Samsung Galaxy S25 Unpacked live blog — last-minute leaks and all the big news

Time for a charging change?

Samsung may have tipped its hand on a new feature coming to the Galaxy S25 series back at CES in a press release put out by the Wireless Power Consortium on the emerging Qi2 wireless charging standard. To make a long story short, Samsung is pledging to support the updated standard for wireless charging. “The exceptional Qi2 growth story will continue in 2025,” Samsung said in a statement. “You can expect to see Android devices supporting Qi2 from Samsung Galaxy devices in 2025.”

We don’t want to leap to conclusions, but it’s 2025 right now and new Samsung Galaxy devices should be announced this week. So that would seem to make Qi2 wireless charging a lock for the Galaxy S25. So what does that mean? It should be easier to keep chargers perfectly attached to the back of Samsung’s phones, and wireless charging should be faster. That’s the short answer, though — for a longer one, check out our guide on Qi2 wireless charging.

Galaxy S22 comparisons

Let’s face it — while Galaxy S25 vs. Galaxy S24 comparisons can be helpful in telling us how a phone changes from year to year, very few people are upgrading to a new phone 12 months later, especially in this day and age.

Finding out what you get if you upgrade from a phone that’s a few years old can bey very helpful, though. So with that in mind, here’s a Galaxy S25 vs. Galaxy S22 comparison if you haven’t bought a new Samsung device since three years ago.

Price rumors

One of the biggest revelations at Galaxy Unpacked will be the official price Samsung plans to charge for its new phones. Early pricing rumors have us bracing for an increase.

The most definitive word we have so far on costs comes from a 91 Mobiles report featuring a screenshot of what appear to be Galaxy S25 model prices in Europe. The screenshot shows across-the-board price hikes for all three expected models, ranging from €60 to €100, roughly.

We have no idea how accurate those figures are; we also don’t know if Samsung will raise its phone prices in some regions while leaving others untouched. But the writing on the wall seems to suggest a price increase for this year’s lineup. We hope that’s one rumor that doesn’t pan out.

Galaxy S25 Ultra: Will it look different?

If you’re familiar with what Samsung’s last couple of Ultra models look like, you probably have a good idea of the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s basic appearance. Samsung isn’t planning a design overhaul from what we’ve heard, though there are some changes compared to the previous year’s models.

A tweet by leaker Ice Universe that shows a Galaxy S25 Ultra render next to its two predecessors underscores a pair of modest yet noticeable changes. For starters, the corners on the new phone look much more rounded. For another, the bezel around the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s screen is a little bit thinner. That could squeeze in some more useable screen space on the new Ultra, which Samsung may be trying to do in light of the iPhone 16 Pro Max’s larger screen.

More on Moohan

Of all the rumored products likely to join the Galaxy S25 at Unpacked on Wednesday, the most likely choice would seemingly be Project Moohan, the mixed reality headset Samsung confirmed the existence of last month. For starters, Project Moohan isn’t a phone, so it’d be unlikely to steal any thunder away from the Galaxy S25 models. For another, Samsung has already confirmed that the headset will go on sale at some point in 2025.

More evidence of a possible Project Moohan announcement comes from the fact that we just don’t know that much about the headset, giving Samsung the platform to confirm new details even if it’s not ready to set a ship date. All we know about Moohan — besides the fact that it’s apparently Korean for “infinity” — is that it will run on Google’s newly launched Android XR platform. Qualcomm, which is supplying the Snapdragon XR Plus Gen 2 silicon that powers the headset, also says that its chipset offers support for up to 4.3K resolution in each eye, running at 90 frames per second.

Samsung has promised “state-of-the-art displays, Passthrough capabilities and natural multi-modal input” with Project Moohan. We’ll see this Wednesday if it’s ready to supply more insight into what all that means.

Galaxy S25 rumored specs

Before every Galaxy Unpacked event, the steady stream of rumors that’s been happening for months on end gives us a pretty good idea of what Samsung is going to show off. And that’s why, a little more than 36 hours ahead of the January 22 Galaxy Unpacked, we can put together a table of what you’re likely to see when Samsung announces the Galaxy S25 lineup. Most of the specs below come courtesy of a report earlier this month at Android Headlines.

Not all of these specs may materialize. But based on various reports and tweets from leakers with solid track records, this can at least be a good guide on what’s potentially going to happen with the S25 lineup.

Get ready for a camera phone fight

Pay attention to what Samsung announces about the cameras on its new phones — particularly the Galaxy S25 Ultra. On the positive side for Samsung, last year’s premium Galaxy S24 Ultra as one of the best camera phones we tested. But it also lagged behind the iPhone 16 Pro Max and Pixel 9 Pro XL in our head-to-head tests.

At the same time, other phone makers are raising their game. The OnePlus 13 just came out, and our colleague John Velasco thinks it really narrowed the camera performance gap in a OnePlus 13 vs. Galaxy S24 Ultra 200 photo face-off. Clearly, the S25 Ultra is going to need to step up its camera game.

Galaxy AI: What we want to see

Galaxy AI figures to be one of the main talking points at Galaxy Unpacked, as Samsung adds new capabilities powered by artificial intelligence to Galaxy S25 lineup. We’ve got two big questions about AI that we hope to have answered at Unpacked — 1) what are those new features going to be and 2) are they going to trickle down to older Galaxy S models?

The answer to that second question will be how dependent on on-device processing power those features are going to be, though the rumor is Samsung wants to increase the number of Galaxy AI features that run entirely on a device. That may preclude older flagships from picking up features the way they did last year.

As for the first question, we polled the Tom’s Guide phone team on what Galaxy AI features they’re hoping to see this year.

Snapdragon’s time to shine

Usually for a Galaxy S launch, we don’t have the luxury of knowing how the chipset powering the new phones might perform. But that’s not the case with the Galaxy S25 and the Snapdragon 8 Elite silicon expected to be included in each model.

It’s not just the fact that we’ve benchmarked Qualcomm’s new chip in a reference device shortly after it was released — though we did. We’ve also had the chance to test it in two already announced phones — the Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro and the OnePlus 13. Both devices launched ahead of the new Galaxy S flagships and both offer Snapdragon 8 Elite silicon.

The ROG Phone 9 Pro actually turned in faster times on the Geekbench CPU test than the OnePlus 13 did, though you’d figure that would be the case for Asus’ gaming-focused phone. Multicore scores were well ahead of what the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro Max posted, though Apple’s chip has the better single-core results on Geekbench. Graphics numbers for the new Qualcomm chip also set a new standard.

We don’t know whether Samsung will optimize the Snapdragon 8 Elite for performance like the ROG Phone 9 Pro or go for an approach similar to the OnePlus 13’s, but that should give you some idea of the performance the new phones will bring to the table ahead of their launch.

Slim chances

We’ve mentioned the Galaxy S25 Slim possibly joining the other S25 models as a sneak preview at Galaxy Unpacked. But some news that broke over the weekend makes us think that Samsung’s going to hold off on mentioning anything about a slimmer version of its new flagship.

Tipster Evan Blass says the Galaxy S25 Slim might not ship in the U.S. Instead, this could be one of those phones Samsung releases in just a handful of markets to see what demand is like. That’s something Samsung has done with other phones like the Galaxy Z Fold Special Edition that appeared in South Korea last year.

If Samsung wasn’t going to distract from its S25 launch with a model that was unlikely to ship at the same time as the other phones, it’s certainly not going to show off a phone that’s not going to go on sale in the U.S. at a U.S. product launch. So maybe strike the Galaxy S25 Slim off your bingo card for Wednesday’s Unpacked.

Samsung’s Unpacked deal

With Unpacked still a day and a half away, you still have time to take advantage of a Samsung deal that will let you save on whatever Galaxy hardware get announced during Wednesday’s event. And it won’t obligate you to buy anything if you ultimately decide to take a pass.

Just register your name and email address with Samsung for a chance to pre-order any announced products, and you’ll get a $50 credit you can apply to your purchase. In addition, you’ll be eligible for a $300 instant credit when you do pre-order. You can save up to another $900 by trading in your current phone. So that’s up to $1,250 in potential savings.

You need to be registered before the start of Unpacked so get your name into the queue soon.