Samsung’s Galaxy S25 turns Gemini into a cross-app agent

Phone keynotes used to be about camera sensors and screen nits, but Samsung’s latest showcase was almost entirely about turning your phone into an errand boy.

At Galaxy Unpacked 2025, Samsung officially unveiled the Galaxy S25 lineup, featuring the base S25 ($800), S25+ ($1,000), and S25 Ultra. All three carry the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chip and 12 GB of RAM. The base models look closer to an iPhone than ever while retaining their signature vertical triple-lens layout. The Ultra gains rounded corners, a 50 MP ultra-wide camera, and TV-derived ProScaler tech to boost visuals to QHD+, though its built-in S Pen quietly dropped previous air gestures. Samsung also teased a slimmer S25 Edge and smart glasses powered by Android XR coming later this year.

Gemini takes over the side button

The real story here is the new integrated AI platform. Press and hold the power button, and Google’s Gemini pops up ready to handle cross-app tasks.

Instead of just generating text, the assistant can now execute chained commands across Samsung and Google services. You can ask it to parse an email, drop the details into your calendar, or draft a text from your notes. For now, WhatsApp and Spotify are the only third-party apps supported at launch, with Samsung promising a developer APK soon.

Elsewhere, Samsung sprinkled AI into daily system functions. A new lock screen Now Bar mixes Pixel-style widgets with Dynamic Island mechanics to show commute weather, morning briefs, and sports scores. On the video side, a standout Audio Eraser isolates recorded sound into distinct tracks for voice, music, wind, and noise, letting you turn down skiing wind gusts on the fly. The camera also picks up 10-bit HEVC LOG video recording for pro workflows, while AI Select turns screen clips directly into quick GIFs.

Why it matters

For everyday users, features like the Audio Eraser and cross-app calendar scheduling offer genuine quality-of-life upgrades. But you probably do not need to upgrade today. If you already own an S24 or Pixel 9, Google confirmed that multimodal Gemini Live features and Circle to Search expansions are rolling out to those devices in the coming weeks anyway.

For the broader industry, Samsung is effectively drawing the battle line around system-level agentic workflows. As Apple builds out its Apple Intelligence ecosystem, Samsung is skipping the burden of training its own frontier model and letting Google handle the heavy lifting.

We think this partnership is tactically brilliant for shipping practical agent features quickly, but it comes with real baggage. Samsung is willingly handing over its core user interaction layer to Google. Furthermore, launching with only two supported third-party apps shows just how painful app orchestration really is. Until everyday apps support this new APK at scale, the promise of an autonomous pocket assistant will remain mostly trapped inside Google’s and Samsung’s own walled gardens.