If you’ve asked me what is my view on the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, I will definitely tell you that it is an AI-packed flagship smartphone. This year’s AI features on the Galaxy S25 Ultra is offering better personalisation usage. But despite that, there is the million dollar question, does it worth to be in your pocket?
In this review, I will fairly touching the points of the new updates to the Galaxy S25 Ultra, so let’s find out more at below.
Design
While not changing too much on the aesthetic looks when compared to predecessors, the Galaxy S25 Ultra now is slightly taller and lighter. The S25 Ultra is now a 6.9″ behemoth and weigh at 218 g, offering splendid view and easier to carry around. This year’s design also taken the rounded corner, provided better ergonomic hold for users who are constantly using their device.
The body chassis is now using improved titanium frame (grade 5) and Corning Gorilla Armor 2, delivering best in class protection and durability. You still get the IP68 rating for the S25 Ultra. Meanwhile, the buttons, charging port, speaker grille and S-Pen slot has remain unchanged for their placement.
Performance
This year’s Galaxy S25 Series is powered by Qualcomm’s flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, which definitely offer better performance improvement. However, Samsung decided to opt only 12GB RAM for the whole series and the Ultra model offers storage up to 1TB.
Truth to be told, Galaxy S25 Ultra is a performance beast as the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset can cope with any task you want to throw on it, be it for productivity, creating content or mobile gaming. Playing Genshin Impact at the max settings or rendering your content in 4K60, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is able to perform faster and shows no signs of any slowdown.
But the major strong point of the Galaxy S25 Ultra is the larger vapor chamber solution, which Samsung said it is 40% larger than the predecessor. For everyday usage, you will barely feel the warm on the device. But during my period of testing the device, I managed to make the device warm up during taking 4K60 videos for long period and taking a lot of RAW + JPEG photos in 24MP via Expert RAW.
Out of the box, Galaxy S25 Ultra is running with One UI 7.0 with Android 15. The animation, launching apps and interface feels solid and fast. You now can pull your notifications from top left to bottom while accessing the phone settings from top right to bottom.
Camera
The Galaxy S25 Ultra now gets a new 50MP ultrawide camera, while the rest remains the same spec. You will definitely get better photos with the new 50MP ultrawide camera. Also, the new 50MP ultrawide camera also delivers incredible macro shot with better detail and clarity for extreme close up shots. One major surprise (which is not talked by most media) is the ultrawide camera supports flash during photos and videos. This feature now helps the ultrawide camera to shoot better during low light condition.
While I’m not going through the rest of the camera, the Next-Generation ProVisual Engine does definitely helps in delivering amazing neutral colours for photos and videos. During at an event, the Galaxy S25 Series took a neutral colours photos while others suffering from blue hue. But, the photos still tend to be slightly overexposing, making some of the shots looking a bit noisy at times especially with telephoto shots.
The videos taken from the Galaxy S25 Ultra also looked better and you can even improved by turning on HDR. With HDR turn on for videos, you get excellent dynamic range in the video, providing better realism for aspiring filmmakers and content creators. The downside for HDR videos are the lack of support for the format on social media platform, so it is best you convert it back to SDR.
If you even want to offer your video content with better dynamic range and removing copyright audio playing in the surrounding, there is now Galaxy LOG and Audio Eraser on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The Galaxy LOG now offers to deliver incredible dynamic range video, albeit you have to convert it back with the exclusive LUT. Galaxy LOG can shoot up to 8K30 while it can be accessible via Pro Video or the Video recording menu (you have to go to settings to turn it up. Galaxy LOG only can switch rear camera lens when shoot with the “Video” and no lens switching if you decide to use Pro Video.
Meanwhile for the Audio Eraser, it just make your worries go away especially creators shooting video when a song is playing at background. You basically had to access from the Gallery, go to Edit, tap on the speaker icon and choose Audio Eraser. From there, you just have to move the slider on each category you want to decrease or increase the volume. It does worked well and I will recommend people to use it.
Display and Audio
Galaxy S25 Ultra now spots a slightly larger 6.9″ Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X with 120Hz refresh rate, supports HDR10+ and gets a peak brightness up to 2600 nits. The S25 Ultra’s display still remain great and you hardly find anything to complain. It also retain the anti-glare, offering better viewing at sunny/bright area.
While there is no mention of anything on the speakers, I felt the Galaxy S25 Ultra has slight improvement on the stereo speakers, which delivers better audio in terms of loudness, clarity and bass.
AI Features
For the AI Features, I will touch on what’s new on the Galaxy S25 Ultra. First up, the Circle To Search now able to search for audio information. Pretty handy if you’re a music lover that search music as you just require to open up Circle To Search and tap on the music symbol. It can pretty quick (when compared to Shazam).
There is also Now Brief, which offers quick glance on you schedule and weather as standard. You can opt to have more option to be shown by setting up at Now Brief settings. Another new feature is Now Bar, which basically allow you to access the app without the need of unlocking it. From the lock screen, you can swipe up and down to switch between apps working on the background.
This year, Samsung also introduces the Cross App Action feature, offering to perform numerous tasks across different apps, with a single voice command. You just have to hold down on the power button and ask away to get Galaxy AI (or Gemini, as it is doing the task). The Cross App Action works with Google Apps, Galaxy Native Apps and 3rd Party Apps like WhatsApp & Spotify.
Battery
For the battery department, nothing much actually changed other than the Qi2 Ready for the wireless charge. You still get the same 5,000 mAh battery that supports 45W wired, PD3.0 and 15W wireless charging speed. Battery life is still amazing as you can last throughout the day for normal usage and you can even extend it until one and a half day if you’re a light user.
S Pen
The Galaxy S25 Ultra made the highly controversial act of removing the Bluetooth on the S Pen was well-voiced all over the social media. However, despite the removal of Bluetooth, it still work fine and hardly a missed feature unless you are constantly using the Air Gesture command. However, I wished that there are new technology or innovation to be introduced on the S Pen, hopefully we could see something like S Pen with AI features integrated together.
Final Verdict
With the starting price of RM5,999, I feel consumers should be focusing from the 512GB storage variant onwards, especially those who are creating contents or using it as their productivity device.
This year’s Galaxy S25 Ultra may looked like offering lesser prominent upgrades but what Samsung actually does is refining their flagship device to continue delivering the stability of usage for its consumers. There is nothing wrong with that, but the competition is catching up really fast and Samsung have to step up their game on their next flagship device.
So, the million dollar question I have asked in the early part, does it worth to be in your pocket? The answer is Yes, but if you’re coming from couple or few years old model who are looking for an upgrade. I highly recommend the Galaxy S25 Ultra to put it in your buying list and its for the content creator, filmmakers, gamers and working adult. For ratings, I only give it 9 out of 10. Despite lackluster upgrades that deliver the wow factor, Galaxy S25 Ultra is still one of the balanced flagship smartphone you can purchase it at anywhere and anytime and it works on every app you require to use it daily.