Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: Not quite the phone I was hoping for

The world of technology looks forward to two major smartphone launches each year and Samsung has just shown off the first. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra – alongside the S25 Plus and the S25 – has now been officially launched, you’ll be able to pre-order one from today and I’ve had my annual chance to get hands-on with it.

This isn’t a full review of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra (we’ve covered the S25 and S25 Plus in a separate piece here) because, well, I’ve only really had limited time with the phone as yet, but I must say that my initial impressions aren’t hugely positive.

I’ll go into my reasons why below the specifications section, but when Samsung itself doesn’t seem that enthused about the hardware and spends most of its time on AI boostery, it’s tough to get too excited.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: Specifications, price, release date

• 6.9in, 1-120Hz, 2,600 nits Dynamic OLED 2X QHD+ display
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor
• 12GB of RAM
• 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage
• 200MP, f/1.7 main camera; 50MP, f/1.9 ultrawide; 50MP, f/3.4, 5x telephoto; 10MP, f/2.4, 10x telephoto; 12MP, f/2.2 front camera
• Titanium chassis
• Corning Gorilla Armor 2
• IP68 dust and water resistance rating
• 5,000mAh battery with 45W “Super Fast Charging”
• 5G, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5,4 wireless connectivity
• Dimensions: 77.6 x 162.8 x 8.2mm
• Weight: 218g
• Price: £1,249 (256GB), £1,349 (512GB), £1,540 (1TB)
• Availability: Preorder from 22 January from www.samsung.com, on general sale from 7 February

Samsung S25 Ultra hands-on: Design and key new features

But first, to the headlines. The biggie is that the screen has grown a fraction, yet again, from 6.8in to 6.9in across the diagonal, without a commensurate hit to the overall size or weight of the phone itself – thanks, in part, to the thinner bezels around the display. According to Samsung, these are the thinnest phones the Korean company has ever produced.

The corners are slightly more rounded but, look closely, and you’ll see that the long edges of the phone are no longer curved but dead flat. Samsung is saying it has shaved 15g off its weight, too, bringing it down from 233g to 218g and that the inclusion of Corning’s Gorilla Armor 2 glass on the front leads to a 29% improvement in resistance to cracks, compared to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

That might sound like a lot but, visually, these changes are pretty subtle. The new design certainly doesn’t scream “overhaul” at you. Indeed, if you were to pick up this year’s Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and compare it side-by-side with last year’s, you probably wouldn’t immediately pick up on the differences.

The cameras on the rear are configured in the same way, with one column of main lenses in the top left corner accompanied by another column of two smaller ones above and below the flash unit. The S-Pen still stows neatly away in the bottom left corner of the phone. The buttons, speaker grilles and SIM card slot are all located in the same places as last year. And that frame is still constructed from hard-wearing titanium.

Inside, there’s a new processor powering things – the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy (an overclocked version of Qualcomm’s latest mobile SoC) – 12GB of RAM and a choice of 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage. Samsung says the vapor-chamber driving the phone’s cooling system is 40% larger in this phone, which augurs well for mobile gamers living in hot parts of the world. This may not make that much of an impact for UK users, though.

However, the battery stays the same size as last year (5,000mAh), the wired charging remains a relatively sluggish 45W and wireless charging is simply “Fast Wireless Charging 2.0” at 15W.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: The phone camera for pros

The camera hardware itself hasn’t received much attention this year, either, but there are a few points worth highlighting. While the main wide and two telephoto cameras remain unchanged at 200-megapixels (3x 10-megapixels and 5x 50-megapixels) respectively, the ultrawide shooter has received a bump, with resolution rising from 12-megapixels to 50-megapixels.

That should give landscape and macro shots a detail boost. For the latter, Samsung claims 4x the clarity, which is obviously a nice thing to have, although I think I’d rather have the extra resolution on the telephoto camera – the Honor Magic 7 Pro has a 200-megapixel sensor on the telephoto camera and although the 3x optical zoom isn’t as impressive as the Samsung’s 5x, having four times the telephoto detail will surely be nearly as useful, if not more so.

Despite the paucity of hardware improvements, however, image quality should be improved this year, thanks to a boost to computational photography, courtesy of the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Snapdragon processor and its “next generation pro visual engine”.

Samsung threw around a fair few buzzwords during its presentation, noting that the phone’s “double analysis noise removal” and “spatio-temporal filter” will deliver superior noise reduction in still and video. There’s also a Pixel-like background audio eraser, for removing distracting background audio from your video clips.

However, the most significant improvements from a camera perspective arise from the features Samsung has added to a new Pro Video mode, namely the addition of LOG video capture – a mode that professional camera people shoot in that makes it easier to colour match to other cameras in post – and zebra striping.

The latter overlays over-exposed areas of a shot with black and white diagonal stripes, indicating areas that are overexposed. This helps you to get the perfect shot.

Finally, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra also now gains the ability to adjust a “virtual” aperture from f/1.4 to f/14 in its Expert RAW mode, which should give you much finer control over depth of field in your photos.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: It’s all about AI (again)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Samsung concentrated a lot on getting its AI messaging out there during its presentation about the new phones and I get it. AI is still the tech phrase on everyone’s lips right now, even if it’s still in its infancy as far as providing practical, genuinely life-changing tools is concerned. Still, it’s worth just recapping a few of the key new features, even if you don’t end up using many of them.

The main planks of the improvements come under the term “human-like AI agents”. The phone has Gemini and Bixby now integrated across the system, allowing you to, for instance, search the gallery app for “the last pictures I took when I was in Italy” or to “make the [onscreen] text a bit larger”.

And you’ll now be able to perform lots of different actions, with one question as well. Questions like: “find a pet-friendly vegan restaurant near me and text the results to Nathan,” should be possible under the new system.

“Personalised AI”, meanwhile, takes the form of the new Now Bar and Now Brief, a system that’s supposed to act on the contents of your phone – email, calendar, messages and so on – to proactively provide you with assistance throughout the day. This will show a morning briefing when you wake up, with details of how you slept and what’s to expect from the day ahead, a midday briefing, plus evening and late-night briefings, presumably all with appropriate, AI-driven contextual information about your day.

Not only that, but there’s also an expanded selection of AI-powered tools to play around with. There’s the audio background eraser I mentioned above, and also a tool called AI Select – a sort of Circle to Search but on steroids. This allows you to select on-screen elements, from text to images, and perform generative AI operations right there and then.

You can use AI Select to quickly provide summaries of onscreen text and remove unwanted elements from photographs and other imagery. All very clever, but it’s effectively a tweak of what we had before. Perhaps it will prove useful, perhaps not. We will only know that through extended time with the phone itself.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: Early verdict

And perhaps, when we get our hands on the phone for a full review later this week, I’ll be more enthused with it. It’s possible those AI features will prove to be a game changer and maybe those pro cameras will up my video capture game.

However, this cynical hack remains to be convinced. By focusing more on AI and less on the hardware, I think Samsung might be missing a trick here, especially with other phone manufacturers such as Honor coming up on the rails with its Magic 7 Pro.

For now, though, I’ll have to hold fire until we’ve had the phone in for more extensive testing. Once we’ve tested the camera, the battery life, the performance and the new AI features, we’ll know for sure if Samsung is treading water or whether it’s taken another major step forwards.