Plenty of people tuned in to Apple's Glowtime event this past week to watch Apple unveil its new iPhones. And you have to figure at least a few of those viewers are employed by Samsung.
If so, the enhancements Apple showed off to its iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro models might have rattled the nerves of any Samsung executives tuning in to see what their chief smartphone rival is launching out into the world. But those same improvements also present an opportunity for Samsung and its next flagship phone.
Make no mistake — development of the Galaxy S25 models, including the Galaxy S25 Ultra, is already well underway, with Samsung likely to release those new handsets as soon as four months from now. Whatever improvements of its own Samsung plans to make have been in place long before any of the four iPhone 16 models appeared in Apple's launch video.
And yet, this is a copycat business, where one phone maker is quick to answer another one's new capability with a surprisingly similar addition. Even if Samsung's Galaxy S25 plans are firmly set in place, you can imagine the electronics giants making some tweaks in focus and tone to address what Apple just introduced.
With that in mind, then, five things stood out about the new iPhone 16 models that Samsung is going to want to tackle with its Galaxy S25 models. Here's what the Korean phone maker should be paying attention to as the iPhone 16 hits retail shelves this week.
Get ready for a battle over performance
Samsung and its chip supplier Qualcomm have made a lot of progress in recent years chipping away at Apple's once overwhelming lead in mobile performance benchmarks. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powering all of the U.S.-released Galaxy S24 models — and the Galaxy S24 Ultra no matter where it shipped — actually managed to beat the latest iPhones in some of our testing, especially when it came to graphics benchmarks.
Apple's response was to equip every new iPhone with an A18 system-on-chip, even the standard models that in recent releases had used the silicon found on board the previous year's Pro phone. As for the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max, they're running on an A18 Pro chipset that features an extra core in the GPU — clearly an indication that Apple intends to reassert the iPhone as the one to get when you want the best performance.
We still need to finish testing the new iPhone models to see what the A18 and A18 Pro are capable of, but leaked benchmarks suggest that the A18 should deliver notably faster performance compared to the iPhone 15's A16 Bionic chipset. The early word is that A18 Pro results should be even more impressive, producing benchmark numbers comparable to the M1 chips found in some Macs. If we can verify that initial report, that would help the iPhone 16 Pro models outpace the Galaxy s24.
This sounds like a fight Samsung could be ready for, though. You'd imagine that the phone maker is going to use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 in next year's flagship phones, and while Qualcomm has yet to announce that chip, leaked benchmarks have surfaced. They indicate jumps of 45% over the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered Galaxy S24 in both single- and multi-core tests on Geekbench 6.
We'll find out more next month when Qualcomm is set to preview the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4. Regardless of what gets announced, it sounds like we're in for a mobile performance shootout in 2025.
Don't coast on the cameras
Samsung's Galaxy S24 release was characterized by only a few significant changes. Samsung pretty much left the cameras on the standard model and the Galaxy S24 Plus unchanged. The Galaxy S24 Ultra got a larger sensor with bigger pixels to serve as its main camera, but the biggest change was a fairly controversial one — one of the telephoto lenses sacrificed zoom length in favor of a sensor with a higher megapixel rating. Gone was the 10MP telephoto lens with a 10x zoom in favor of a 50MP shooter with a 5x zoom.
It's safe to say Apple went a different direction with the iPhone 16 Pro cameras. On the 6.3-inch model, every camera in the rear array saw an upgrade. The main camera uses a larger sensor, the ultrawide camera now features a 48MP shooter and the telephoto lens adopts a tetraprism design that bolsters the zoom length to 5x. The iPhone 16 Pro Max also picked up those main and ultrawide camera changes, keeping the upgraded zoom lens introduced with the iPhone 15 Pro Max.
We're expecting Apple's Pro cameras to continue to rank highly as the best camera phones once we complete our head-to-head testing. If Samsung has any hope of keeping pace, it's going to have to make more of a splash with the Galaxy S25 camera setup. Rumors have hinted at everything from an upgraded ultrawide camera on the Galaxy S24 Ultra to the addition of a second 50MP telephoto lens replacing the remaining 10MP zoom camera. There's also talk that a new main camera sensor could an add anti-refractive layer and pixel isolation to improve light capture and reproduce shadows more accurately.
Whatever Samsung plans on doing, it's clear that Apple is throwing down the gauntlet with its iPhone 16 Pro camera improvements.
Make your phones more convenient to use
Maybe the Camera Control button Apple added to each of its new iPhones turns out to be a great feature, or maybe it's one that people wind up ignoring as they launch the camera app and snap photos the old-fashioned way. But it gives people another way to take pictures and capture video with their iPhone while putting some pretty clever controls right at your fingertips.
I'm not arguing that Samsung should add something exactly like the Camera Capture button — there's a limit to how many copycat features we can allow. But I do think Samsung should be inspired to look for ways that simplify common tasks on its phones.
In a way, the phone maker already does this. One of the hidden features on Galaxy phones is the ability to reprogram the side button so it triggers various shortcuts — kind of like the Action button that's now on every iPhone model. More thinking along those lines may not introduce ground-breaking capabilities, but they could make people excited about using their smartphones again.
Galaxy AI is the key
Both Samsung and Apple introduced phones this year where AI features took center stage — Galaxy AI in Samsung's case and Apple Intelligence on the iPhones. I think I'm being fair when I say that Galaxy AI feels like it's further along if for no other reason than Apple Intelligence is only available as a developer beta at present. It won't arrive on the iPhone 16 models (and the iPhone 15 Pro models, while we're at it) until next month. Even then, Apple is still treating those features like a preview.
With the Galaxy S25, Samsung should press its advantage by rolling out new AI features and fine-tuning the ones that are already in place. For instance, i like that the Galaxy voice recorder app can not only transcribe audio recordings but recognize when different people are speaking — at least in theory. In practice, the accuracy is a lot more hit-and-miss, and I hope that the next version does a better job producing cleaner transcripts I don't need to clean up as much. Similarly, I'd like Circle to Search to further expand its toolkit beyond looking up things on shopping sites.
As for new features, the Galaxy AI capabilities added to the Notes app provide a template of how to use AI successfully. Galaxy AI will auto-format your notes, taking care of a dreary, time-consuming task so that you don't have to. That's what I want out of AI, and not something that can generate an anthropomorphic cucumber or tell me if a text I'm about to send is too snarky.
Keep your prices the same
I now hold my breath during phone launch events, waiting for the inevitable price hike on one or more of the models introduced. Samsung is a part of this, having upped the cost of the Galaxy S24 Ultra by $100 over that phone's predecessor. And that happened after a similar price hike to the iPhone 15 Pro Max back in 2023.
So it was a big relief when Apple flashed up iPhone 16 pricing at its Glowtime event — and nothing changed. The iPhone 16 models have the same prices as their predecessors, which is particularly impressive given the larger screens Apple is using on the new iPhone 16 Pro models.
Samsung will ultimately set prices for the Galaxy S25 that protect its bottom line. But if those prices include a price increase for any of the models coming out next year, that's going to be a hard PR hit for the phone maker to overcome.
