Samsung is the king of the smartphone stylus – not only does it have the most models that support one, but the S Pen is deeply integrated into its Galaxies. And it’s nowhere better than in the Galaxy S Ultra flagships. That’s because the Galaxy S22 Ultra was the spiritual successor to the last Galaxy Note, essentially merging the Note and S Ultra lineups together.
But Samsung removed the Bluetooth and gyroscope from the S Pen for the Galaxy S25 Ultra – features it added in 2018 – which signals that the S Pen may be on its way out.
Citing its own survey, Samsung says that only 1% of Galaxy owners use those features of the S Pen. That’s a bad argument for a few reasons. First, 1% of all S Pen users is a lot of people – hundreds of thousands. Second, the S Pen was the ultimate remote shutter for your Galaxy phone (Samsung would like you to use your Galaxy Watch for that now). Third, Samsung didn’t add anything to compensate for the lack of Bluetooth.
Bluetooth aside, the S Pen is still a capable stylus. It still has 4096 levels of pressure sensitivity and it still opens up a world of productivity possibilities on your phone.
But the dumbing down of the S Pen, sadly, almost universally signals its upcoming complete removal from phones. We hope we’re wrong about this, but it’s never a good sign when features are removed.
And it can happen as early as next year. We could be looking at a S Pen-less Galaxy S26 Ultra. Samsung may use a bigger battery or inner component optimization as arguments for this.
On the other hand, Samsung could be working on a new standalone S Pen that will work with more phones – this opens up the possibility for fancy new cases with S Pen holsters for more phones, which will lead to improved profitability. It’s a winning strategy, even if we Bluetooth-enabled S Pen holdouts will be salty about it.
