Samsung’s new phones will almost certainly be the most popular Android phones of 2025. They’ll probably also be among the best Android phones of 2025. And yet the Unpacked event this week felt like one of the most boring phone launches… ever. Are we entering a new phase of the smartphone industry, in which companies basically just launch the same thing over and over? Wait a second: have we been in that phase for a while now?
On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk a lot about what this year’s Samsung phones mean. The Verge’s Allison Johnson joins David and Nilay to talk about the vibes at Unpacked, where the thinner S25 Edge inspired raucous enthusiasm, and where Samsung tried to make the case that AI will make your phone better even if there’s not much new hardware to speak of. We also talk about the glimpse we got at the Project Moohan headset, Gemini’s increasing dominance over the future of virtual assistants, and more.
After that, we take a deep breath and wade into the first week of the new Trump administration. The Verge’s Lauren Feiner explains what’s going on with Stargate, and why a $500 billion AI data-center plan is being announced in the White House. We talk…
