My Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review was mostly very positive, and it's undoubtedly one of the phones of the year so far, but not everything about the handset quite landed with me. In particular, the S Pen seems somewhat redundant—and I haven't taken the integrated accessory out of its slot since I finished writing my review.
The sleek stylus has been around since 2011, when it made its debut with the Samsung Galaxy Note—back when the “phablet” was a form factor. After the Note series was discontinued with the Note 20 in 2020, the S Pen was supported by the Galaxy S21 Ultra in 2021, before getting its own dedicated slot on the Galaxy S22 Ultra the following year.
The S Pen has also been supported on a range of Samsung tablets, laptops, and foldables down the years. Now though, the accessory seems to be falling out of favor: It's not supported on the latest Galaxy Z Fold 7, and Samsung cut some of its features with the Galaxy S25 Ultra version.
Having used the Galaxy S25 Ultra, I'm not surprised Samsung is scaling back the functionality of the S Pen—and I also wouldn't be surprised if it was missing on the Galaxy S26 Ultra next year.
What are people using this for?
The latest S Pen no longer has Bluetooth support.
Credit: Lifehacker
On previous models of the S Pen, with full Bluetooth functionality, you could use it as a remote for snapping photos or advancing slides in a presentation—some of the features Samsung ditched with the latest stylus because less than one percent of phone owners actually used them, apparently.
The ability to open apps and trigger other actions via Bluetooth has gone too, which means Samsung's official list of what you can actually do with the S Pen is mostly about features you no longer get. What's more, you can't use an older S Pen, like the one included with the Galaxy S24 Ultra, on the Galaxy S25 Ultra.
There are some benefits: The S Pen itself and the Galaxy S25 Ultra are lighter as a result, and the newest S Pen no longer needs a battery, so there's no need to worry about charging it. Presumably it now costs Samsung less to make, though there was no difference between the launch price of the S24 Ultra and the S25 Ultra.
All that's left is sketching and note taking, plus the basics of selecting buttons, menus, images, and text using the S Pen—something I suspect many people will just use their fingers and thumbs for. Your mileage may vary, but I haven't found myself popping the S Pen in and out of the Galaxy S25 Ultra often.
Sure, being able to take handwritten notes on the lock screen is kind of handy, but surely it's easier and more convenient to simply tap them out instead. That's certainly what I do—even if many of the best note-taking apps out there (including the excellent Google Keep) can accept and recognize handwritten text, and convert it into digital text.
What do you think so far?
It's good for digital art, at least
The list of S Pen options isn't as long as it used to be.
Credit: Lifehacker
The best experiences I've had with the S Pen on my Galaxy S25 Ultra are with sketching out little doodles. Drawing Assist, where you can sketch out something and have the on-board AI turn it into a more complete picture, is fun for about five minutes—although the results I got rarely matched what I was thinking in my mind.
I do like drawing, though, and with the S Pen this is much more enjoyable and accurate than using a finger. Load up a note app or a drawing app on Android, and the S Pen actually starts being useful, whether you want to create a flowchart of ideas, or a mockup of a design, or just a little comic strip.
There are more quality drawing apps on Android than you might realize. There's the likes of Infinite Painter, Sketchbook, and Krita, for example, and Adobe just relaunched Photoshop for Android. These are all capable of creating professional-level artwork, and using them with the S Pen really does elevate the usual experience.
You're probably not going to do a lot of this kind of work on your mobile phone, however, and professional creatives will certainly want to use a bigger canvas—so in that respect it's a shame that S Pen support has been dropped from Samsung's foldables this year. That said, I bet most foldable owners would prefer to have a thinner device and a longer battery life.
No doubt there are people out there who make full use of the S Pen on their Samsung Galaxy phone, but I imagine it's a shrinking fraction of overall users. If removing the S Pen from the Galaxy S26 Ultra means that gains can be made in terms of device design and battery capacity, then I think Samsung will go for it.
