Here's how the Samsung Galaxy S25 can beat the Google Pixel 9

The Samsung Galaxy S25 family is almost here – we expect to hear official news of the Galaxy S25, S25 Plus, and S25 Ultra at Galaxy Unpacked on January 22.

With this new flagship lineup supposedly waiting in the wings, it’s hard not to imagine how Samsung’s latest smartphones will match up against their contemporaries.

Though people will always pit the best Samsung phones against the best iPhones, perhaps an even more interesting rivalry has emerged between Samsung's Galaxy flagships and the best Pixel phones. As the two leaders of the Android world, Samsung and Google are both close collaborators and close competitors, as Samsung relies on Google's Android operating system, and Google no doubt enjoys the influx of users for its various built-in apps that Samsung provides.

Samsung and Google stratify their smartphone lineups differently, but it’s likely that the Galaxy S25 will most closely resemble the Google Pixel 9. We’ll be able to give a more detailed appraisal of how these phones compare once the S25 is out and we've had a chance to test it for ourselves, but until then, here are my thoughts on how these two Android flagships might stack up.

Samsung Galaxy S25 vs Google Pixel 9: specs

First, let's take a look at the rumored specs of the Galaxy S25 versus the confirmed specs of the Google Pixel 9.

Samsung Galaxy S25 vs Google Pixel 9: how can Samsung best Google’s flagship?

With the Galaxy S25, Samsung will be able to score a few points against the Pixel 9 simply by carrying over a few great features from the S24.

First of all, Samsung equips its current S24 flagships with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy chipset, a class-leading chipset that offers plenty of performance power. The S25 is expected to launch with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which is potentially the most powerful mobile chipset ever created. It’s unlikely that the Google Tensor G4 chipset found in the Google Pixel 9 will even come close in either benchmarks or real-world performance.

It’s possible that this could give the S25 an edge when it comes to AI processing, too. Though Google develops Gemini, the AI assistant that now comes bundled with Android as standard, a more powerful hardware platform may enable the Galaxy S25 to take better advantage of these tools than the Pixel 9 – in fact, AI slowdown was one of the main concerns raised in our Google Pixel 9 review. With the S25 tipped to match the Pixel 9’s 12GB of RAM, it’ll be a game of processing power and optimization to determine which ends up the faster phone.

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Samsung can utilize some momentum in the camera department, too. Of the ‘big three’ phone makers – that's Samsung, Google, and Apple – Samsung is the only one to equip its baseline flagship phone with a telephoto camera. This naturally makes a serious difference to zoomed images, and gives users a way to take more natural-looking portraits. The Pixel 9 lacks a dedicated zoom lens but sports the same fantastic main camera as the Pixel 9 Pro, with truly excellent low-light photography and post-processing. Still, as our Samsung Galaxy S24 review notes, Samsung’s camera system is the most versatile on the market, and most rumors suggest the S25 is likely to continue the trend by bundling in the exact same triple-camera setup.

We probably won’t see such a noticeable rift in other areas. Display-wise, the two phones could look very similar, with the S25 rumored to sport a 6.2-inch 1080 x 2340 120Hz display, while the Pixel 9 comes equipped with a 6.3-inch 1080 x 2424 120Hz display – near enough identical, aspect ratio and color accuracy aside.

We don’t expect a revolution in design from the S25 series, either, which leaves us with little to discuss about these two rounded slab phones. As for the battery, the Pixel 9 wins on paper with its 4,700mAh cell, compared to the 4,000mAh battery we expect to see the S25 launch with, but this could be offset by software optimization and the efficiency of the S25’s Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset.

One area where Google has a solid chance of besting the S25 is in the software department. Samsung’s One UI is notoriously more finicky and less polished than other implementations of Android, and while we’ve heard numerous credible hardware rumors about the upcoming S25 series, word of One UI 7 has seemed harder to come by (a One UI 7 beta is currently live, but it doesn't appear groundbreaking).

Google’s Pixel Launcher is as close to ‘stock’ Android as you can get these days and presents an altogether simpler experience with a few neat features, like a dedicated screenshots app. The S25 is likely to be a much more powerful phone hardware-wise, but just how much of the user experience this accounts for will be up to each individual user.

Personally, I’m torn; the hardware power of the S25 is likely to be impressive, but the extent to which the average user can actually make use of this power remains to be seen.

The S25 is expected to launch at a starting price of $799 / £799 / AU$1,399, the same as the Google Pixel 9 (except in Australia, where the Pixel is AU$50 cheaper), and phones of this price are already excellent at performing everyday tasks like messaging and web browsing. Pro users will tend towards the S25 Ultra and Pixel 9 Pro anyway, so Samsung’s success with the base S25 could rely more on user experience and leveraging processing power for AI.

In any case, with the phone's official announcement surely just around the corner, it seems we won’t have to wait long to see for ourselves.

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