It turned out that no one used the Samsung S Pen for gestures

It’s remarkable that Samsung got its Galaxy S25 Ultra as thin and light as it is, but it came at the cost of a few other features. For example, the venerable S Pen, a longtime part of the Galaxy Ultra series, no longer has a Bluetooth chip to facilitate certain functions. In a briefing for its latest flagship, Samsung told us and other media that no one was using these things in the first place, so it decided to delete them from the lineup entirely.

Specifically, the S Pen can no longer work Air operationsfunction started with Galaxy Note 10 five years ago. The basic premise of Air Actions is that you control the screen with the stylus from a distance, using it as a remote or as a stick. There were gestures you could “draw” in the air to control the interface from afar. The S Pen can also be used to browse your gallery and move back and forth on a page in Samsung’s browser. It could even be used as a slideshow remote.

If you have a WearOS, Samsung, or other smartwatch, you can use a camera shutter shortcut instead. Samsung still lets you use the open-palm gesture to start a countdown and take a selfie—it’s such a popular gesture that even Google adopted it for the Pixel.

In the grand scheme of things, what the S Pen offered was minimal compared to everything else under $1300 Galaxy S25 Ultra it aims to do now, which includes a range of new AI capabilities and higher-resolution wide-angle photography. Ditching the Bluetooth chip helped the Galaxy S25 Ultra reduce its weight enough for Samsung to praise its efforts to reduce the thinness of the chassis. Samsung has also kept the handy tracking mechanism that notifies you if you’ve left the S Pen behind – because if you’re going to use a phone with a dedicated stylus storage space, you should have an alarm mechanism that reminds you what you’ve left behind .

The Galaxy S25 Ultra’s S Pen still does everything you want a stylus to do: draw, take notes, and let you point and touch things. You can customize the Air Command menu to include only the abilities that interest you most. Screen off note captures fleeting thoughts in an instant with just the flick of a pen. There’s even an option to add a second S Pen for dual stylus input.