Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Review: Bigger But Lighter, 200MP, Dual Zoom

Our Review and Specifications

Range: Samsung’s Flagship Ultra | Standout Feature: A 6.9-inch Gorilla Armor 2 Glass Display, Snapdragon 8 Elite, 12GB RAM | Unique: Built-in S Pen and Titanium Frame Feature

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is the phone Samsung fans have effectively been asking for since the Note line disappeared: an Ultra that looks and feels part of the S25 family, keeps the S Pen, and gets noticeably lighter without shrinking the screen. It doesn’t reinvent anything, but reinvention wasn’t really the brief. Refinement was, and on that score it delivers.

We’ve spent time with the S25 Ultra alongside its predecessor and its closest rivals to work out whether the newer chip, the bigger display and Samsung’s ever-expanding Galaxy AI toolkit actually add up to a worthwhile upgrade, or whether this is one for S24 Ultra owners to skip.

Design and Build

Samsung has quietly dropped the last visual link to the old Galaxy Note in favour of a look that matches the rest of the S25 family: flatter sides, squarer corners and a titanium band running around the edge. It’s a subtle shift rather than a dramatic one, but it changes how the phone sits in the hand.

At 162.8 x 77.6 x 8.2mm and 218g, the S25 Ultra is both slimmer and considerably lighter than the S24 Ultra’s 232g, despite growing a fraction taller. Fifteen per cent thinner bezels mean Samsung has managed to fit in a larger screen without adding bulk, which is the single biggest tell that this is a proper generational refinement rather than a reskin.

Build quality is exactly what we’d expect from a £1,249 phone. The titanium frame feels reassuringly stiff, the front and back are covered in Corning Gorilla Armor 2 glass, and the whole thing carries an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance. The glass resists glare impressively well in bright sunlight, though it isn’t scratch-proof, and light marks can show up on the display over time with heavy use.

The S Pen remains tucked into its silo at the bottom of the phone, next to the USB-C port, SIM tray and downward-firing speaker. It’s a genuine point of difference against every other flagship on the market, none of which bother with a built-in stylus any more. The one change worth knowing about: Samsung has removed Bluetooth Low Energy support from this year’s S Pen, so the remote shutter and slide-advance tricks from previous generations no longer work. If you relied on those, it’s a step back.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra cases       Samsung Galaxy S25 Accessories

Samsung Galaxy S25 Cables

Display

The headline change is the screen. Samsung has grown the display to 6.9 inches, up from 6.8 on the S24 Ultra, without making the phone any bigger, thanks to those slimmer bezels. It’s a Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel running at Quad HD+ resolution (3120 x 1440, 498ppi) with an adaptive 1-120Hz refresh rate and a claimed peak brightness of 2,600 nits.

In practice, this is one of the best screens on any smartphone right now. Colours are rich without tipping into cartoonish in the Natural screen mode, HDR content on Prime Video and Netflix looks genuinely cinematic, and outdoor visibility is excellent even in direct sun. Samsung’s glare-reducing coating does a noticeably better job than previous Ultra models.

The standout addition, though, is ProScaler, a TV-derived upscaling feature that sharpens lower-resolution streaming video on the fly. Most mobile apps cap out at 1080p, and ProScaler visibly cleans up that content before it hits the QHD+ panel, adding detail and reducing softness. It’s a small feature on paper that makes a real difference watching anything on the move.

By default, the phone ships at FHD+ resolution to save battery, and most people should leave it there. Switching to the full Quad HD+ mode is there if you want it, but the difference is subtle enough on a 6.9-inch screen that it’s rarely worth the battery hit.

Performance

Powering the S25 Ultra is the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, a custom-clocked version of Qualcomm’s flagship chip built specifically for Samsung, paired with 12GB of RAM across every storage tier. Samsung claims a 37% jump in CPU performance, 30% in GPU performance and 40% in NPU (AI) performance over the S24 Ultra’s chipset, and real-world use backs that up. Everything from gaming to multitasking to heavy camera processing feels instant.

A 40% larger vapor chamber and new thermal interface material keep the phone running cooler under sustained load than its predecessor, which matters given how much of the AI processing now happens on-device rather than in the cloud. We didn’t see any noticeable throttling during extended gaming or video export sessions.

One UI 7, running on top of Android 15, is the smoothest version of Samsung’s software yet, and the company is promising seven years of OS and security updates, matching Google’s own Pixel commitment and putting real pressure on Apple’s update policy.

Galaxy AI and Software

This is where Samsung wants the conversation to be, and it’s hard to argue the S25 Ultra isn’t the most AI-integrated Android phone on sale. A long press of the power button summons Google Gemini directly, letting you chain requests across apps in a single voice or text prompt: finding a video’s key points and saving them to Notes, searching Spotify for podcasts and drafting a WhatsApp message, or building a calendar from a sports fixture list.

Now Brief is the more ambitious piece: a set of morning, midday and evening briefings pulled from your calendar, weather, Samsung Health data and usage habits. It’s a good idea that needs time to become genuinely useful, since the personalisation only sharpens the longer you use the phone and the more Samsung or connected devices (Galaxy Watch, Galaxy Ring) you own.

Circle to Search, Audio Eraser and Sketch to Image all return and continue to work well. Audio Eraser in particular does an impressive job isolating and removing background noise from video clips, and Sketch to Image can blend an S Pen doodle into a real photo convincingly enough that the AI watermark is the only giveaway. Not everything lands, though. Some cross-app prompts stall on formatting requests, and a handful of image generation prompts get blocked for vague “inappropriate content” reasons with little explanation.

[LINK: Galaxy AI features guide]

Camera

Samsung has left the headline camera specs almost untouched from the S24 Ultra: a 200MP main sensor, a 50MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom (and a 10x optical-quality crop), a 10MP telephoto with 3x optical zoom, and a 12MP selfie camera. The one genuine upgrade is the ultrawide, which jumps from 12MP to 50MP.

That ultrawide bump matters more than it sounds. Low-light ultrawide shots are noticeably cleaner, and the extra resolution makes for genuinely detailed macro photography, an area where the Ultra line has historically lagged behind. Across the rest of the array, images are sharp, well-exposed and rich in detail, particularly from the 200MP main sensor in its 12MP pixel-binned default mode.

Samsung’s colour science remains firmly on the vivid side. Skies read a little too blue, foliage a little too green, and portraits get a default beautification pass. If you prefer punchy, shareable photos straight out of the camera, that’s a plus; if you want something closer to natural colour reproduction, you’ll want to dig into Expert RAW or shoot in Log video and colour grade afterwards.

Zoom performance is strong without a dedicated 10x lens. The 5x optical zoom, backed by that 50MP sensor, handles most everyday long-range shots convincingly, and the 10x optical-quality crop holds up well. Push into the 30x and 100x Space Zoom range and, as with previous Ultras, you’re firmly into AI-assisted reconstruction territory rather than optical detail.

Battery Life

The S25 Ultra keeps the same 5,000mAh battery as its predecessor, but the more efficient Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip stretches that further. Samsung rates the phone at up to 31 hours of video playback, and independent lab testing recorded 18 hours 35 minutes of continuous use at a standard 60Hz refresh rate, dropping to 17 hours 15 minutes with the adaptive refresh rate enabled, which is competitive with or ahead of most rival flagships.

Charging is rated at 45W wired and 15W wireless. With a compatible fast charger, a full charge from empty takes around an hour, though as with previous Samsung phones, no charger is included in the box.

Verdict

The Galaxy S25 Ultra isn’t a phone that reinvents what an Ultra is, but it doesn’t need to. A big, bright QHD+ screen in a lighter body, a genuinely quick chip, the best battery life we’ve seen from Samsung, and the deepest AI integration on Android right now make this an easy recommendation for anyone in the market for a large-screen Android flagship. If you want the S Pen and the biggest screen Samsung makes without stepping up to a foldable, this is still the phone to get.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Specifications