Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Review: Powerful, but not especially innovative

Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra isn’t a radical reinvention of the Galaxy S25 Ultra line, and whether that’s a good thing or not will very much depend on which phone you’re upgrading from.

Score: 4/5

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In this review

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Specifications
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Design
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Camera
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Performance
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Battery
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Conclusion

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is Samsung’s latest flagship phone, and as you might expect out of a phone that will set you back north of $2,000, it’s quite a capable device.

Indeed, I could say that it’s the best phone Samsung has produced to date, and in most respects that would be absolutely true.

If you’re a die-hard Samsung phone and you want the best right now, this is it.

However that’s not the same thing as saying that it’s the phone everyone should buy. Even leaving the hefty asking price aside for a minute, the fact that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra really only tinkers around the edges of what the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra did last year does make it a touch tricky to recommend unless you’re after a premium phone to replace a much older handset.

There are features that I wish Samsung had included or made more of, and the continuing focus on AI-led features sadly doesn’t really make the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra stand out quite as much as Samsung might want you to think it does.

Ethical note: This review is based off a little over  a week’s testing time, less than I would have liked to have for evaluative purposes – but this is a phone that was loaned to me by Samsung Australia, not one that’s been sent my way permanently. As always, irrespective of that, this gets it reviewed, albeit in slightly less time.

Update: The reviewed model has indeed returned to Samsung, but the company has now loaned me a unit for long-term evaluation and comparison for future features (which, honestly, I did not expect). As always, this has no effect on my review (or future reviews), but I do think upfront ethical disclosure is vital. Now, on with the review.

Also read:
Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra Review

Design

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is built around a 6.9 inch QHD+ 1-120Hz Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with a resolution of 3120x1440 pixels. Any phone with a 6.9 inch screen is going to be large in your hand, and that’s certainly true here. Samsung has tinkered with the design just a little here, with slightly more rounded edges that do give a more pleasant feel in the hand.

Even with the inclusion of Corning Gorilla Armour 2 glass on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, I’d suggest that buying a case to protect your $2,149+ investment would be a wise move.

The Galaxy S25 Ultra can lay claim to being a little lighter than the Galaxy S24 Ultra was, but the difference here is only 18g. While that’s interesting engineering, it’s one of those details that I suspect plays more of a psychological trick on you – you think it “feels” lighter in the hand – rather than being substantially lighter in a way that every phone user would appreciate. Opinions on this can vary, but once you tip over 200g in a phone, I’m not so certain that folks will notice the difference of 18g.

It's 18g lighter -- which is fine engineering, but arguably not a weight difference you'd notice until I told you about it. Now you can't forget it. See how that works?

The display on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is very good, and I’d expect nothing less from Samsung. Bezels are minimal, so you’re spending most of your time simply looking at its display when in use, excluding the very small holepunch array for the front-facing selfie camera. As yet, the only Samsung phone that has an under-display camera to get around this are its Galaxy Z Fold lines – and there the quality isn’t great, so I can’t entirely blame Samsung for skipping out on that option here.

Where I would have liked to see Samsung maybe be a little more bold is in colour choices. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra sells in Australia in 7 different hues -- Titanium Silverblue, Titanium Black, Titanium Grey, Titanium Whitesilver, Titanium Jetblack, Titanium Jadegreen or Titanium Pinkgold.

Firstly, I’d like to buy someone in Samsung’s marketing department a space bar, because theirs is clearly faulty… but I digress.

While seven colours sounds like a lot, and I’m sure there’s engineering and R&D a-plenty to make them, the practical reality here is that you’ve two shades of black, two of silver, one grey that sits between them and then only green or pink gold to pick from.

The seven shades you can get the regular (and cheaper) S25 and S25+ cover a wider spectrum of the rainbow and give you more choice – so why do the pricier models get such a subdued range of hues?

The Galaxy S Ultra line took over note-taking duties from the Galaxy Note line back in 2021,
so naturally enough there’s an S-Pen located in the body of the phone. It pops out from the lower left hand side of the phone, and has seen one notable change this year, in that it’s no longer Bluetooth compatible.

The practical upside there is that while you can still use the S-Pen for scribbling notes or AI-assisted drawing (more on that later), it’s no longer workable for raised screen gestures or to use as a camera or slideshow remote when not actually touching the phone screen.

Samsung’s contention appears to be that very few users were actually using those features, and maybe that’s true – and maybe it’s a little alarming to think of your S-Pen usage being analysed in that way – but I’m never going to be a fan of a lesser featured device relative to years gone past. The pricing on the Galaxy S25 Ultra hasn’t bounced upwards particularly, and maybe that’s the price you pay for avoiding inflation. That would be OK with me as I’ve never personally been a huge S-Pen user, but you’ll have to make your own call as to whether that would also sit well with you.

On the durability side, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is rated as IP68 for water resistance, which means it should survive accidental dunkings – but as always, it’s not a great idea to take it for a swim in the pool or surf in the waves, because water resistance is not the same thing as water proofing.

Camera

Flagship smartphones often live and die on the quality of their cameras, and this is a good thing, because it pushes innovation in the smartphone camera space.

The features that debut in flagships one year make their way slowly down the pricing ladder, which is why it’s possible to buy mid-range and even budget phones these days with surprisingly good cameras.

The pace of innovation does mean that phone makers who want to stand out need to keep things moving along at a fairly brisk pace year-on-year.

It’s hard to look at the Galaxy S25 Ultra and not see Samsung somewhat resting on its laurels in this respect. The Galaxy S25 Ultra features a 50MP Ultra-Wide lens, 200MP Wide lens and dual telephoto 50MP and 10MP lenses at the rear, plus a 12MP front-facing selfie camera.

The primary difference there between the Galaxy S25 Ultra and last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra is that the ultra-wide lens has been bumped up to a 50MP sensor to better handle your landscape style shots.

Is that enough? It doesn’t feel like it’s a whole lot of improvement on the surface of it relative to the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s asking price, and certainly nothing to get excited about if you’ve already got a Galaxy S24 Ultra.

Which is not to say that the Galaxy S25 Ultra is a bad camera phone; it’s just that it’s not that much different from last year’s model.

Galaxy S25 Ultra Selfies are decent, but that should absolutely be assumed by now.

Everyday photos are easy to take -- and again, that's par for the course for an Ultra phone.

This Wombat poses no threat to me -- or the Galaxy S25 Ultra's cameras, as you'd expect.

Where a premium camera needs to stand out more of course is in additional photo modes and capabilities.

On the telephoto front, you rather predictably get telephoto zoom up to 100x (“Space Zoom” in Samsung-speak), and just like every other year, 100x zoom shots aren’t really worth taking.

I'll give you an example of shots taken at a local fountain.

The ultra wide on that fancier new 50MP lens works well, as you would expect.

Nothing to complain about with the wide lens either.

The 2x zoom is almost certainly just a crop of that primary wide 200MP sensor, given that the true telephoto doesn't kick in until 3x. No complaints, however.

3x lens likewise shoots well. You can see where this is going, right?

5x zoom is also a native optical zoom, so of course it's decent.

10x zoom is the first hybrid digital zoom range offered by default, and it's a good choice.

30x can be tricky to frame properly (as it was here), but it can create some pleasing photos... but that's about as far as you should take it because...

100x zoom is just ugly, and it pretty much always has been ever since Samsung started shoving it into its Ultra phones.

I suspect that, like Oppo does with the Find X8 Pro there’s a level of AI sharpening going on with 100x shots, but the results are still sub-optimal.

Samsung's other big pitch for the Galaxy S25 Ultra is that it also offers improved low light photography over prior models.

I didn't have an S24 Ultra available to me to do any head-to-head testing, but comparative testing against competitors? That I could do, so I headed out one night to do a little low light shot testing:

First stop, a vertical shot of a tree in near darkness. Here's how all three phones compared:

None of the phones did badly here, with the S25 notably getting just a little more colour and light at the top of the tree. It's close, however.

Next up, a shot I've used more times than I can count for testing out low light camera performance of the park behind the tree:

Here there's a definite quality gulf between the Pixel and the Apple and Samsung phones, though I'd give it to the Samsung again (just), simply because the iPhone colours the grass in the forefront in green where the S25 Ultra picks up more of its patchy nature.

Next up, a shot of the illuminated clubhouse to see how these phones handle low light with patches of illumination:

Here the iPhone takes the edge, simply because it grabs just a little more light and detail around the tree tops compared to the Samsung (and even moreso over the Pixel)

To test out a little more illumination difference, a shot down a road with a number of light sources in play:

Here again the iPhone gets the lighting balance right (or better) than its competitors, though there are some aesthetic choices in play here too.

The other type of photo that people love to take in low light are selfies, but here there's a significant difference in how each phone takes low light selfies in portrait mode. Both Apple and Samsung put up a large glowing disc or rectangle on the screen before taking the selfie, effectively "lighting" your face prior to the shot. This is something the Pixel doesn't do.

Technically, that makes the Pixel's shot more honest than the Samsung or Apple shots... but it certainly doesn't make for a pleasing looking photo in any way at all.

So very clearly, the Pixel is the worst performer there -- either that, or I accidentally slipped into an alternate cursed dimension while taking that selfie and never noticed -- but I'd give the edge to the S25 Ultra here too. Neither it nor the iPhone selfie are great, to be sure, but there's less grain and more of what approaches skin texture in the Samsung shot.

Does all of that equate to better low light performance? It's certainly improving, though I do suspect the lines between it and at least last year's Galaxy S24 Ultra probably aren't that high.

Performance

Samsung has for quite some time now had a tie-up with Qualcomm that saw it nab a given year’s premium Snapdragon processor first, often with a few optimisations thrown in as well.

That deal sees the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, paired up with 12GB of RAM and either 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of internal storage. There’s no capacity for micro SD card expansion, but the model loaned to me by Samsung Australia did support dual Nano SIM plus eSIM capabilities.

Samsung has for years now in straight line CPU benchmark terms trailed behind Apple’s own A-series silicon, with Qualcomm promising every year that its newest processors would be even faster and better, only to fall behind, sometimes by more than a generation of A-series processors.

It would appear that the race is back on, however, given how the Galaxy S25 Ultra performed using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

It’s been a long, long time since the top of that chart didn’t have “Apple” as the prefix for a phone name, but Samsung has managed it, and it won’t be alone in incorporating the Snapdragon 8 Elite into its phones this year – which means that it could be about to get very interesting in comparative performance and value terms.

It’s even better news for Samsung on the GPU performance front:

The one slight caveat that I’d put on those figures when comparing against Apple’s efforts is that most app development that taxes the GPU on the iOS side tends to (to my understanding) use Apple’s Metal framework for added efficiency, so it’s not a straight up like-for-like comparison there.

Still, there’s no denying that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is a powerful smartphone.

Like so many flagship phones you’re arguably overstuffed with power here unless you’re going to use the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra as your effective desktop via DeX. Most people I suspect won’t do that, but then the advantage of having this additional performance headroom isn’t in the here and now, but in the fact that it should remain a quite capable and quick device for years to come.

Like prior flagship Samsung phones, you’re promised seven OS updates and seven years of security updates starting from Android 15 and Samsung’s own OneU 7 platform.

The other area where Samsung really wants to push the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra into your hands as a must-have device is via Galaxy AI, because AI is going to remain the big marketing push for most phone makers this year.

This covers off the rather unusual state of having both Google’s Gemini and Samsung’s Bixby assistants on the same phone, and while they don’t really trip over each other, with every year I’m less enamoured of Bixby as a prospect. Then again, I’m waiting for the moment when a phone comes along with an AI feature that makes me think that it’s a must-have feature – and the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s implementation of Galaxy AI hasn’t really changed that much at all.

New this year are features such as the Now Brief, which is meant to use AI to intelligently give me the details about my day that I really need in a snapshot view. Nice in theory, but the implementation doesn’t feel great for now.

This may be a function of the shorter review period that I’ve had with it, and maybe it’s about to get super-smart, but so far it’s really only acted as a simple weather widget, a small homily about my day and a link to YouTube for some reason. It’s meant to incorporate news feeds as well, but so far, I’ve had no news. Given the state of the world, maybe it’s saving my sanity, but then again maybe not.

Sheep farmers rejoice: The Now Brief has you covered. This is not detail I needed myself, however. Also of note: This was at 11:51am, but it's telling me about last night for some reason.

The other new feature that isn’t quite as likely to appear on every other Android phone – because much of the Galaxy AI story is really just the same kinds of features we’re seeing in Gemini-enabled devices – is Drawing Assist.

This lets you create a sketch, maybe add in a text description and then let Galaxy AI turn it into a fully featured artwork.

So my first attempt was this awful Godzilla sketch.

If it wasn’t already clear, I paint my pictures with words, not actual pictures

Adding the prompt “Godzilla breathing fire over Tokyo” got me in trouble with Drawing Assist, not for an impending Toho lawsuit, but because it might contain content “inappropriate” content.

Galaxy AI, it turns out, has very strict ideas about what’s appropriate or not for Kaiju to engage in, because even “Godzilla breathing fire” wasn’t acceptable either.

But Godzilla was… and it delivered the exact same kinds and styles of Godzilla pictures that I’ve seen from other AIs.

That's definitely the scaly chap, though my picture was obviously no inspiration to it at all.

Now, that’s not surprising comparing it to, say, the Galaxy Tab S10 because it's also using Galaxy AI, but it’s also the case for the Pixel 9 Pro’s Pixel Studio too.

AI, it turns out, just isn’t that creative either, it's just good for churning out the same results based on what it knows, not what it can imagine. Because it's AI, and right now, imagination is not part of the feature set, no matter what slickly produced marketing ads might want to tell you.

You can also use your own photos as the basis for some AI generated artwork, and you might think that this would produce more creative works. Experimentally, I threw the S25 Ultra's low light selfie at Drawing Assist to see what would happen:

This is apparently me. I'm really, truly not seeing the resemblance here at all.

Also not me, but this time in a suit. I do appreciate the "AI Generated Content" label, though.

Battery

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is a large phone, and that could have given Samsung scope to pack in even more battery capacity behind its immense frame.

Samsung did not do this, instead opting for that 18g weight drop from the Galaxy S24 Ultra. At 5,000mAh it’s not tiny in battery life terms, but it sure is average for an Android phone these days.

That concerned me, because such a powerful phone is likely to want a lot of battery energy to maintain that power, unless it’s also backed up with smart battery optimisation. But how to tell?

I’ve recently written about the variability of battery tests, and to give me a baseline for comparison, I used my standard 3 hour YouTube battery test to see how the Galaxy S25 Ultra would compare. Here’s how it stacks up:

Given the processing power at play here, those aren’t bad figures at all. Sure, they’re not the best in class either, but they’re solid through the first hour where phones that drop below 90% often flag themselves as problematic for even a single day, while lasting reasonably well through the second and third hours.

My own anecdotal testing has been shorter than I’d like, but certainly this is a phone that’s got scope for most users to last out a day unless you’re hammering it relentlessly.

Like so many premium phones, there’s no charger in the box with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, just a USB-C to USB-C charging cable, so you’ll have to provide your own charger (up to 45W) for wired charging.

Wireless charging is also supported, and so is Qi2… sort of.

Technically speaking, the Galaxy S25 Ultra can charge at up to Qi2’s maximum wireless rates, but if you drop it onto a Qi2 charger, especially an angled one, it will slide right off.

That’s because the Galaxy S25 Ultra supports the Qi2’s charging standards, but not the incorporation of magnetic coils within the body of the phone that would make the magnetic docking part of Qi2 work without a secondary Qi2 compatible case. Samsung, naturally enough sells those if you’re so inclined.

At one level magnetic cases are nothing new, there’s loads of third party options around, though it appears that only the Qi2 certified type might work optimally with Qi2 chargers. It’s still ultimately disappointing to me that Samsung didn’t actually incorporate Qi2 properly in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, instead opting for this half-and-half system instead.

Galaxy S25 Ultra: Alex’s Verdict

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is a really good phone with good cameras, nice performance, decent battery life and a great display. It’s not inexpensive, but then we are playing in the premium end of the phone pool here.

The big question really is whether that’s enough for you.

If you’re already rocking, say, a Galaxy S24 Ultra or S23 Ultra, the answer to that should be no.

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is faster and a little nicer, but it’s not from-$2,149-nicer, even if you could get a decent trade-in for your existing unit (and presuming that trade-in itself doesn’t go horribly wrong.)

If you’re coming from a much older premium Galaxy phone, or an older phone, period, then it’ll be a huge jump up in performance terms, and with it, the promise of a phone that should stay fast and relevant for a good long time to come.

Galaxy AI still isn’t all that to me, though I can accept that there are folks for whom matters like automatic text generation might be something of a boon. Samsung’s still staying quiet about quite what it all might cost come the end of this year, too.

However, the additional rub here is that Samsung’s also got another option open to you that’s not quite as powerful, but is considerably cheaper in the form of the Galaxy S24 FE.

That’s more than enough phone for most folks, and right now, if you asked me which phone most people who want to buy a Samsung phone specifically should opt for, it’d be that one.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Pricing and availability

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra retails in Australia at $2,149 (256GB), $2349 (512GB) and $2749 (1TB).

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