Galaxy S25's New Camera Rings Are Basically Glued Onto Last Year's Design [Video]

One of the few hardware changes I personally liked about Samsung’s new Galaxy S25 series is the addition of a color-matched ring around each camera, but as it turns out, those are basically just glued onto last year’s design.

Samsung has been using more or less the same design for its cameras for the past few generations of Galaxy devices, but started to change things up on last year’s Galaxy Z Fold 6. That change expanded to the Galaxy S25 series last month, with the trio of new flagships adopting a new camera ring that also features a ring of metal around the side that matches the frame of the smartphone. It’s a rather nice new look, even if it comes on devices that are largely identical to their predecessors otherwise.

However, that new look is effectively just a quick add-on.

As discovered in JerryRigEverything’s routine durability test, the camera rings on the back of the Galaxy S25 Ultra (and presumably the rest of the series) aren’t directly built into the device. A very small gap between the ring and the device serves a way to pry the ring off, revealing the same camera module as the Galaxy S25 Ultra (and S23, and S22).

It’s a rather funny revelation, especially as products have popped up in recent years that take the design of an older phone’s camera module and make it look like a newer version. In a way, that’s what Samsung is doing.

The good news here is that the camera rings don’t come up without quite a bit of force, to the point where one of the rings was pulling the back glass along with it (which, in itself, is a bit concerning). The Galaxy S25 Ultra unsurprisingly still survived the durability test as well, coming out without any damage beyond the usual scratches at Moh’s hardness level 6 and higher – a slight change from the Galaxy S24 Ultra, which managed to forgo any scratches until level 7 with its first-gen Gorilla Armor. It seems Gorilla Armor 2 isn’t quite as scratch-resistant.

The Galaxy S25 series is now available for purchase.

Galaxy S25’s New Camera Rings Are Basically Glued Onto Last Year’s Design [Video]

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