The Galaxy S25 Ultra has brought many great improvements. It has better cameras, a great new software experience, an absolute beast of a chipset in the form of the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy. Samsung fans have largely been satisfied with the scope of these changes, but there's one thing that the company didn't talk about during its Unpacked event, how the S Pen has been crippled.

Samsung may have discontinued the Galaxy Note series a few years ago but it knew that the S Pen had to remain on its smartphones in some capacity. The stylus has a dedicated following and it's one of the reasons why the Galaxy Note phones were so highly sought after. So the Ultra models were reimagined in the shadow of the mighty Note.

Even the design was reminiscent of that series. While other models in the Galaxy S series had rounded edges and curves, the Galaxy S Ultra phones had the same boxy and industrial silhouette that made the Galaxy Note series popular. That has changed this year, as the Galaxy S25 Ultra moves away from those design elements and embraces the heritage of the Galaxy S series.

The S Pen has become a casualty of this embrace. Yes, it's still there, and it's stored inside the device, but it loses a crucial feature that made the S Pen truly unique. Samsung has eliminated Air Actions, the Bluetooth-enabled feature allowed the S Pen to be used as a clicker for the camera and with gestures for scrolling through the UI, etc.

Supporting this feature required the S Pen to have a small battery and several other components. The Galaxy S25 Ultra's S Pen doesn't have them. Samsung could say that removing this allowed it to make the Galaxy S25 Ultra thinner and lighter, which it noticeably is compared to its predecessor, but fans aren't necessarily buying this reasoning.

Fans across the globe are outraged at this change. You can see their reactions online, and we've received a lot of them across our social media profiles. To them, it doesn't feel like this had to be done in order to achieve a thinner and lighter profile. They weren't even asking for it!

If the only way to reduce the thickness was by removing these S Pen features, many fans would have much preferred the Galaxy S25 Ultra to be just as thick as its predecessor. It's already impressively svelte at 8.6 mm compared to the Galaxy S25 Ultra's 8.2 mm. The difference isn't the huge, it's just 0.4mm.

They want to call it for what it is: A blatant attempt at cost cutting camouflaged as a net benefit for fans. We've seen this before from Samsung. For example, new phones no longer ship with a charger in the box because of “sustainability.” You can drop $1,299 on a Galaxy S25 Ultra or $1,799 on a Galaxy Z Fold 6 today, but if you need a charger you must buy one, because it's not sustainable to ship one in the phone's box but certainly so shipping one separately for extra money.

It's one thing to make a change that customers had been asking for, it's another to take something away when nobody was asking for it. Samsung would say that this decision was based on its usage statistics and that people weren't really using the S Pen's Bluetooth functionality.

One wonders whether such logic is applied to the many Samsung apps every Galaxy smartphone comes with that people may not use because a similar app from Google is already pre-installed. Why not remove them and make the software even more nimble?

Fans are right in asking where does this end? At this rate, they can't discount the possibility of Samsung completely doing away with the S Pen, at least one that ships with and stores within the Ultra, just to sell it separately to anyone who wants to use it.

Samsung already does that for the Galaxy Z Fold series and with the Galaxy S25 Ultra moving away from the Note legacy as it is, we'd say this is a disheartening possibility that fans should start preparing themselves for.

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