Samsung Teases New Galaxy S25 Features And $1,250 Offer

After months of heavy Galaxy S24 discounts, Samsung is now gearing up to launch the Galaxy S25 by teasing new AI abilities and a fresh pre-order offer.

Galaxy Unpacked will take place on January 22nd and the company is emailing registered Samsung users a £50 ($62) voucher to use when buying Galaxy S25 if they answer a questionnaire. The quiz asks basic questions about your smartphone usage and what devices you’re interested in hearing about.

ForbesSamsung Makes A Surprise $374 Offer To Galaxy S24 Ultra BuyersBy Janhoi McGregor

This questionnaire discount appears to be separate to the reserve program that Samsung has now opened. In that, shoppers who reserve the Galaxy S25 will receive $50 towards “additional eligible products” and not the handset itself. In previous years $50 has been exactly enough to buy a case. The voucher Samsung is emailing to registered users can seemingly be used on the Galaxy S25.

The reservation site also teases $1,250 of “additional savings” and enhanced trade-in values. That $1,250 figure is a combination of different promotions rolled into one. Last year’s Samsung Galaxy S24 pre-order deal consisted of enhanced trade-in values and a double storage deal, alongside store credit and money-off accessories. I expect we’ll see something similar this year.

The highest trade-in prices will be reserved for the latest phones from Apple and Samsung. But considering the Korean company’s consistent sales, focusing on staggeringly high trade-in prices for phones nearly a decade old, I also expect good prices for old handsets. If you plan to buy the Galaxy S25, do not throw away your old smartphone; it might be valuable.

ForbesSamsung Shows Your Galaxy Phone Is Now More ValuableBy Janhoi McGregor

Samsung Has An AI Surprise For Us

Samsung is teasing the “next evolution of Galaxy AI” with a short video of a talking chatbot that doesn’t sound like Google Gemini. Samsung’s Unpacked press release doesn’t explicitly mention its in-house Bixby AI tool, but the long-lost AI assistant was refreshed last November and released in China alongside the region-specific W25 foldable phones.

According to SamMobile, the improved Bixby is similar to other large language model (LLM) powered chatbots in that it can understand complex natural language requests. That includes answering follow-up questions without including the full context of the original question, and answering open-ended questions. It sounds like Bixby will operate in a similar way to Gemini and ChatGPT.

It will be interesting to see how Bixby integrates with the Galaxy S25. SamMobile mentions asking Bixby to give a step-by-step guide on how to watermark an image captured with a Samsung phone, with the AI bot explaining how the camera feature works. The possibility of using AI to navigate through a smartphone, and explain some of their complex or hidden features, would set the Galaxy S25 apart from the competition.

ForbesSamsung Slashes Galaxy Z Fold 6 Price In Early January SaleBy Janhoi McGregor