The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is an extremely impressive phone. As usual, it’s Samsung’s most powerful phone ever. However, there’s no big standout feature this year that I can put into the headline, beyond some more AI features (which will soon come to older phones anyway).
At some point, there are not really many ways companies can innovate on the best phones. Every few years, the edges will go from round to square, the camera gets a bit better, battery life improves a little, and the chip is a bit faster. But there’s no killer hardware change other than folding that I can recall in the last five years.
New smartphones aren’t made to be significantly better than last year’s model. Instead, they’re built to be an incremental improvement, so that by the time most people get around to upgrading in three years, it’ll be different enough to warrant upgrading.
So, to borrow from The Simpsons, every year most smartphone makers give Malibu Stacy a new hat, in the hopes that this is the hat that will encourage people with older phones to finally upgrade and begin the cycle over again. If you’re at the point in the cycle with the S22 Ultra, and especially the S21, you’re going to love this phone. If you’ve already got the S24 Ultra, then you already have most of the important stuff here.
Table of contents
First impressions
This is a premium-looking phone. It is the nicest-looking Android phone I’ve seen in a while. The sleek straight edges, the rounded corners; it just looks beautiful. My review unit is ‘Titanium Silverblue’, which is simultaneously a really stupid name, and absolutely the best way to describe this colour.
It’s also shockingly light for such a large phone. The way it’s balanced makes it feel lighter than 218g. Even though the year-on-year difference is only 14 whole grams, the difference feels more impressive than the sheer numbers.
The setup process was quick and easy to move over from my Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. All up, it makes an excellent first impression.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra specs and price
| Display | 6.9-inch AMOLED 1440 x 3120 pixels 120Hz refresh rate |
| Chipset | Snapdragon 8 Elite |
| Rear cameras | 200MP wide 50MP ultra-wide 50MP telephoto (5x zoom) 10MP telephoto (3x zoom) |
| Front camera | 12MP |
| RAM | 12GB |
| Storage | 256GB, 512GB, 1TB |
| Battery | 5,000mAh |
| Price | From $2,149 |
| Warranty | Two years |
| Official website | Samsung Australia |
There are a few key things to note here. To start with, the ultra-wide camera is 50MP now instead of 12MP on last year’s model. The battery is the same 5000mAh, but efficiencies mean it lasts a bit longer. In terms of hardware, it’s very similar to the S24 Ultra. It’s the upgrade to One UI 7 (which is also coming to the S24 Ultra later) that makes the real difference.
One disappointment is that while it’s Qi2 ready, it doesn’t actually have any of the magnets to give it that properly MagSafe-like experience without a magnetic case. I didn’t have the single official Samsung one on hand, but when used with a QuadLock Mag case, Qi2 worked a treat.
In terms of benchmarking, the S25 Ultra is a clear step up from last year’s model.
| Device | Geekbench 6 CPU Single-Core | Geekbench 6 CPU Multi-core | Geekbench 6 GPU |
|---|---|---|---|
| Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra | 2,360 | 8,911 | 14,671 |
| iPhone 16 Pro Max | 3,350 | 8,021 | 32,719 |
| Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6 | 2,328 | 7,231 | 15,646 |
| Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra | 2,141 | 6,690 | N/A |
| Google Pixel 9 Pro XL | 1,961 | 4,736 | N/A |
Those CPU numbers are very impressive. It beats the multi-core speeds of the iPhone 16 Pro Max while crushing the Z Fold 6, which is good. While the GPU is lower than the other two phones, that’s still very good.
One UI 7 puts AI front and centre
I hope you’re really excited about AI, because Samsung sure is and it’s getting harder to avoid. Because I can write for myself, and I’m more interested in my photos and videos reflecting the actual scene, rather than some false memory of an event perfected by AI (which is seriously dystopian if you think about it too long), I haven’t personally needed to use most of the AI features. The translation stuff is really good, and that’s great for travellers and people from multi-lingual families. But most of that was already available last year.
The big change for this year is that there are now two AI assistants vying for your attention. For the basic Samsung stuff, there’s good ol’ Bixby, who is just happy to be included. For everything else, there’s Google’s Gemini AI assistant, who has now been given new powers over your phone.
Gemini can now understand what’s on your phone screen, so you can ask it to add an event to your calendar that your friend has texted about. It can summarise a video you’re watching, for some reason. Or you can take a photo of a poster and ask Gemini for more information. Of course, if you are looking at the poster for an event, you could always just type the info into Google, which is possibly less effort, but I’m sure it has other uses. That’s coming to most Android phones soon, so while it’s fun to play with on the S25 Ultra, it’s not a reason to get one.
The things that are actually new and just for the S25 Ultra are Drawing Assistant and Now Brief. Drawing Assistant is good for when you want to get your device to do your art for you so you can focus on doing the dishes or something. You draw a sketch or give a prompt and then it generates an image that looks kinda okay. Uninspired, but tolerable. Similar to Apple’s Image Playground and Google’s Pixel Studio, it’s a good alternative to practising an artistic craft and getting better at it so you can express yourself.
Now Brief is a morning briefing your phone gives you that tells you about your alarms, the weather, what you’ve got on that day and (if you have a wearable) how you slept. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but I like it. Presumably, the more I use it, the better it’ll get to know me and make more relevant suggestions.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra camera quality
I want to be excited by the camera. But this is a bit of deja vu. I loved testing the S24 Ultra camera, because it was a really good camera. These are very similar cameras. They’re slightly better in low light, but unless you’re really looking for differences, you wouldn’t know which was which.
However, if you missed last year’s camera, you’re in for a treat. It’s great.
The photos that I think show the biggest difference are the portrait photos. None of these looked exactly like what I saw in real life, but the closest by a long way is the S25 Ultra. It looks so much more natural, and the colours match better to real life. The S24 Ultra is too saturated, and the iPhone 16 Pro Max is too washed out.
Looking at landscape photos taken using the standard zoom setting, it is so hard to tell the difference between these three. The iPhone better reflects the dramatic sky on the day, while the two Samsung phones present the day as looking sunnier and brighter than it was. The S25 Ultra perhaps has greener greenery than the S24 Ultra? But I’m really straining to see anything to point out in these between the two Samsung models.
On a 5x zoom test, the colour in all three looks completely off. The iPhone looks like it has the sepia tone North American movies get when they want to show they’re in South America, while the S24 Ultra looks like it was taken on a bright sunny summer’s day. Then the S25 Ultra looks like it was taken right before a storm. None of these colourings are accurate. If you zoom into the tree as closely as possible on all three to see how the details have been captured, the S24 Ultra has the most detail out of the three of them, with the S25 a close second and the iPhone 16 Pro Max just happy to be included.
On the 10X zoom, I really expected all the AI in the S25 Ultra would give it the edge, but actually the colouring on the iPhone and S24 Ultra are much closer to the reality of the day. That said, there is less noise and more detail in the water on the S25 Ultra, which is a tick in its favour.
Finally, comparing photos of a person, here is my very wriggly daughter who would not stay still to have her photo taken. While both the Samsung models have done an excellent job of getting a sharp photo of her while she was moving a lot, there is something uncanny and airbrushed about the way the image has been processed. It’s also made her skin much, much lighter.
Looking at these photos you’d think she was snow white, but she actually has olive skin, as depicted on the iPhone. I’m really uncomfortable about the way the Samsung phones have lightened her skin and airbrushed the red teething marks on her cheeks. At the same time, the iPhone emphasised every possible imperfection, making an eight-month-old baby look like she’s trying to hold down two jobs with bags under her eyes and a mysterious mark on her chin that isn’t there in real life. None of the cameras really impressed me on this one. The Samsung ones are cuter, but unreal, and the iPhone is a bit too gritty.
In terms of video, you can now use AI to remove certain types of sound from a video to give it an artificial kind of quiet sound.
Battery life
The S25 Ultra’s battery is marginally better. I find that I finish the day with 20-30% battery left, which is great considering how much of my life is currently being sucked up by Pokemon TCG Pocket. It’s not exactly the most graphically intensive game, but I do play a lot of it.
If you want to upgrade your phone because you want more battery life, and your phone is a few years old, this is going to knock your socks off.
Who is the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra for?
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is for Android users (or Android converts) who want the most powerful phone Samsung has to offer, with the S Pen, particularly people who are upgrading from around three years ago, or from a lower-tier phone.
It’s not the most thrilling update Samsung has ever released; this isn’t going to set the world on fire with the joy of innovation. But it’s a solid phone that does what you’d expect and more, plus some AI nonsense.
At $2,149, it’s definitely down the expensive end of the smartphone pool, so it’s designed for power users and those used to the finer things in life. It’s a solid, very good phone. It’s exactly what you’d expect it to be, and nothing more.
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