Lounge
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: A flagship that feels fresh at a closer look
Summary
With a bunch of improved features, the Galaxy S25 Ultra offers smooth performance and a refined experience. But do the incremental upgrades justify a switch for users of earlier Galaxy models?
At first glance, you wouldn’t be penalized for wondering if the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra was actually its predecessor, the S24 Ultra. Barring a few minute differences that only a closer look will reveal, the latest flagship from the house of Samsung veers too close to what the company had already showcased last year. This, though, has given it a chance to showcase all the work it did inside the phone—with software improvements and AI optimizations.
It is, of course, no surprise that Samsung has made its flagship smartphone all about its AI smarts for the second year running. While that’s the obvious, what is particularly appreciable is that the Galaxy S25 Ultra feels like Samsung took in user feedback from its previous phone, filtered them to zero-in on what was missing, and tried to fill these gaps.
As a result, you get a phone that is nearly the same in dimensions, but is actually noticeably lighter. In fact, thanks to good build weight distribution, the Galaxy S25 Ultra does not feel like a heavy phone despite its near-unwieldy size. The display, which is identical bar none with its predecessor, is a tenth of an inch larger than before—for all practical purposes, it feels the same.
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In fact, in every way, Samsung has done exactly what Apple did a few months ago—upgrade its largest flagship phone so incrementally that it would actually take a few minutes to find out what’s new.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra has a new ultra wide-angle camera with a 50-megapixel image sensor and a larger aperture lens, upgraded from a 12-megapixel one before. Whether you’d use this camera much or not is really subjective, but the upgrade is definitive—and makes ultra-wide photographs brighter and crisper than before. Apple, however, continues to produce more true-to-source contrast levels across all cameras.
All of this, however, is incremental. Once you set-up the Galaxy S25 Ultra, you can’t help but take a beat at exactly how smooth this smartphone feels. The device is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite processor, which the latter said is tuned specifically for the Galaxy S25 lineup here. Even with the base variant that comes with 12GB memory and 256GB of storage, the Galaxy S25 Ultra has been smoothly running Microsoft’s 365 Copilot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI model, Google’s Gemini based on the latest Gemini 2.0 Flash model, and Need For Speed’s No Limits game in tandem—actively switching across each of the three, without a hint of a lag.
This is made possible by Samsung’s latest interface, OneUI 7.0, which finally feels like it has come of age.
Not only is the latest Samsung interface better designed in terms of its ergonomics and accessibility, it is largely intuitive and lets you figure out how to access all features and settings without needing technical assistance. There are obvious iOS ‘inspirations’ all over the place—the organized ‘Now Brief’ feature, for instance, is exactly what Apple’s ‘Scheduled Summary’ appears like.
Samsung, however, has done it better by making ‘Now Brief’ appear as a tab on the lock screen, which opens into a window listing all pending tasks and notifications in a column. Swiping down from the top-right of the display gives you a control centre that is neatly designed and clearly denoted enough to get all the essentials in one place.
There is also a smooth level of maturity in the interface animations that make for the biggest upgrade in our Samsung smartphone experience.
Then, there’s AI. Frankly, it’s a shame that Samsung doesn’t let most of the functionalities work with on-device data processing, even though there’s no real reason why it should not. Hence, you get access to real-time call translation—although the experience remains rather jarring. There’s a default photo editor that can remove background objects akin to Google’s Magic Editor, but it’s established that much of Samsung’s AI is actually branded by the Korean firm, but made with Google Gemini or Imagen as the underlying engines.
All of this works quite well, and what’s good to note is that the AI features, unlike Samsung’s 2024 attempt, are not in-your-face. You can have a perfectly normal phone that doesn’t need you to fiddle with too much AI, as long as you’re not ready. The Gemini/Bixby experience also mimics what Apple showcased as the new Siri experience at WWDC last year—but then again, it’s functional, and how different can phone assistants be, anyway?
This is what brings us to our point of contention. On standalone terms, there’s nothing wrong with the Samsung Galaxy S25. In fact, it’s a very good flagship phone, and guarantees seven years of the latest Android version—which means that if you so desire, spending ₹1.3 lakh on this phone today can potentially last you until 2032.
Yet, there is nothing that plays as a ‘hook’ for the biggest Samsung flagship this year. Its strongest suit is the interface redesign, but given that this is a OneUI feature, there’s no reason why that won’t work on even the four-years-old Galaxy S21. The AI features are still not pivotal, though they are undoubtedly well-integrated and nice to have.
If you’re looking for a new flagship phone to buy, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is absolutely one of the best contenders today. If you already have one that’s less than four years old, there’s absolutely no reason for you to buy a new one—and the S25 Ultra doesn’t do enough to change that.
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