Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review: The ultimate AI superphone?

Samsung was ahead of the curve when it launched the S24 Ultra with Galaxy AI. Now, a whole year later with most rivals having shown their initial hand, the pressure was on Samsung to truly regain some lost ground in the AI arms race. With the Galaxy S25 Ultra, Samsung has done just that, stringing together a lot of the AI advancements in the past year into arguably the best AI superphone around. Is it worth all the pretty pennies you have to shell out for the privilege?

Let’s talk AI first, though. Powering the most significant leap forward is the default Gemini assistant, which is now integrated deeply across Google and Samsung apps, allowing you to look things up on the screen and directly add an event to the calendar. Or for that matter, ask Gemini to perform multiple actions in one statement and have it execute them one by one – for instance, looking up Chinese restaurants near me and sending it to a friend over a message. It works well, sort of – I’ve had many issues getting it to work with WhatsApp even though it is one of the supported apps at launch, and the message to the friend only contained plain text options for the restaurants (where it could have shared links instead). And when it did work, it felt like Galaxy AI inched a bit closer to truly useful AI instead of some of the stuff we’ve been peddled in the past year. You get some of those too, like moving or removing folks from within a picture, sketching real objects into photos or live translation of audio in a conversation. 

Elsewhere, you get the AI-boosted Now Brief, a hub of what you might like to see at various times in the day, like the weather and sleep information in the morning or your activity levels and evening schedule in the evening. It’s still a work in progress, limited in the apps it supports and building a personalized profile rather slowly (I’ve been using it for three weeks), but the promise is that it will understand my usage well enough to show me something truly useful right at the time I need it.

Right now, what’s more useful is the Now Bar, which works like the Dynamic Island on iPhones and shows you currently playing music or sports scores on your lock screen and notification shade. As you use the phone, you realize the big improvements are in the scores of tiny refinements across One UI 7 interface atop Android 15, and the seven years of software support is among the best around.

Once you’re done with the AI, there’s a whole lot more phone to the S25 Ultra – right from the newly flattened edges and rounded corners that pack in a slightly larger 6.9-inch screen to the use of Gorilla Armor 2 to better survive drops and scratches. Samsung has even made the phone thinner, less wide and 14 grams lighter, which makes holding the boxy slab more comfortable (but only just). That display, though – all 3120x1440 pixels refreshing at 120Hz, pumping out rich visuals that don’t get overpowered in bright environments, thanks to the Ultra’s anti-reflective screen.

Powering the experience is the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chip in its overclocked ‘for Galaxy’ avatar, along with 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of snappy UFS 4.0 storage, with a fixed 12GB memory. Performance is boosted and thermals are much improved, and the phone doesn’t heat under heavy workloads. Battery life with the 5000mAh cell, 45W/15W wired/wireless charging and between 6 to 7 hours of screen-on-time is respectable. 

Likely the most underwhelming aspect was the cameras, where the setup remained the same as last year, except for the bump up from 12 to 50MP on the ultrawide sensor. Shoot a lot of photos and you realize subtle tweaks to the image processing algorithm help make better images from the same hardware. That said, the 10-megapixel 3x optical telephoto does feel like a step back…as does the S Pen which drops Bluetooth this time around, so no more using it as a camera remote or performing gesture-based commands.  

In all, the S25 Ultra is every bit the AI superphone we expected, but just a tad less Ultra than its predecessors were for all these years, and the competition has come out all guns-a-blazing this year.

Rating: 8/10

Price: Rs. 1,29,999 (12/256GB) onwards