Setting up a brand-new phone is one of my favorite things. Whether starting from scratch or carefully restoring apps, messages, and photos that matter to me, it always feels like a fresh start. With that fresh start usually comes something new to explore, like a new camera mode, updated AI features, or maybe even something I’ve never considered. Sometimes, you get a bit of all three — like with Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 series.

Yes, as usual, Samsung launched its new flagships with plenty of tricks up its sleeve, and it’s time to start exploring. Whether this is your first foray into the Samsung Galaxy or you’ve been away for a few years, we have you covered. Here are the tips and tricks we’ve found to get more out of your Samsung Galaxy S25 device right away.

One of the first things you should check out on your Samsung Galaxy S25 device is, well, one of the first things you’ll see every day. Yes, it might look slightly like Samsung is lifting its inspiration from Apple’s Dynamic Island, but there’s much more to the Now Brief than that. The Now Brief only really covers half of Samsung’s real-time update feature, working in close concert with the similar but not identical Now Bar.

Essentially, the Now Brief is an all-in-one place to check what you have coming up for the day. It pulls the hourly weather forecast for the day and any calendar appointments you might have lined up and pairs them with news articles you might be interested in, along with a Spotify playlist for the day. I like that it puts just enough of the things you might need together in one place, yet it never feels like you’re downgrading your Galaxy S25 experience if you forget to check it once or twice throughout the day.

The Now Bar, on the other hand, takes over for the Now Brief the rest of the time. It’s closer to Apple’s Dynamic Island in that it appears either at the top or bottom of your display (depending on whether your phone is unlocked or not) and can provide you with updated sports scores, track kitchen timers, and display driving directions from Google Maps. Then, when you’re done with whatever information it’s providing, it disappears — no awkward Face ID sensor to disguise.

Although the Now Brief and Now Bar are brand-new features, our next Galaxy S25 tip is anything but. It’s a return to our favorite broken record — a reminder that you should always, always, buy a phone case. Yes, Samsung may be using tougher materials than ever, with Gorilla Glass that keeps getting stronger and the return of titanium on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, but no smartphone is invincible. All it takes is one errant drop, and you could be looking at a spiderweb of cracks across your $1,000 phone.

So, with that in mind, buy a phone case. It doesn’t have to be an expensive first-party option — though Samsung’s collaboration with Hershey’s Chocolate takes the candy bar phone to a new level — just please, buy something. If you’re unsure where to start, we’ve done some legwork for you. We’ve put together guides for the best Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus cases and Galaxy S25 Ultra cases, including a mix of brands and case styles for all three devices.

You don’t need to live dangerously — protect your phone.

Now, back to the brand-new features that Samsung has added to the Galaxy S25 series. Well, maybe not brand-new, but certainly reimagined. Remember the good old days when you couldn’t post a photo to Instagram without slapping an obnoxious old filter on it? Well, those days are back again — but they’ve grown up. Taking a page out of Apple’s book with its Photographic Styles, Samsung has introduced a new set of camera filters to the Galaxy S25 series, and I think you should check them out.

If it helps, you don’t have to think of Samsung’s new tools as filters. They won’t add dog ears or make your face sparkle like a vampire from Twilight — they’re more like Fujifilm-level film simulations. Samsung’s filters allow you to change the color profile of your image, along with the saturation, contrast, and film grain (basically manual control over your ISO). If you’re not sold on any of the dozen default filters, you can also drag sliders for each setting to raise and lower its intensity.

Finally, Samsung’s filters have one option that Apple’s Photographic Styles don’t: You can create your own. While swiping to the left runs you through a menu of pre-built filters, a swipe to the right lets you open your camera roll and pick out an image with a color science you like. From there, your Galaxy S25 device will use Galaxy AI to emulate that same profile for use on future images. It’s not perfect — I still like the colors out of my Fujifilm X100V a bit better — but I won’t argue with the convenience of having one device to capture everything.

Last year, when I sat down to write these tips about the Galaxy S24 series, one of the first things I suggested was to remap the Bixby button. After all, I rarely used Samsung’s in-house assistant and figured I probably wasn’t alone. So, when the Galaxy S25 Ultra landed on my desk, and a long press of its power button opened Gemini rather than Bixby, I couldn’t help but feel a little vindicated. Now, you could always remap the button away from Gemini, too, if AI isn’t your thing, but this time, I think you should give it a try.

Unlike Bixby, which always felt like the second-best option behind Google Assistant, Gemini feels perfectly capable in most situations. Whether you’re planning a weekend trip with Gemini Live and asking for advice on great museums in a new place or simply trying to find a recommendation for a new video game, Google’s AI-powered assistant picks up on much more context than its predecessors. I also appreciate that it’s much easier to interrupt Gemini, especially if it takes your suggestions off in a different direction than you might have expected.

Of course, if you’re still not onboard with a button to launch your digital assistant, you can also remap the side key to power off your phone. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Open the Settings app
2. Head to Advanced Features
3. Tap Side Button
4. Choose between a smart assistant or controlling your phone’s power

Just remember that if you boot Gemini off your power button, you’ll have to access it via voice commands or the Gemini app itself.

Although you can opt out of having Gemini launch from a hardware button, several of our remaining tips will center around Galaxy AI, so you might have a tough time escaping it altogether. For example, Auto Trim is one of the newest camera tricks available on the Galaxy S25 series, and it’s about as easy as it sounds. Essentially, Auto Trim acts like a pocket-sized video editor in your Gallery app, drawing the highlights out of your clips so that you can publish a shiny Instagram Reel or TikTok much faster.

Before I explain a little more about how it works, though, here’s how to start an Auto Trim video for yourself:

1. Open the Samsung Gallery app (not Google Photos)
2.  Tap on the Menu button at the bottom right corner and select Go to Studio
3. Press Start New Project
4. Choose the video clips that you want to add and press Done
5. Tap the icon in the bottom left corner that looks like a pair of scissors in a circle

Once you press that icon, Galaxy AI will scrub through your selected clips to pull out their highlights and combine them into one video. From there, you can either adjust the length of the video, rearrange the individual clips within the larger video, or add stickers or text overtop, just like you would when creating an Instagram story.

Of course, you can also do all of this editing by hand, which gives you better control over the transitions from one clip to the next or the ability to make some clips longer or shorter, but Auto Trim finds a happy medium to fit everything into one video.

Sticking with the creative side of Galaxy AI, it just got a whole lot easier to doodle on the Galaxy S25 series and have Samsung clean it up for you. Samsung’s version of Android 15 introduces an updated, much-improved version of Sketch to Image, now called Drawing Assist. It essentially works the same way that Sketch to Image did, taking your handheld, often shaky doodles and turning them into sharper, more identifiable images. Also, unlike Sketch to Image, Drawing Assist doesn’t require starting with a photo, making it even easier to let your imagination roam.

In some ways, Drawing Assist feels like Samsung’s answer to the Pixel Studio or Apple’s Image Playground in that it allows you to choose from a few art styles, like Watercolor, Sketch, or Oil Painting, before you start creating. If you’re not convinced by your artistic abilities, you can use a text box to describe what you want Drawing Assist to create, making it even more like its competitors from Apple and Google. Here’s how to access Drawing Assist:

1. Swipe on your Edge Panel to open it
2. Tap the button marked Drawing Assist
3. Either doodle or describe your image
4. Press Generate

From there, you can also ask Drawing Assist to generate an additional image if you’re not happy with the first version. If you have a Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can access Drawing Assist by removing your S Pen from its slot and selecting the option from the pop-up menu.

Another AI-powered feature I’ve come to appreciate is that everyone wants to make searching for things on your phone easier. Whether it’s Apple with a redesigned Photos app or OnePlus with context-aware search, it seems like the hot new thing is to take the guesswork out of your searches. Samsung is no exception, and it’s starting with your camera roll.

Once again, to tap into the full strength of Samsung’s Galaxy AI, you’ll have to use its in-house Gallery app rather than Google Photos. However, once there, you can use the Search feature (marked by the usual magnifying glass) to look for shots of familiar faces — whether people or pets — or figure out exactly which day you spent exploring a national landmark like Independence Hall.

It works pretty well in my experience, managing to pick out the people and places I’m looking for, but there are a few tricks to be aware of. For starters, you can’t search for people or pets by name unless you label them within the Gallery app. So, if you have a cat named Spot, you’ll have to identify them to Samsung before you can keep track of them. Thankfully, you won’t have to tag every single image of Spot, but it does take some of the automation out of Gallery Search.

Moving on, I’ll admit that I thought the days of Memoji and Bitmoji were behind us. I figured that most people wouldn’t be using an animated version of themselves and that it would probably disappear from smartphones before long — or at least be minimized. And yet, Samsung has decided that 2025 is the year to bring back animated avatars in a big way. It’s rebranded AR Emojis as Galaxy Avatars and massively reduced the creepy factor in the process.

As much as Samsung may have liked its previous AR Emoji setup, the finished products were usually a little bit too close to the uncanny valley, and as a result, I can count on one hand the number of times I ever sent them to friends or family. These days, though, the Galaxy Avatars are a little bit closer to Apple’s Memojis, which is to say they’re much cuter and a little more cartoonish — though Samsung’s model seems to struggle when your subject is wearing a hat in the reference image.

You can make Galaxy Avatars from your front-facing camera or by uploading an image from the Samsung Gallery, both of which seem to work just fine. Currently, Galaxy Avatars live within the Advanced Features section of the Settings app, which can make them difficult to find, but it’s easy enough to create and customize your lookalikes once you get there.

Since we’ve already discussed buying a case for your new Galaxy S25 device, let’s return to another all-important accessory: a shiny new charger. If you’re using a fairly recent Galaxy device, you might be able to discount this tip, but if you’re switching from an iPhone, a Motorola device, or any number of other phones, you may need to spend a little bit more to reach peak charging speeds.

Although Samsung hasn’t wavered from 25W wired charging on its Galaxy S25 or 45W speeds on the Galaxy S25 Plus or Ultra, you’ll still need a USB PD PPS-enabled charger to reach those maximum speeds. Thankfully, there are plenty of high-speed options, including chargers with multiple ports and USB-C and USB-A ports. You just have to decide which one will best meet your needs.

Also, if you’re eyeing a new wireless charger, you can ignore everything about Qi2 for now. Samsung’s latest set of flagships decided to skip the magnet-based wireless charging standard, meaning you can count on your old flat charger for another year. Of course, if you want to try a version of MagSafe, you can always grab a third-party case and attach it to a magnetic charger.

Last but certainly not least, don’t forget to customize your phone. Samsung made a few changes to some of the most basic parts of One UI 7, like a few app icons and widgets, but it’s up to you to make the rest of your device feel like home. Whether that means dipping into Samsung’s AI-powered wallpaper generator or simply loading up a few shots from your gallery, all that really matters is the phone feels more like your own.

I’m still a fan of Samsung’s generative wallpaper tool, at least because it allows me to switch up the landscape I have to look at every day. Right now, I’m rolling with a surreal set of mountains in shades of navy blue, and it’s a much better look than the basic wallpaper that comes preloaded on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Once you settle on a wallpaper, don’t forget that you can also theme the rest of your device around the main colors, including color-matched app icons and shades for everything from buttons in the Calculator app to Samsung’s Calendar. Interestingly, the preloaded apps like Copilot and OneDrive aren’t included in the color-matching process, making them stand out like sore thumbs you can’t uninstall.

These are just a few things I’ve been doing on my Samsung Galaxy S25 so far, but I’m always open to learning new tricks. If I missed one of your favorites, let me know in the comments. Also, if you haven’t grabbed a Galaxy S25 device but are thinking about upgrading, you can do with the best prices we could find so at the widgets below: