Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Review: Slightly Less Exclusive But Still Quite Ultra

Much has been said about the form factor of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and its lack of any kind of change over the last four years. Well, there have been some changes, but I wouldn't blame you for not really noticing them. Some changes are for the better; some not so much. But here we are, it's the year 2025, and we're in need of a new Samsung flagship, and the S25 certainly checks all the boxes.

But I'm not going to criticize Samsung's lack of design polish. I should, but I won't. I will cover all the design changes in just a little bit, but the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is a bit more than a flagship phone, in the traditional sense. This phone is about — I'm so sorry, I have to say it — AI. But it's a different flavor of AI than we have seen this far, and that's why it's exciting.

Maybe "exciting" isn't the right word. Maybe "important" is more accurate. We're going to find out together. I've been using a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review device provided by Samsung for one week on T-Mobile's network all around San Jose, San Francisco, and Chicago, and this is my full review.

The hardware on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is very much like previous generations, as I mentioned with a fair amount of snark in my hands-on at Samsung Unpacked. So, rather than give you the full tour, we're going to yadda-yadda past the same old, same old, and talk about what's new. First, the corners which are more round than last year's Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, and that was a necessary change. The phone is physically more comfortable to hold now. Not only that, but the bezels are smaller, meaning Samsung was able to shoehorn in an extra .1" into the display while staying with (mostly) the same footprint.

Then there's the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor laying inside the chassis and a new 50-megapixel ultrawide camera. We'll get into the performance of both of these components more in depth later, but this is a generational upgrade to the phone that the people expect, and Samsung delivered.

Finally, there's the last update – yes, there are really only three notable updates to the phone. The S Pen has gone through some changes. Notably, the Bluetooth features (and the hardware that made it work) are gone. No more camera shutter with the button, no more super cool gestures that you can show off at parties. The basics are still there, but Samsung found that less than 1% of users actually used the Bluetooth stuff.

Ok, fine. I was part of that 99%. But it's still a shame to see a flagship phone with less functionality than its predecessors.

On the software side, there are two really fun improvements to OneUI 7.0 that I have been clamoring for and might actually allow me to like Samsung's software. First, Samsung has — finally — adopted the vertical app drawer and let me be the first to say "hallelujah!" Samsung's previous side swiping app drawer was never optimal. Some Samsung diehards will miss it — I feel for you. I don't agree with you, but I feel for you. The vertical drawer is just superior, and I give Samsung mad props for finally adopting it.

The second addition was surprising. Android is bringing sports notifications to the top of your phone (and the Now Bar which we'll discuss in a bit). Specifically, I noticed my beloved Blackhawks were playing a game through a notification in the upper left corner of the screen. This seems to use the same parts of Android that allows you to pin sports scores to the home screen, and show persistent voice recordings in the notification area, so it's not technically "new" but this is a new implementation.

Put simply, the Now Bar seems to be Samsung answer to the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. It's in a different place, and its usefulness is just as dubious as Apple's was when it debuted. Basically, the Now Bar lives on the bottom of your lock screen. If you have something happening on the phone, like music playing, or a voice recording, or a workout, you can see it in the Now Bar without unlocking your phone.

You can also see sports scores, alarms and timers, Interpreter mode and more. It's all configurable in Settings. I like this functionality, and I like that Samsung is doing it, rather than a company like OnePlus. With Samsung adopting the Now Bar, it's more likely that developers will jump on board. However, this could very quickly turn into a function that you only find on Samsung hones, which might hinder adoption.

To use the iPhone as an example, early editions of the Dynamic Island were cool, but limited. It's when United, and Uber and Lyft, and ESPN and others got on board that this functionality got truly useful. Android doesn't have the same kind of chutzpah that Apple has. One of the phrases I hate most in this industry is "...and we can't WAIT to see what developers do with it" and this is very much that kind of situation. Time will tell.

A new feature introduced with the S25 Ultra is the Now Brief. Now Briefs show up throughout the day, morning, noon, and night. These are supposed to give you a look at your day ahead, what's going on during the day, and give you a recap of what went on. This includes things like news, the weather, sports scores, calendar appointments, and the like. Unfortunately, thus far I have only been treated to my calendar and a single news story — usually political — and nothing else.

That's not the experience I was expecting. I wondered early on, since AI is supposed to learn from you as you go about your day, perhaps more would pop up the longer I used the phone. That hasn't happened. Granted, one week is still a pretty small sampling, but I haven't seen any evidence that more is to come. Samsung showed me how to configure the types of news stories, which is nice, but there are several other categories — Digital Wellbeing, Gallery Stories, and the like — which I have selected, but are still missing. I have reached out to Samsung to ask about this, and I will be sure to update this review when I hear back.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra comes with all the same AI tricks that the S24 came with (as well as most other Samsung phones). That includes things like Sketch to Image, which led my poor wife down a wicked rabbit hole. Samsung's realistic sketch-to-image animals are still a lot more real looking than they have any right to be. But the really cool AI stuff comes from Gemini – and is available on any Gemini-enabled phone.

Now, you can tell Gemini to perform multiple actions in one statement and have it execute those steps. Samsung seems to really enjoy adding things to calendars because a lot of the actions Samsung representatives talked about included looking things up and adding events to their calendars.

Still, that's a pretty cool thing to be able to do. Multi-step actions are something that have been missing from AI until now and makes the idea approach the "usefulness" threshold I've been looking for.

The best part is, this is now possible on any Gemini-enabled device, including iPhones. That's right, if you have the Gemini app on your iPhone, you can also do these things, and welcome to the party!

At a separate event during "Unpacked Week" Samsung hosted a roundtable talk (shown above) with representatives from Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm, and they described how they all worked together to design the AI experience on the S25 Series. This was very informative, but there were a couple of statistics that stood out for me.

The first stat was that in a surveyed group of thousands of people, over the last six months everyday usage of AI increased from 16% last summer to 27% this winter. The second was that 56% of people who did not use AI every day doubted AI's ability to bring meaningful benefits. It's really that second stat that describes my general take on AI thus far.

Up until now AI has been rather focused on creation — make a drawing, write a poem, make a video. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and Gemini have started accomplishing tasks, like creating a calendar entry, or researching some data. In one example, I asked Gemini to find the addresses for the "Painted Ladies" (houses in San Francisco), the house from the '80s sitcom "Full House" and the house from "Mrs. Doubtfire" and put all three addresses into my notes. It's important that I was able to put this into Keep Notes (my preference) over Samsung Notes. Then, I asked Maps to plot a walking route that passed all three addresses.

Of course, this is AI. One of the three addresses was wrong. The only reason I noticed on address was wrong was because I had already plotted those addresses the night before and noticed that the map it presented me was not the same. Had I not done that, I might have toddled off on my merry way to the second address and found myself at a house that looked nothing like my childhood memories.

The fact of the matter is, AI still needs a lot of work, and rigorous fact-checking. The unfortunate fact is that most people will not fact-check before toddling off to whatever address AI sends them to and will spend the rest of their lives showing people a photo of the wrong house when they talk about how they found the "Full House" house.

As much as I want to believe in AI, this one thing still holds me back. AI is still deeply flawed — all of it. Until AI can give me consistently good results, I'll remain part of the 56% that doesn't believe it will bring meaningful benefits, but it's not because AI can't do useful things. It's because AI is still excessively unreliable. But what might be even worse — it's confidently inaccurate. It will tell you a thing with a lot of confidence that is completely, ridiculously false.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra runs Qualcomm's latest processor – the Snapdragon 8 Elite For Galaxy. This is a similar name that the last generation Samsung phones used, though Samsung suggested that there was a deeper collaboration here. According to Samsung, it collaborated with Qualcomm to build a new Application Processor. Time will tell if the benefits are truly tangible, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite is already a powerhouse, as I discovered with the OnePlus 13.

Games like "Genshin Impact" and "Asphalt Legends" perform flawlessly. We're honestly mostly past the point where gaming can determine hardware performance in flagships. They're all plenty fast, which is a great thing. Gamers can now officially get on board the mobile gaming train.

As for the battery, it's been pretty remarkable. I haven't had a ton of time to test it, but I managed to leave the phone off the charger for two full days before plugging it in and still had 15% left of the 5,000 mAh battery. The only thing I found that could deplete the battery was plugging in the Xreal One AR glasses, switching the DeX mode (and attaching a ProtoArc Mouse and Keyboard that I used to cover CES 2025). While streaming music to Samsung Galaxy Buds Pro 3, I wrote the bulk of this review using that setup. But it severely impacted my battery. I still had 35% left in the tank after a full workday of phone use and about four hours of DeX/Glasses use, but it certainly wasn';t the 48 hours I'd previously experience. Long story short, battery life is excellent.

As for the cameras on the phone, there is a four-pack of cameras on the back. Returning are the 200-megapixel main camera, 10-megapixel 3x telephoto camera, and 50-megapixel 5x telephoto camera. New this year is the 50-megapixel ultrawide camera with 120-degree field of view.

I took the phone on a nerdy day trip to San Francisco for a 1990s nostalgia-fueled sightseeing tour, which started at the Painted Ladies houses and ended at Fisherman's Wharf with a quick golden stopover at the Golden Gate Bridge. I did not come away disappointed by the camera during those times. The 10-megapixel 3x telephoto camera is the obvious odd-man-out, and that comes through in the grainy dark areas of the shots, but for the most part, I have no problem shooting during the day.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

One aspect of long-distance photography that has gotten a lot better continues the tradition of the OnePlus 13 — AI corrections of long-distance shots. I took one set of shots of a clock tower I can't even see in the ultrawide shot of the scene, but I was able to zoom in on individual numbers at 100x. I'm not saying these shots are perfect, but they are miles better than they were even a year ago.

At night, things are still good, but to be honest, not as good as I wanted them to be. Samsung spent a lot of time talking about night videography in particular, and we'll get to that. There is a lot to like about nighttime landscapes, but portraits of people in low light still end up with a lot of grain and some blur. If your subject is moving, even slightly, it will very much adversely affect your photo even though Samsung said it could account for movement and get a sharp shot anyway.

Adam Doud/SlashGear

On the video side, when there's a subject that you're following, footsteps and their associate judder are minimized, but still pop up every now and then. Once a subject leaves the frame, the picture falls apart quickly. Also, shooting with anything but the main camera at night is not recommended. Overall, the camera set is not bad, but for $1,300, not bad is not good enough.

One area where Samsung noticeably improved video capture includes the addition of log format. Log, from what I understand, is the equivalent to RAW, but for video. I'm not a videographer, so I'm not well-versed in the intricacies and capabilities of capturing in log, but I know it's a cool thing for those that wanted it. Now you have it.

The other cool part about video capture comes from Samsung's Audio Eraser. This is similar to Google's feature of the same name, but rather than just eliminate noise automatically, Samsung gives you a sort of audio mixer that lets you reduce noise by category, such as wind, nature, voices, or background noise. Presumably the most common use-case will be voices when you're trying to capture nature or scenery, and vice versa when you're capturing a person talking near nature or in a windy environment. It's pretty cool and works very well. I also suspect it'll only be a matter of time before this rolls out to other Android devices.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra can be had in the U.S. for $1,299. As always, there are various trade-in deals that can bring down the cost through carriers and retail stores. Samsung also has a few Samsung.com exclusive colorways that you can buy if you go through the manufacturer directly. But the question is, should you?

Overall, this is a really great phone that really showcases when an AI phone can be. Samsung, along with Google and Qualcomm, but a ton of AI functionality into a phone body that has not changed much over the past few years. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels stagnant. It also means the majority of the improvements to this phone are largely software-based and further, a lot of what I talked about in this review you can now do on any phone with Gemini. That's really great news for the Android ecosystem, but not really great for Samsung.

Pout simply — and for the record Samsung seems to realize this too — if you have an S22 Ultra, or maybe an S23 Ultra, this is a great phone to pick up and you'll be pleased with the improvements. If you have an S24 Ultra, there's a better than average chance that most of what I liked about this phone will be on your phone within months anyway. In fact, you'll also lose some S Pen functionality if you upgrade. So S24 Ultra (and even S23 Ultra) owners should probably stand pat.

But Samsung, this design can't live through another year. Rounded corners and 15 grams lighter is nice, but if it starts to look like you're phoning it in (pun intended) your customers will lose interest. If they're dropping this kind of coin on a flagship, they want it to feel special, and that means not looking exactly like its three older siblings.