Update: December 29 with details on the Galaxy S25 Special Edition release dates.
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, Galaxy Unpacked 2024, London, United Kingdom
With Samsung’s community eagerly expecting the new Galaxy S25 family to launch in mid to late January, many are wondering when they can put down their name for one of the new handsets. New details on Galaxy pre-orders suggest the community won’t have to wait long.
Update: Sunday December 29. While Samsung will not reveal the Galaxy S25 family ahead of its Galaxy Unpacked event, some details have slipped through to the community through several accessory manufacturers. The latest to offer details on the Galaxy S25, S25+ and S25 Ultra is dbrand.
The Canadian-based company makes cases and skins for a wide range of consumer electronics. It’s best known for a wide range of vinyl skins that cover a device. From game consoles, through laptops and tablets, to mobile devices, dbrand has an option. Right now, it’s offering several options for Samsung’s yet-to-be-announced Galaxy S25 family.
All three of the regular S25 smartphones have skins available, from solid blocks of color to its popular ‘x-ray’ stickers showing the internals of a smartphone. While we don’t yet have the x-ray of the S25 phones (dbrand notes that it will ship your order when the correct internals are available), the vinyls confirm much of what has been suspected about the Galaxy S25.
This includes the redesigned corners of the S25 family, with a sharper and more distinctive look that should offer more internal volume in the same footprint. The camera island and location of ports and buttons look to be carried over from the S24 handsets.
The Samsung Experience Store on Oxford Street in London (Photo by Olly Curtis/Future via Getty … [+]
When Will The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Pre-orders Open?
Samsung is widely expected to host a Galaxy Unpacked event on January 22nd. South Korean’s FN News is reporting that pre-orders will open on January 24th and run through until February 3rd, opening up the store to complete the purchases from February 4th before the official retail launch on February 7th.
If this is, in fact, the schedule, there are two points worth highlighting. The first is that everything is running a week later than the Galaxy S24 launch in January 2024. The second is that rather than pre-orders opening at the end of the Galaxy Unpacked presentation, there is a two-day wait before people can put their names down for the new flagships.
Will The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Have Any Special Offers?
In previous years, Samsung has offered several peripherals, is counts and higher specifications for those who pre-order their smartphones. The S24 deals included a free ‘bump up’ to the next level of storage, alongside discounts on the Galaxy Buds FE and Galaxy Watch 6. Similar offers for the S25 family would not come as a surprise.
Previously, Samsung has reserved specific colorways of the new handsets as Samsung Store exclusives, so if you have designs on a specific shade of pastel or titanium, you’ll need to shop carefully if this strategy continues.
What About The Samsung Galaxy S25 Special Edition?
There is the question of which handsets will be offered. While it feels a racing certainty that we will see the Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+ and Galaxy S25 Utlra, a fourth Galaxy S25 handset is in the wings. Echoing the release of an extra slim Special Edition of the Galaxy Z Fold a few months after the Z Fold6, a thinner Galaxy S25—the presumptively named Galaxy S25 Special Edition—could show up later in the year.
Attendees walk past the logo of Samsung Galaxy during a Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event in Seoul on … [+]
Update: Sunday December 29.
Tucked inside the upcoming version of Samsung’s OneUI—its flavor of Android—is a clue towards the arrival dates of the Galaxy S25. The team at Android Authority have looked through the latest beta, which has numerous references to the upcoming handsets… or at least references the three core handsets.
They found references to three US versions—the SM-S931, SM-S936 and SM-S938, representing the Galaxy S25, S25+ and S25 Ultra. The beta version will, in all likelihood, ship with handsets announced at the upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event. This means that the absence of the fourth handset points to its absence in the initial release wave.
As part of the preparations for the launch, Samsung has populated the GSMA IMEI database with four references that fit the Galaxy S25 profile. The fourth model is the SM-S937, which sits between the S25+ and the S25 Ultra in the listing.
This is the presumptively named Galaxy S25 Special Edition, and its omission from the OneUI beta is telling. It’s clearly coming, but it’s not quite ready for the market.
