Galaxy S25’s Now Brief: Cool but could be better
Samsung’s Galaxy S25 series comes with a fresh feature called Now Brief, powered by Galaxy AI. It’s pretty neat, but there’s room to make it even more helpful for S25 owners. Let’s dive into what it does and where it falls short.
Now Brief watches how you use your phone and picks out key things you need to know. It then puts together a custom update you can check right from your lock screen. Depending on the time—morning, midday, evening, or late night—it shares stuff like weather updates, meeting reminders, energy levels, coupon alerts, and more.
There’s a big list of topics it can cover, including health, travel, tasks, routines, digital habits, messages, memories, photo stories, traffic, news, smart home controls, music, podcasts, and YouTube Shorts. I’ve been testing it since day two with my Galaxy S25 Ultra, and here’s what I found.
The updates pop up as notifications on the lock screen’s Now Bar. Tap it, and you get a quick summary. You can also find it through the Edge panel or a home screen widget. It greets you based on the time, shows weather details with an hourly forecast, and pulls in health info or event reminders. It even connects to smart home gadgets. So far, so good.
But it’s not perfect. I turned on all the categories in settings, yet my daily updates barely changed. I added a birthday to my calendar, set alarms, made routines, created photo stories, tracked trips for traffic, linked my Samsung smart TV, and watched tons of YouTube Shorts over a month. Out of all that, Now Brief only flagged an upcoming alarm and nudged me about YouTube Shorts. If you don’t set it up, you’re stuck with just weather updates.
What Could Improve?
Criticism without ideas is pointless, so here’s how Samsung can step it up:
- More Variety: Most folks don’t care about the weather all day. Add AI summaries for emails, social media, game alerts, or other apps.
- Clearer Setup: Picking categories is confusing with no hints. Samsung should explain how to make them work better.
- Faster Updates: Adding an alarm at noon shouldn’t wait until the night update—it should show up right away and stick around until done. Sometimes, changes take too long to load.
Final Thoughts
Now Brief is a nice touch for the Galaxy S25, but it’s not fully there yet. Samsung needs to tweak it to make it truly useful for everyone.
