- Samsung sets its Unpacked date
- It’ll be on Jan. 22 and in San Jose
- The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is expected to be the star of the show
Samsung officially announced the dates for its Winter Unpacked event. It’ll hold the unveiling of what we assume is the Samsung Galaxy S25 line on January 22 in San Jose, California.
The company sent out invites on January 6. Yes, that’s at the start of CES 2025 in Las Vegas, and you can thank us later for noticing in the middle of all this.
Last year, the company previewed its latest hardware in Las Vegas at private meetings with journalists during CES 2024. This year, even though Samsung will again be a big presence at what is probably the world’s largest tech event, it’s unlikely we’ll see a hardware preview in Sin City.
Along with a new Galaxy S series, Samsung is promising a “more natural and intuitive Galaxy AI” that will “change the way Galaxy users interact with the world.” We were generally impressed with Galaxy AI when we tried it last summer with the all-new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, so that’s a high bar indeed.
While TechRadar will be on the ground on January 22, you can watch the entire event on one of Samsung’s various livestreams at the Samsung Newsroom, Samsung.com, and the company’s YouTube channel at 1:00 p.m ET / 10:00 a.m. PT.
New Galaxy phones
Beyond these scant details about the new products, we have some educated guesses about the new flagship Android handsets and what, if any, other hardware might be on display.
First up, we expect this to be the launchpad for Samsung’s brightest mobile star: the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra.
According to recent rumors, we should expect a new, curvier design, a larger screen, and a new Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset. Perhaps it’ll get the newly launched Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite, which sounds like a very powerful piece of silicon. During last year’s Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Mobile Editor Phil Berne got a chance to test drive early systems equipped with the new mobile CPU. “The results completely blew me away,” wrote Berne.
The bigger story here, though, might be the AI upgrades, some of which we saw during Samsung’s Summer Unpacked event, where it rolled out its new foldable lineup, including the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6. And to support things like AI image generation, the Galaxy S25 Ultra might just feature more RAM than ever,
Naturally, this is all conjecture, and the Galaxy S25 Ultra we finally do see might look and work differently than we expect.
We do anticipate at least two other new Galaxy handsets, namely the Galaxy S25 and the Galaxy S25 Plus. Whatever specs they have will likely be a subset of the new Galaxy S25 Ultra.
A key difference could be the lack of a high-end or more powerful zoom camera. If the S25 Ultra has a 5X zoom with 50MP, the S25 and S25 Plus might have a 3X zoom with 12MP. If the S25 Ultra gets a better ultrawide (with a higher pixel count), there’s no guarantee that the entire line will follow suit.
Surprise package
We could also see one or two surprises from Samsung. I’m wondering, for instance, if we’ll get a chance to experience Project Moohan, the new Android XR-based mixed reality headset Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm introduced last month.
It’s still just a dev kit, but we can’t wait to put it on and see if the experience is as close to wearing an Apple Vision Pro as we suspect it is. Granted, Samsung and its partner Google have said they plan to make this a Gemini AI experience. That alone could set it apart from Apple‘s expensive mixed-reality headset.
Since we just saw Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra, Buds 3 Pros, and Galaxy Ring updates and releases, respectively, it’s unlikely there’ll be any news on those fronts.
Whatever Samsung unveils, TechRadar will be on the ground to give you early looks at all the new gear.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
