AI is the latest buzzword for smartphones this year, with plenty of brands touting their flagship devices that can seemingly do magical things to help you edit your photos, notes, and more. But which phone is the best at using AI? We’ve listed five AI phones in the Philippines that have stood out so far in 2025, sporting the best generative AI features that should make your life easier and your photos better this year.
Best AI phones for the Philippines in 2025 (Q1)
- OPPO Find X8
- ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro
- Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
- iPhone 16 Pro Max
- HONOR Magic7 Pro
OPPO Find X8
The OPPO Find X8 is the current flagship of the Chinese brand in the Philippines and was our pick for the best smartphone of the year in 2024. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s not small, but it’s compact enough that you won’t have trouble using it one-handed. It takes great snaps and comes equipped with OPPO’s full suite of AI tools, which includes their version of an AI eraser (to remove unwanted people from photos) as well as an AI reflection remover that eliminates reflections when you’re shooting through things like glass panels.
There’s also an AI Clarity Enhancer that upscales low-res images and an AI unblur tool that makes blurred photos—well—not blurred. If you’re creative, there’s also AI Re-image, which applies a template or filter to your photos to reimagine them in fun ways.
You also get a suite of AI writing and summary tools, an AI assistant for notes, and document translation.
ASUS ROG Phone 9 Pro
ASUS has found a novel way to utilize AI in their new gaming phone. While other brands leverage the tech to upscale and improve photos, ASUS uses AI to enhance gameplay. X Sense 3.0 employs AI recognition tech to identify the game you’re playing and streamline tasks based on your needs—auto-collecting items and automatically upgrading player skills in MOBAs, for example—so you can concentrate on ganking the next player that comes down your lane.
Meanwhile, X Capture 2.0 automatically records key gameplay moments like victory screens and lucky pulls, so you can quickly share your latest haul with friends on social media. Finally, the ROG Phone 9 Pro’s AI noise cancellation helps you communicate with your team more effectively (or just talk smack to randos in pickup games) by eliminating background noise—like sounds from a kitchen or café—more effectively than models without it.
All these features make this insanely powerful and capable gaming phone an even sweeter deal.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
While many derided Samsung’s top-tier offering as more of the same externally, there are plenty of new features under the hood that make it a worthy successor to last year’s model. Aside from sporting the fastest version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite, the phone also boasts a robust suite of AI tools for consumers.
Read: Samsung S25 Ultra first impressions
There’s a writing assist feature that helps create professional copy, add hashtags or emojis, summarize text, translate languages, and instantly check spelling and grammar. There’s also a transcription summarizer in the voice recorder, as well as real-time voice translation for both phone calls and in-person conversations.
Samsung also offers the requisite AI photo-editing tools in its image editor and photo gallery, which can remove reflections in glass, erase unwanted people from photos, and use AI to expand images you’ve cropped too tightly.
The coolest feature here is in Instant Slow-Mo, which uses AI to create extra frames and inject them into recorded video footage.
iPhone 16 Pro Max
If you’re a die-hard iPhone user, you already know that Apple got off to a rocky start with AI on their phones. Apple Intelligence had some trouble at the beginning, with staggered deployments in different regions—much to the chagrin of many. Feature rollbacks due to inaccurate information also set the company back, but now the AI features in the iPhone 16 series are mostly ready for prime time.
As with other phones, the iPhone 16 Pro Max has writing tools that can help you proofread, rewrite, summarize, reformat text, or open ChatGPT via the Compose option. Photos now includes a Clean Up tool (similar to Google’s Magic Eraser), natural language search for pics or clips, and auto-generated Memories animations.
Custom emojis can be created instantly, while Image Playground turns text prompts into sketches, illustrations, or animations. Finally, Notes can transcribe and summarize recordings, and the dialer app can do the same for calls.
HONOR Magic7 Pro
HONOR’s newest flagship will be dropping soon, and like most phones on this list, its AI tools are primarily aimed at producing better photos.
First on the list is AI Super Zoom, which uses AI to enhance the detail of shots taken beyond 30x zoom. The results are impressive—you can see the details in the photos instead of just a general blob, as is often the case with images zoomed in this far.
The Magic7 Pro can remove unwanted people from photos, but its generative AI fill is also good enough to convincingly replace missing details obscured by other objects. This is the best implementation of this tech we’ve seen so far.
The Magic7 Pro also has built-in Deepfake Detection, which alerts you if the phone suspects you’re viewing deepfake-generated video.
You also get access to Google’s Gemini, real-time translation tools, and HONOR’s Magic Portal—their take on Circle to Search.
These are the best Best AI Phones in the Philippines for 2025. Do you have any other suggestions you’d like to add? Let us know in the comments below!
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