Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Review: More Than Meets The Eye

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is a familiar face, but a very different beast. It’s a phone defined by subtle refinements and a few bold choices, making it a compelling upgrade.

On the surface, it looks like Samsung did the bare minimum to release a new flagship phone. However, once you spend time with the Galaxy S25 Ultra, you’ll notice that there is a lot of changes here that make this a bigger upgrade than it first seems. Like the change in design to flat sides and curved corners. Or the changes to the ISP which greatly improve the cameras, despite using the same camera hardware (other than the ultrawide). And even battery life exceeded expectations, given that it is the same size battery as the Galaxy S20 Ultra from 2020.

The real question, however, is whether these changes are enough to make it a worthy upgrade? That’s what we will explore in this review of the Galaxy S25 Ultra. When you’re reading this, we are getting started on reviewing the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S25 Plus, so stay tuned if you’re interested in those two.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Design and Build Quality

These days, the design of a phone is tied to the brand identity of the phone maker. So we don’t expect to see any major redesigns these days, instead, they are iterations of the design to make it better and more comfortable. And that’s what Samsung did here. Last year, the Galaxy S24 Ultra had a flat top and bottom, with the sides being curved. That resulted in sharp corners that could be uncomfortable to hold after a little bit of time. That’s no longer a problem on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, since it is now flat on all four sides, with the corners being more rounded.

Now some Galaxy Note fans are going to be upset with this, as it does get away from that Galaxy Note aesthetic. However, the way Samsung did this, the Galaxy Note aesthetic is still there, just improved. It’s still a pretty boxy phone, with the corners being very slightly rounded, making it better to hold in your hands for an extended period of time. Though, it’s still not the most comfortable phone to hold, in my opinion.

Honestly, that’s probably the biggest design change this year. There are a couple of changes that you won’t see, but definitely feel. One is the weight. Samsung has decreased the weight of the Galaxy S25 Ultra to 218g, that’s about 15g lighter than the Galaxy S24 Ultra, or about 6% lighter. That’s no easy feat, given that the phone actually has a larger display this year. It is something that you will feel in the hand, however, and it does make a huge difference for comfort.

The other design change is the larger display, despite the Galaxy S25 Ultra being physically smaller when compared to the Galaxy S24 Ultra. Thanks to the slimmer bezels, Samsung was able to get this to a 6.85-inch display, which allowed them to round up to 6.9 inches. Nice.

All of the usual suspects are still present on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Including the power and volume rocker above it on the right side of the phone. The USB-C port and SIM card tray are on the bottom – please do not stick the SIM ejector tool into the microphone hole. With the four cameras on the back, and the laser autofocus. Samsung did decide to add the camera rings from the Galaxy Z Fold 6 (and Flip 6) to the Galaxy S25 Ultra, and I really do dislike them. But the reason I dislike them likely won’t bother most other people. When taking photos of the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the camera rings tend to make the cameras look out of focus. Which is really only a problem for journalists and content creators. The other issue I have with it, will affect everyone, is they are now thicker. Meaning the phone is going to wobble on a table much more than before. So you’ll definitely want to get a case.

At the time of writing this review, DisplayMate had not reviewed the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s display, but I do feel confident in saying that this is the best display on a phone. The OnePlus 13 held that title for a bit, and technically still does, based on DisplayMate’s grading. However, Samsung’s display is simply stunning. I’ve watched far more content on this phone than I normally do during a review period, because the display is so good. The color reproduction is spot on, and it does get very bright.

While I do live in Michigan and it’s currently January – meaning we won’t see the sun for a couple more months – I was able to test out the brightness in direct sunlight in San Jose. And it performed very well. It was still plenty bright to see the display, without getting warm. In Michigan, this is even more important when we do get the few hours of sunlight bouncing off of the snow, which makes it even brighter. Galaxy S25 Ultra was no match for that amount of light though. Despite only having a peak brightness of 2,600nits.

In our testing, we were able to get it up to about 1250nits. Which is to be expected, as that peak brightness number you will likely never see. It is really only achieved in a laboratory in the most absolute perfect conditions. High Brightness Mode is more important, which is likely around 1300-1500 nits, Samsung unfortunately does not publish that number.

Now, of course, we can’t forget about Gorilla Armor 2. Last year, Samsung debuted Gorilla Armor which is an anti-reflective glass that Corning developed, and it also makes it stronger. Making it less susceptible to scratches and shattering. In fact, Samsung said during our Galaxy S25 briefing that Gorilla Armor reduced screen repairs by 60%, when compared to the Galaxy S23 Ultra. Which is probably an even more impressive feature than the anti-reflective coating. Below, you can see how it looks compared to the other Galaxy S25 models – since only the Galaxy S25 Ultra has it.

To put it bluntly, this display is amazing. The only complaint I have is the lack of Dolby Vision. Now this is a thing across all of Samsung’s products, as they would prefer to support open-source HDR standards like HLG, which they also helped create. But where Samsung is one of the only phone makers that doesn’t have Dolby Vision support, is a pretty big deal – especially for a $1,299 price tag.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Performance

For the last few years, Samsung has worked with Qualcomm to create a “For Galaxy” version of their latest chipset. Typically this meant that it was overclocked. That is the case again this year, but it is also fully customized for the Galaxy S25 series. Samsung said in our briefing that this makes the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy even more efficient than Snapdragon 8 Elite on competing devices, like the OnePlus 13. We hear claims like this quite often, so I took with a grain of salt. But after testing the OnePlus 13 for the past month or so with the Snapdragon 8 Elite, and now using the Galaxy S25 Ultra, it is definitely more efficient.

Snapdragon 8 Elite has its prime cores set at 4.32GHz, while Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy has these overclocked to 4.47GHz, which is just nuts for a smartphone. But somehow, Samsung was able to make it perform as well as the OnePlus 13 in battery life, despite having a much smaller battery. More on that in the battery section. The Snapdragon 8 Elite doesn’t run hot, like we’ve seen in some other phones – mainly the realme GT 7 Pro. As you’ll see in our thermal benchmarking section, the Galaxy S25 Ultra ran cooler than other Snapdragon 8 Elite devices, and even its predecessor. Of course, that huge vapor chamber likely helps out with that.

Overall, when it comes to performance, I have zero issues with the Galaxy S25 Ultra. Even though it does have only 12GB of RAM. That doesn’t seem to be an issue for this device, even with all of the Galaxy AI features included.

Benchmarks

Here at AndroidHeadlines, we benchmark every device that we review. We put it through three different benchmarks to see just how powerful these devices truly are. This includes Geekbench 6 which shows us the raw performance of the CPU and GPU. 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, which pushes the device to its absolute limits and allows us to see how thermal throttling is. And finally a video export test with Capcut, timing how long it takes to export a 60-second 4K30 video.

First up is Geekbench 6. Probably the most popular benchmarking tool out there, and with the Galaxy S25 Ultra, we are comparing it to the OnePlus 13 as that also has a Snapdragon 8 Elite inside, and the Galaxy S24 Ultra. The Galaxy S25 Ultra scored about 43% higher than Galaxy S24 Ultra in single-core, 48% higher in multi-core, and 61% higher on the GPU. It also scored the highest of any other Snapdragon 8 Elite device. Those running the Dimensity 9400 are beating it pretty handily in the GPU test, like the Vivo X200 Pro and OPPO Find X8 Pro, however. What this shows us, Qualcomm’s claims of around 40% improvement across the board are correct.

For kicks and giggles, we also compared it to the iPhone 16 Pro, with its A18 Pro chipset. And the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy beat it in both single-core and multi-core, but the iPhone destroyed it in the GPU test, with a score of 32,846. I’m not sure any Android chipset is coming close to that GPU score anytime soon.

Next up is 3D Mark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test. This benchmark pushes the phone to its absolute limit, running the same 1-minute loop twenty times. It then provides us with a best loop, a lowest loop, and from those twenty scores, a stability percentage. The Galaxy S25 Ultra does have a pretty low stability percentage of 47.7%. However, it’s best loop score is still about 13% higher than the OnePlus 13 which runs on the same chipset. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra had a Best Loop of 6,744, a Lowest Loop of 3,215, and as mentioned, Stability was just 47.7%.

Finally, we have our video export test. In this test, we load up the exact same 60-second video, and export it at 4K30, timing how long it takes to export. The Galaxy S25 Ultra did it in a blazing 5.56 seconds. That is the fastest time we’ve seen for a phone that was not a gaming phone. Those like the RedMagic 9 Pro, and surprisingly the iPhone 16 Pro, did it faster, though still over 5 seconds, so the difference is pretty negligible.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Battery life and Charging

When asked about the same battery size as the past five “Ultra” phones, Samsung said they were satisfied with the battery life from their 5,000mAh cell. Which, at the time, we all thought that was just the corporate line to keep the press happy. But it turns out, this 5,000mAh capacity battery does perform exceptionally well. You know earlier when I said the Snapdragon 8 Elite is more efficient in the Galaxy S25 Ultra than competing devices? This is one way we’re able to prove that.

Comparing with the OnePlus 13, with a 6,000mAh capacity battery and a slightly smaller display (6.82 vs 6.85 inches), it performs relatively the same as the Galaxy S25 Ultra with a 5,000mAh capacity battery which is about 16% smaller. On both devices, I was able to hit 10 hours of screen-on time, over almost 30 hours. That’s pretty impressive, now I won’t need 10 hours of screen on time every day, but some days are heavier than others, so I’m happy to have that extra juice.

When I’m not pushing the Galaxy S25 Ultra, this actually turns into a two-day phone for me. That might not be the case for everyone, but this is impressive. And this is with the default settings. Which means, if you moved over to the “Light” performance mode, you could likely get way more battery out of this thing. Absolutely insane how efficient this phone is.

Charging is also pretty impressive this year. We’ve found that the Galaxy S25 Ultra does stick to around 40-45W much longer than its predecessors. Allowing it to charge in just about an hour. Sure it’s not as fast as the OnePlus 13, which we found charges to 100% in around 38 minutes, but it fully charges in closer to 45 minutes. You see, OnePlus will bring it up to 100%, but that’s not truly 100% until it flips over to “fully charged”.

Benchmarks

So, battery life benchmarks, hey? The Galaxy S25 Ultra outperformed our expectations in both battery life and charging tests. For battery life, we load up a 24-hour YouTube video and have it stream over WiFi on the device from 100% down to around 1%. We try to catch it before it shuts down, but we can’t always do that. In this test, the Galaxy S25 Ultra had a time of 22 hours and 3 minutes. That is just 32 minutes shorter than the OnePlus 13. Which again, has a much larger battery. It is actually a few hours shorter than the Galaxy S24 Ultra from last year, but we all know that Samsung kind of screwed up the battery life with updates.

Onto charging. Once we run the phone down to under 5%, we try to let it get as low as possible without going into some battery saver mode, we then plug it in and time how long it takes to get to 100%. We use either the charger that came in the box, or a charger that is able to max out the phone’s charging speed. In the case of the Galaxy S25 Ultra, we used a 65W Anker charger, and a USB-C cable that outputs the current charging speed. In total, it took 1 hour and 1 minute to get to 100%. That is about 24 minutes faster than we got when performing this same test on Galaxy S24 Ultra.

To go a bit more in-depth, the Galaxy S25 Ultra does stick to its max speed of 45W a lot longer than on previous models. We found that it fluctuates in the 40s until around 23%, where it then drops down into the 30s, mostly staying around 33W until around 79%. After that, it starts to trickle down as you’d expect from any phone.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Software

Samsung is launching the Galaxy S25 Ultra (the whole Galaxy S25 series actually) with Android 15 and One UI 7. This is a pretty big update for Samsung phones, which is why it took longer to launch than normal. And the Galaxy S25 will get updates through One UI 14, that’s 7 years. Which is almost unmatched. Only Google and Samsung are offering 7 years of updates, whereas most other smartphone makers are offering up to four years.

One of the bigger additions to One UI 7 this year is the Now Bar and Now Brief. The Now Bar is essentially Samsung’s take on the Dynamic Island from the iPhone. It appears in the status bar, or at the bottom of the home screen. And it will show things like timers, Google Maps directions, sports scores and much more. Honestly, it’s super useful, especially if you have a timer going. Then there’s the Now Brief. This essentially shows you a briefing of what’s happening, throughout the day. So it’ll show you the weather, what’s on your calendar for the day, sometimes a news story from Samsung News, and a shortcut to YouTube shorts for some reason. It’s really not that detailed unless you are all-in on Samsung’s ecosystem, using things like the Galaxy Watch and Galaxy Ring. Then you’ll see some health metrics in there, and your Energy Score, among other things. It will of course, continue to populate more things as you use your Galaxy S25 Ultra more.

Natural Language Search is also available on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. This might not sound like much, but it means that you can search for exactly what you’re looking for, instead of translating it into search engine speak. This is available in the Gallery app, but more importantly in the Settings app. I’ve used this far more in the Settings app, asking where to find a certain setting, or how to change something. It works very well, and since Samsung has so many settings available, it’s super useful.

Gemini is now more integrated than ever before. It actually is integrated with Bixby, behind-the-scenes, so for some things you might not ever know that Bixby was the one that did the task for you. But now when you long-press the power button, the new Gemini UI will pop up, and from there you can ask it to do a boatload of different things. Like asking when the next Pistons game is, and add it to your calendar. Gemini is able to do multi-step tasks. It’s not perfect, but does work very well.

While we’re on the topic of AI and Google, Circle to Search is getting a few new additions as well. You can now search for music, and audio within videos. Circle to Search was already pretty impressive, and something that I used quite often, and now I use it even more often.

Lastly, we can’t forget about the S Pen. Yes, it is still included in the Galaxy S25 Ultra, for now. Samsung decided to ditch the Bluetooth connectivity on the S Pen, which allowed Air Actions to work. These were things like a remote shutter for the camera, or swiping through the gallery and presentations. Samsung says that less than 1% of users actually used this feature. For other OEMs that’s no big deal, but for Samsung, that’s still a large group of users, and the vocal group of users. The Galaxy S24 Ultra sold 15.8 million units, which means 1% of just that phone is still 158,000 people, never mind the previous “Ultra” phones with the S Pen. This leads me to believe that Samsung might ditch the built-in S Pen next year. And offer it as a separate product only, similar to what they do with the Galaxy Z Fold 6. Or, it could still be included, just not built-in like they do with their tablets and laptops.

The software runs very smoothly on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, even more so than usual. In fact, I did a speed test against the OnePlus 13, and found that it outperformed the OnePlus 13. So kudos to Samsung here, and for adding actually useful AI features.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Camera

“It’s the same camera!” I know you’ve seen that on social media, and while it is mostly true, since only the ultrawide camera was upgraded, it’s also not the same camera. Part of the customization that Samsung did with Qualcomm includes the ISP. So we’re seeing some pretty big changes from the Galaxy S24 Ultra, even with the same hardware. Samsung has also updated their algorithms for post-processing, and it’s quite noticeable. However, Samsung’s photos are still a bit oversharpened and in a lot of cases, over-saturated.

Samsung did upgrade the ultrawide, so it is now a 50-megapixel sensor, versus the 12-megapixel sensor from before. But the rest of the sensors are the same. That includes a 200-megapixel main sensor, a 10-megapixel 3x, and a 50-megapixel 5x. The main issue with this camera setup is the 200-megapixel sensor. It’s just not that consistent. Sometimes you get great photos out of it, and sometimes you don’t. Given that this sensor is a couple of years old already, I was expecting better.

However, the zoom capabilities on the Galaxy S25 Ultra are quite good. I didn’t use the 3x all that much, as I find 5x to be more useful if I’m not using 1x or 2x. And the 5x shots are pretty good, plenty of detail, though they are still over-saturated. While in San Jose, Samsung took a group of us to the Warriors vs Bulls game at Chase Center. We sat pretty high up, and I’m assuming Samsung did that so that we could test out the zoom capabilities of the Galaxy S25 Ultra. It was quite impressive actually. Here’s a bunch of pictures from the game, as well as some other zoom shots I’ve taken since receiving the S25 Ultra.

Below is a gallery of photos at 10x, 30x and 100x. Unfortunately, 30x and 100x are still mostly unusable for photos that you want to share. But still great if you want to see what something is from far away. I think most people will stick to using 5x and 10x only for zoom photos.

On the ultrawide lens, I did find that it sometimes would blow out areas of a photo that were brighter than others. Again going back to the game at the Chase Center, it would sometimes blow out the Jumbotron, especially when it had lighter colors being displayed. Despite tapping on the jumbotron for focus. But in other ultrawide shots that didn’t include displays, it looked great. Macro shots also looked great, and you can tell there’s a lot more detail now, versus before and even when compared to other 50-megapixel ultrawide sensors, which was quite surprising. Below, you’ll find a bunch of photos from the ultrawide sensor.

I’ve done a few comparisons of the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s camera to the OnePlus 13 and also the iPhone 16 Pro. The biggest differences I’ve seen is with color accuracy. Both OnePlus and the iPhone are a lot more color accurate than the Galaxy S25 Ultra. One tell-tail sign is the sky. It’s much bluer on the Galaxy S25 Ultra than it is in real life. Some people like that, obviously Samsung is in that group, but if you want accurate colors in your photos, then the S25 Ultra isn’t the right phone. I’ve included a few comparison shots below.

Samsung made some pretty big strides here with video, including adding an option to shoot in LOG. Now I’m not a videographer, so that doesn’t mean much to me, but being able to shoot in LOG and then use your own LUT (or Look Up Table) to color the video, is a pretty big deal for YouTubers that do a lot of recording with their phone. But again, no Dolby Vision here, just like with the display on Galaxy S25 Ultra. This also is one of the only phones that records in 8K, and you can even record 8K30 in LOG. Of course, most of us won’t record in 8K, since it’s just not as good as 4K still, and it also uses up a ton of space.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra?

Is the Galaxy S25 Ultra perfect? No, of course not. There’s no such thing as a perfect phone. But I do think this is the best Android phone for most people. It’s not the best camera, though the phone with the best camera isn’t sold in the US so that’s not helpful for us Americans. And it’s not the cheapest. But it does everything well enough.

Samsung does have some pretty incredible pre-order deals still going on, where you can get the phone for as low as $399. And if you’re reading this after pre-orders end on February 6, Samsung does continue to have great deals on the Galaxy S25 series. Which is why we don’t generally factor in pricing to our review of Samsung phones, as you can typically get them for half off, or less. At $399, this is a pretty nice upgrade to have, but if you’re paying full price, that makes the decision a bit harder.

You should buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra if:

• You have a Galaxy S22 or older.
• You want a big phone with big battery life.
• You want a stylus built into your phone.

You should not buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra if:

• You have a Galaxy S23 or S24.
• You want a smaller phone (Galaxy S25 is an option, however).