S25 Ultra runs a cool $1299.99 in its entry-level configuration. You can preorder the phones ahead of their launch on February 7th, but before you do, you’re probably wondering what’s new.

The phones don’t look or feel much different, save for the slightly curvier Galaxy S25 Ultra. The Snapdragon Elite 8 is perhaps the S25 family’s most notable hardware upgrade, which is up to 40 percent faster than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset and comes with a new neural processing unit to support Samsung’s expanded Galaxy AI experience. The company introduced multimodal and generative AI improvements, after all, and the Galaxy S25 line will be among the first to usher in new Google Gemini features.

Samsung just teased the Galaxy S25 Edge — the new ultra-slim entry into the Galaxy S25 lineup. The phone isn’t out yet, and Samsung hasn’t provided any details, but now we know it’s real. And we have pictures.

Like pretty much every phone, it’s a thin silver slab. It’s got two cameras on the back, rather than the three cameras you’d get with other S25 phones. The Edge is rumored to measure just 6.4mm thick, but my colleagues Allison Johnson and Vjeran Pavic, who are on the ground at Galaxy Unpacked and took the below photos, weren’t able to actually hold or measure the device to confirm.

Samsung finally took the wraps off its new Galaxy S25 lineup during its Unpacked event on Wednesday, providing us with our first formal look at the forthcoming Galaxy S25, S25 Plus, and S25 Ultra. Available starting on February 7th, you can already preorder the S25 starting at $799.99, the S25 Plus starting at $999.99, and the S25 Ultra starting at $1,299.99.

On the hardware front, Samsung’s latest phones represent a relatively minor refresh over last year’s S24 series. The new Galaxy S25 phones are all “Qi2 Ready,” meaning they charge at up to 15W on a Qi2 charger using Samsung’s magnetic Qi2 Ready cases. Each phone also features 12GB of RAM by default, along with more processing power thanks to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip.

Will cracked screens actually become a thing of the past this decade? We’re definitely on an impressive trajectory! Just two years after Samsung’s Galaxy S23 adopted a new Corning Gorilla Glass that can survive waist-high drops of one meter directly onto concrete, the new Samsung S25 Ultra has a ceramic version that can apparently survive head-high drops of 2.2 meters (7.2 feet).

It’s called Corning Gorilla Armor 2, and you should know that neither Samsung nor Corning is promising that your actual phone will survive such a drop — if it’s anything like the 2023 claim, the 2.2-meter drop is simply what a phone-sized, weighted “puck” was able to survive when dropped face down in the lab. All Samsung said onstage today is that the material is better able to resist damage.

Samsung just teased the Galaxy S25 Edge at the end of its Unpacked event, where it announced its Galaxy S25 lineup. It didn’t offer any details beyond the quick naming of the phone.

Below are some screenshots from Samsung’s presentation. It was brief, but it’s a phone, alright.

Samsung and Google are partnering up to build AR glasses, Samsung’s TM Roh told Bloomberg. But there aren’t many other specifics beyond the fact that they’re in development — there’s not even a specific release timeline, with Roh telling the publication that Samsung and Google “will try to reach the quality and readiness we want as soon as possible.”

The announcement follows Meta’s splashy reveal of Orion, its first augmented reality glasses, last year. Those glasses won’t be sold to consumers, but my colleague Alex Heath called them an “impressive demo.”

The “Ultra” model in Samsung’s Galaxy S lineup is typically the phone crammed full of every feature the company could think of. But this year, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is actually taking a step backward with the S Pen. The motion gestures and useful remote camera shutter function have been removed, and the stylus is back to being just a stylus. You can still wave it around like a magic wand, but the phone won’t do anything.

During a media briefing on the new S25 series last week, Samsung explained that customers rarely ever used the “Air action” gestures. So the company decided to try and cut costs by ditching them entirely. And no, the starting price of the S25 Ultra hasn’t come down as a result. Samsung believes other hardware upgrades are more than enough to maintain the same $1,299.99 price.

Samsung announced today that its connected appliances and smart home devices will soon be able to act as motion and sound sensors for its smart home platform SmartThings. This includes its televisions, Music Frame speaker, Family Hub fridge, and more. The company said the updates are slated for release in 2025 and 2026 but didn’t provide specific timelines.

The move is part of its vision of “AI for All,” using AI to simplify technology in the home. By leveraging sensors in its appliances, Samsung’s new Home AI — an artificial intelligence layer that the company is applying to its connected devices — can gather “insights from everyday life to create personalized experiences to fit your needs, transforming your home into a smarter, more efficient space,” according to a Samsung blog post.

If the Galaxy S24 series heralded the triumphant arrival of Galaxy AI, then the S25 and S25 Plus may be a bit of a comedown: they promise more AI that’s smarter and sometimes slightly faster. You’d better like it because that’s pretty much all you’re gonna get.

Samsung changed as little as it could on the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus, announced today alongside the larger and redesigned Galaxy S25 Ultra. There’s the obligatory jump to a new chipset — in this case, Qualcomm’s custom-tuned Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, included in phones worldwide this time around — and a welcome decision to offer 12GB of RAM as standard on every S25 phone, pulling the base model in line with the others.