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 thats smarter and sometimes slightly faster. Youd better like it because thats pretty much all youre 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. Theres the obligatory jump to a new chipset in this case, Qualcomms 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.Samsung hasnt changed the look of the Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus.The displays are the same as last year: 6.2 inches on the S25 and 6.7 inches on the S25 Plus, peaking at 2,600 nits of brightness and 120Hz refresh rate. The cameras are identical, too. Theres a 50-megapixel main camera, an ultrawide, and a 3x telephoto, with a familiar 12-megapixel selfie shooter on the front.If you were to upgrade from last years Galaxy S24 Plus to this years model, the only spec that would change is the chipset. Well, that and the fact that the new phones are Qi2 Ready they dont have the magnets that Qi2 certification requires, but theyll charge at up to 15W on a Qi2 charger when paired with Samsungs official Qi2 Ready magnet cases.Samsung hasnt changed the camera hardware at all from the S24 and S24 Plus, though the thick black bezel is new.Both S25 phones are thinner than their predecessors.Perhaps Im being a little unfair. Samsung hasnt increased its prices at least the S25 starts at $799.99 and the Plus model at $999.99, with preorders open now ahead of a full launch on February 7th. Its also maintaining its promise of seven generations of Android updates and seven years of security support. Both phones are lighter than their predecessors and almost half a millimeter thinner. That should ease the disappointment of anyone whos been hoping for the launch of the rumored S25 Slim, which is now tipped not to launch in the US at all. But its still hard to avoid the inevitable conclusion: this year is a software update, not a hardware one.The new Galaxy phones are awash with AI-branded features which Samsung says remain free to use this year, though its plans are unclear beyond that. Plenty of them have been here since last year, like Googles Circle to Search or generative photo editing tools that let you draw elements into photographs or remove distracting people and objects. Those now generate better results in less time, helped by improvements in AI models and the move to the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which handles more AI processing on-device, including previously cloud-based tasks like Generative Edit.Audio Eraser is a built-in tool for video editing that lets you remove or reduce video noise across specific categories think voices, music, wind, crowds to focus on whichever sounds you care about. It works well, but its only new to Samsung: Google Pixel phones have been able to do the same thing through Audio Magic Eraser since the Pixel 8.AI Select replaces Smart Select in the Edge Panel menu.Other AI abilities are just as familiar, but we didnt always call them AI. Take AI Select, accessed from Samsungs Edge Panel, which gives suggested actions like cropping and sharing screenshots, creating GIFs from videos, or adding events to your calendar. It replaces Smart Select, which did most of that, too, but with a different design.The S25 phones also offer a daily summary called Now Brief that lets you know whats on your calendar for the day or how your commute looks, bringing us back full circle to 2012s Google Now. Meanwhile, the Now Bar is Samsungs answer to Apples Dynamic Island: a lockscreen element that can show sports scores and Google Maps navigation instructions or tell you what song is playing. It sounds useful, but is it AI? Apple didnt think so.Gemini is now the default AI assistant on the phones. RIP Bixby.Some of the new features represent more meaningful progress. The phones AI assistant which is now based on Google Gemini by default, with Samsungs own Bixby relegated to access through its app can control your phone with natural language requests. Ask it to make text bigger or find photos from your last holiday, and it should oblige. Gemini can now also work across multiple apps in a single interaction, though this upgrade isnt exclusive to Samsung. It might look up a good restaurant and share it with your friend or pull up sports fixtures and add them to your calendar.The problem for me is that most of these features are hard to test in-depth when youre at a launch event using a phone that isnt yours, has few apps installed and no accounts signed in, and might have only been set up for the first time that morning. Well have a better sense of how effective Samsungs new AI features are when we can actually use the S25 and S25 Plus for an extended run in our review.The problem for Samsung is that, until then, its not clear what here should tempt anyone into upgrading. Many of these AI and software features are baked into One UI 7 itself and should roll out soon to owners of the S24 and older models. If the hardwares hardly changing, and the softwares coming to your phone anyway, whats the incentive to upgrade?Yesterday, my colleague Allison Johnson wrote that Samsung needs to give us a reason to care about new phones every year. On the strength of the S25 and S25 Plus, I think its fair to say that it hasnt.Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge