Few Android phones in the West have ever managed to sustain the kind of loyalty and anticipatory fervor as Apple iPhones. Google’s Pixel engenders that kind of affectionate devotion among the more tech-savvy enthusiasts, but its market share is a relatively small slice of the market.
Only the Samsung Galaxy really competes with the iPhone’s hype wagon. Well, Galaxy fans won’t have to wait long. Right in the middle of the CES tech show madness, Samsung announced that the Galaxy S25 will be announced at Galaxy Unpacked 2025 on January 22.
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So set a reminder for 10 AM PST/1 PM EST on the 22nd to watch the event live, either on Samsung’s website or on Samsung’s official YouTube channel. In the meantime, engage in some good, old-fashioned rumor talk.
Lookee, Lookee
Nobody yet knows what the Galaxy S25 looks like. We won’t know for sure until it’s unveiled on January 22 by Samsung themselves, barring some kind of massively unfortunate (for them) and highly amusing (for us) leak.
Everybody expects it’ll have thinner bezels than the S24, which are already thin to begin with. But I never put much stock in the renders that show up before a device’s unveiling, so I’m not posting them here.
What happens is somebody draws something up that looks pretty, and everybody convinces themselves that it’s close to the mark because they want it to be. Then it gets shared around forums and tech websites, and a sort of circular logic forms. “Well, it’s credible because I saw it (insert some place).
What I will show is a photograph of three supposedly genuine models shown last October by a known Apple leaker:
The three, in order from left to right, supposedly show the S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra. We can’t tell from the images—if they’re genuine—whether the screen will grow or the overall dimensions of the phone will shrink.
i screen, you screen, we all screen
Ross Young, CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants, says the S25 will use the same M13 OLED panel as last year’s Galaxy S24, which disappointed a lot of people who complained of colors looking washed out. That could scare off some people who see other’s enjoying the Apple iPhone 16 Pro’s and Google Pixel 9’s M14 OLED panels and decide to jump ship to one of Samsung’s competitors.
Young also released a list of suspected available colors. For the S25 and S25+, Moon Night Blue, Silver Shadow, Sparking Blue, and Sparkling Green. Plus, the S25+ gets Midnight Black. The S25 Ultra instead gets a choice of four colors, all preceded by “Titanium”: black, blue, gray, and silver.
Leaker Ice Universe also claims that the camera specs won’t change much compared to last year’s S24, except that the ultra-wide image sensor will get an upgrade to 50 megapixels from the S24’s 12 megapixels.
Pricing is a mystery, but because Samsung has stuck with Qualcomm chipsets for a while, everybody seems to except a move to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, which would bring the boost in performance and speed that people tend to expect annually, even as major innovations in smartphones are slowing down from the breakneck pace of the 2010s.
The rest is still a mystery. We’ll continue to monitor the more credible rumors floating around the Galaxy S25, but now that we have a hard release date for its unveiling and that it’s not far off, we don’t have to pretend to be patient for much longer.
