Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Review – New flagship AI phone sets the bar

As their largest offering in the new Galaxy S25 series, the Galaxy S25 Ultra enjoys the most upgrades with a custom-designed Snapdragon 8 Elite for galaxy processor, a more ergonomic chassis, an improved ultra wide angle camera and a host of other tweaks.

We previously shared our first impressions of their titular flagship phone and after taking it for a whirl over the Chinese New Year holidays, here’s our Galaxy S25 Ultra review where we share if it has what it takes to be the premier flagship of 2025. 

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Review – Performance and Benchmarks

For the uninitiated, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is the successor to last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra. The new flagship phone has a 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X QHD+ display that’s 0.1-inches larger than the prior model. The display also gets improved Corning Gorilla Armor 2 glass that offers improved drop and scratch resistance along with an upgraded anti-glare layer for better clarity. The chassis itself is lighter by 15g, has rounded corners and retains the use of titanium for strength and lightness while retaining the same IP68 dust and water resistance rating.

The key upgrade for the Galaxy S25 Ultra is the use of the custom-made Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor that is unique to the Galaxy S25 series. Unlike the stock models, the ‘for Galaxy’ suffix indicates that it has a faster 4.47GHz clocked CPU and a faster GPU. Paired with the faster processor is a 40% larger vapour chamber for better sustained performance. You also get 12GB LPDDR5X RAM and your choice of 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of UFS 4.0 storage.

The rear camera array also upgrades the ultra wide angle camera to a 50MP model up from last year’s 12MP model which can also take tele macro shots. Bar these updates, the Galaxy S25 Ultra essentially has the same 12MP front camera,  the same 5,000mAh battery capacity and similar charging 45W wired and wireless speeds as the prior S24 Ultra.

Here’s how our Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample stacks up on paper:

Price	RM5,999 (256GB), RM6,599 (512GB), RM7,199 (1TB)
Display	6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X, 1,440 x 3,120 pixels, 120Hz refresh rate, 2,600 nits peak brightness
Processor	Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy
OS	Android 15 w/ One UI 7
Memory	12GB LPDDR5X RAM / 256GB, 512GB or 1TB UFS 4.0 storage
Cameras	200MP f/1.7 main camera w/ OIS, 50MP f/1.9 ultra wide camera, 10MP f/2.4 w/ 3x optical zoom and OIS, 50MP f/3.4 w/ 5x optical zoom and OIS [rear] / 12MP f/2.3 [front]
Battery	5,000mAh w/ 45W wired charging, 15W wireless, reverse wireless charging
Size/Weight	162.8 x 77.6 x 8.2mm / 218g

Running under the hood of our Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample is the latest Android 15 with One UI 7 which adds a veritable cornucopia of new AI features across the board with many related to productivity or photography and Google Gemini as the primary AI assistant.

Much like previous versions of One UI, the phone is able to assign up to 8GB of virtual RAM Plus off the onboard storage in 2GB increments starting from 4GB or disable it entirely. Owners also get a whopping seven years of OS and security updates, which keeps it in the lead as the longest in the market, keeping the phone secure until Android 22 and updated until 2032.

With the maximum 8GB of virtual RAM Plus random access memory, our Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review unit managed to score the following benchmarks.

3D Mark Steel Nomad Light	2,524
3D Mark Steel Nomad L. Unlimited	1,881
3D Mark Solar Bay	8,649
3D Mark Solar Bay Unlimited	8,537
3D Mark WildLife Extreme	4,093
3D Mark WildLife Extreme Unlimited	3,974
Geekbench 6 Single Core	3,061
Geekbench 6 Multi Core	9,454
Geekbench 6 OpenCL	17,938
Geekbench 6 Vulkan	24,589
Geekbench AI (CPU quanticised)	4,666
Geekbench AI (GPU quanticised)	1,877
PCMark Work 3.0 Performance	20,636
PCMark Battery Life	15 hours 53 mins

In synthetic benchmarks, our Galaxy S25 Ultra easily outpaces its predecessor the Galaxy S24 Ultra with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor by a comfortable margin across single core, multicore and graphics performance. The custom Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset also has a slight lead on stock Snapdragon 8 Elite processors in most benchmarks.

When subjected to the 3D Mark Steel Nomad Light Stress test which runs a battery of nonstop benchmarks back to back, our Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample got a best loop score of 1,620 and a lowest loop score of 1,246 while getting a relatively high 76.9% stability score. Temperatures were kept between a balmy 38°C to 42°C, which shows that the larger vapour chamber is doing its job seeing as the stock Snapdragon 8 Elite chipsets tend to run hotter under heavy loads.

While the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy does show a high stability percentage, peak and low loop scores were relatively modest in comparison with the standalone benchmarks which infers conservative throttling. This isn’t readily apparent except in demanding synthetic benchmarks that stress a processor to its maximum limits which aren’t indicative of actual day-to-day usage scenarios.

As you’d likely surmise, our Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample easily blitzed through any of the current games in the Google Play store, running the likes of Genshin Impact  and Call of Duty Mobile dialled to high settings while being able to comfortably handle 4K video editing on CapCut along with the usual array of web browsing, videos and the like.

Hardware aside, Samsung is placing huge emphasis on their enhanced interactivity with Galaxy AI with their new Now Brief feature. For the uninitiated, Now Brief aggregates useful information from apps like your calendar and other compatible apps to offer actionable details like the weather, personal energy levels, news and traffic reports so you can get a broad overview of the day.

In practice, Now Brief  helps to put everything you need to know for the day on one page that pops up on your home screen in the morning and in the evening. You also get a Now Bar that acts as a direct shortcut to active apps on the lock screen that comes in handy such as controlling music playback.

Privacy concerned users will likely have qualms here but Samsung has that issue covered with an on-device Personal Data Engine that stores all your personal information on the phone itself and not in the cloud. This data is further secured from tampering with Samsung Knox security for added peace of mind. 

The improved Gemini AI assistant on the phone has been integrated deeply with the hardware, allowing it the ability to open selected other apps that are primarily Samsung or Google in origin like the calendar, browser or settings and perform actions such as ‘setting up a coffee meeting at 4PM on my calendar’, turning on the camera or increasing the volume of the phone via verbal commands on Gemini. This feature can also open up other selected apps like Spotify and Whatsapp and interact with it to some degree. 

The magic here is that you’re able to verbally instruct Gemini to do so with natural sounding requests though it occasionally requires you to rephrase a statement to work. This natural language ability even extends to the Samsung Gallery for images, enabling you to search your library for a specific snap based on verbal parameters like finding images of buildings or people.

The deeper verbal interactivity with Gemini offers immense potential and significantly elevates the functionality of the Galaxy S25 Ultra though this occassionaly requires some experimentation and has a bit of a learning curve; it’s still a good deal easier than Bixby in prior versions which required highly specific sequences of keywords.

One thing to note is that many of these features like Now Brief, Gemini assistant and the like will likely appear in older Galaxy S series phones like the S24 Ultra in some form or fashion when they eventually push the One UI 7 update to older phones but no firm details have been announced yet.

Samsung’s use of Corning Gorilla Armor 2 glass for the display pays dividends. Even after a week plus of it getting tossed around in my pocket and on sundry table surfaces, there’s not a single scratch on the glass itself. Screen clarity, brightness and colour rendition are excellent even under direct sunlight especially on account of its 2,600 nits peak brightness and the anti-glare layer on the Gorilla Armor 2 glass. The anti-glare layer proves its work especially in irksome circumstances such as locations with bright overhead lights, ensuring the screen stays crisp and clear.

Of note is Samsung’s inclusion of ProScaler tech culled from their higher end TVs that upscales lower resolution content to match the display though you need to bump up the screen resolution to QHD+ in the settings as it’s normally set to FHD+ out of the box. 

The stereo speakers are otherwise unchanged from the prior model and remain sufficiently loud enough to fill a room with good detail for music, gaming and movies alike.

Unfortunately, the S Pen stylus has been downgraded this time around as Air Gestures have been removed, meaning that it only functions as a normal stylus, albeit a very responsive one. Curious minds will likely ask but we’ve tested it – even with the use of the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s S Pen stylus on the S25 Ultra’s display, you still can’t get Air Gestures.

In regards to battery life, our Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra was comfortably able to last a full day with heavy use including liberal camera usage, videos and gaming though more conservative, casual users easily get two days of battery life.

In benchmarks, it was about to get about 15 hours and 53 minutes of battery life off the 5,000mAh battery which is an hour plus less than the Galaxy S24 Ultra from last year.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra Cameras – Improved ultra wide camera, LOG and Audio Eraser

Our Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample sports mostly the same hardware as its predecessor save that the older ultrawide camera gets swapped out for a much more capable 50MP sensor. That aside, you get a 200MP main camera as well as a dual-telephoto camera with a 10MP camera that has 3x optical zoom paired with a 50MP with 5x optical zoom.

Combined, the phone has the ability to capture snaps with up to 10x lossless zoom and up to 100x space zoom. Videos can be captured with up to 20x zoom in 4K@60fps or at 8K@30fps though the latter mode has no zoom capability. Up front, the 12MP selfie camera is capable of up to 4K@60fps video and stills. 

While this setup is otherwise unchanged from the prior Galaxy S24 Ultra save for the ultra wide angle camera upgrade, Samsung is leveraging the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset to improve image quality with the addition of a new Spatio-Temporal filter that can better identify moving and stationary objects and, by extension able to better remove more noise especially in low light scenarios for stills and video alike.

The new Galaxy S25 Ultra also has the ability to capture in Log format with Zebra Pattern and False Colour readouts for later colour grading along with the ability to leverage a virtual aperture in Expert RAW mode that lets you finetune aperture settings from f/1.4 all the way to f/16 on demand.

As you’d surmise, recording in Log and virtual aperture settings both require a certain level of knowledge and experience to use. Savvy content creators and photographers likely getting the most out of these new upgrades.

Seeing that most of the hardware is almost a match for the prior Galaxy S24 Ultra, our Galaxy S25 Ultra did not disappoint with comparably excellent image quality across the board. In daylight conditions, shots all the way to 10x zoom offer excellent detail and well saturated colours with good skin tones, delivering usable shots out to 30x with some softness.

While the phone is capable of 100x zoom, it’s still a novelty though the AI does clean up detail a bit more this time around. The inclusion of the 50MP ultra wide angle camera addresses the shortcomings of the S24 Ultra’s smaller 12MP sensor, delivering noticeably better detail in ultra wide shots.

In dim light, our Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample offers better low light performance with better noise reduction and reduced grain compared to its predecessor and the ability to capture slightly more detail, colours and shadows out to about 10x.

Of more practical use for more casual users is the inclusion of a new Audio Eraser that is able to intelligently delete unwanted sound be it wind noise, background noise or music from a video.

This impressive new feature alone is worth the price of entry, allowing for clearer, cleaner audio in videos even if you’re taking it outdoors in crowds or windy scenarios.

While it works best in common scenarios like a gathering with friends or a party, it is surprisingly able to work on music too with some jury-rigging by saving music as an MP4 file, editing out whatever you don’t want to turn it into either a karaoke or an acapella track and saving the results before converting it into an MP3.

The generative Edit feature which debuted on the Galaxy S24 series and which was able to intelligently delete unwanted objects in a photo has been further improved this time around for more seamless looking backgrounds when an object is removed.

Overall, the Galaxy S25 Ultra’s cameras enjoy modest updates that still keep it at the forefront of smartphone cameras and the provision of the new Audio Eraser and better Generative Edit algorithms along with Log recording make it a versatile creative Swiss Army Knife for content creators. 

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra?

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is a highly polished flagship phone that brings a number of measured yet key updates – a powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset, tougher Gorilla Armor 2 glass that offers better clarity paired with a lighter titanium chassis and a bevy of AI enhancements across the board.

While it isn’t as compelling an acquisition for those who already own the Galaxy S24 Ultra, it still maintains the edge one of the most powerful, desirable flagship phones of 2025.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review sample courtesy of Samsung Malaysia. For more details please visit https://www.samsung.com/my/smartphones/galaxy-s25-ultra/buy/