Samsung retires S Pen Air Commands because nobody used them

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra will have a built-in S Pen, as is the tradition for all Galaxy S Ultras smartphones after Galaxy S22 Ultra from 2022 What the S Pen will no longer have are air commands, because it turns out that almost no one cares about them.

Air Commands are a feature that allows Galaxy owners to assign different actions to pen gestures made, as the name suggests, in the air rather than on the phone’s screen. At a briefing, Samsung representatives told members of the media that less than one percent of S Pen customers were bothered to use Air Commands. Those that did mostly used them to trigger camera capture, something that can be done quite easily without the S Pen. For those one percent of users who might be sad to see Air Commands go, Samsung claims that removing gesture support as well as Bluetooth LE will increase the pen’s durability and eliminate some weight.