The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra ditches the S24 Ultra’s design, gets a notable weight reduction, gains a higher resolution ultra-wide camera with macro capability, gets the requisite annual processor upgrade, and loses the Bluetooth on the S-pen.
That’s a shortlist of the hardware changes on the S25 Ultra coming from the S24 Ultra. Let’s delve deeper.
A new, rounded look that says goodbye to the Galaxy Note design DNA
The S25 Ultra says goodbye to the design DNA of its legacy Note phones, which had the sharp corners and curved edges. It’s more iPhone-looking now as it gains the rounded edges and the flat sides all throughout, a look that even 2024’s base S24 and S24 Plus were already sporting.
The S24 Ultra had a distinctive look, as a result, but now with the S25 Ultra, all the phones in the line look the same, save for the screen sizes and the camera array at the back.
The iPhone 16 and the S25 don’t look completely the same. The iPhone has bigger, more pronounced rounded edges, while the S25 has more subtle ones.
I welcome the change a lot. The flat sides just make the S25 Ultra noticeably easier to hold as the S24 Ultra’s convex, curved sides added width that now feels unnecessary.
One thing that really sets the S25 Ultra apart from the S24 Ultra is its weight. The former weighs 218 grams, while the latter weighs 232 grams, and for added comparison, the older S23 Ultra weighs 234 grams, while the iPhone 16 Pro Max weighs 227 grams.
The S25 Ultra is also slightly thinner by 0.4 mm than the S24 Ultra.
These may seem like small differences, but in the context of phones, the improvement counts. The S25 Ultra is just more pleasant to hold. And you can see that cutting weight was a focus for the Ultra this year, seeing that the S23 and S24 version barely changed in weight.
One other thing that I don’t see getting mentioned is how the S-Pen noticeably juts out less from its bottom compartment in the S25 compared to the one in the S24, resulting in a sleeker design. The S-Pen’s bottom part sits more flush with the rest of the frame on the S25.
And about the S-Pen, its Bluetooth capabilities are indeed gone. This is one of the areas where Samsung was able to find weight savings, by getting rid of the stylus’ Bluetooth components. What do you lose? You lose wand-waving gestures that let you take photos or control the gallery remotely with the stylus. I honestly didn’t use those that much and preferred the hand waving gesture to take selfies.
Samsung said its Bluetooth S-Pen features weren’t being used that much, justifying the removal, but certainly there are a group of users who’ll miss these Note-era magic tricks.
The S25 has the thinnest ever bezels on an Ultra phone. For many, the change might be something you’ll see if you look close enough. But I think there’s a cumulative effect here combined with the flat sides of the S25 Ultra’s frame, which really makes for a cleaner, more elegant look.
The S24 Ultra kind of feels chunky by comparison now.
Pixel-peep with this bezel comparison close-up shot on X, with the S25 on the left and the S24 on the right:
The S25 Ultra’s screen is also marginally bigger at 6.9 inches compared to last year’s 6.8.
The camera rings on the S25 Ultra are also thicker than the more subtle styling on the S24, and are now black compared to last year’s silver, which brings it in line with the camera style on the Fold6.
Overall, the design changes are subtle but enough that I wouldn’t want to go back to the weight and the curved sides of the old one. Although, if you’re looking at these physical changes alone, these may not yet warrant an upgrade if you’re coming from the S23 (heavy as it is) or S24 Ultra phones.
The phone’s display also has new Gorilla Glass Armor 2, an enhanced version of the Armor 1 found on the S24 Ultra. It’s known not just for protection but also for its anti-reflective properties to improve contrast, and general image quality and text readability. Like the S24 Ultra last year, Glass Armor 2 is only available on the S25 Ultra and not on the base and Plus models.
A recent durability test by popular YouTuber JerryRigEverything, however, dampens our excitement slightly as the new screen protection isn’t as tough as believed. But we’ll see as we continue to use the device further.
And here’s one major improvement that I don’t think Samsung has been publicizing much: the speakers on the S25 Ultra are great. There’s a distinct difference between the S24 Ultra and the S25 Ultra in this aspect. The latter boasts a much, much more full-bodied sound, with a much improved bass and much better clarity across the audio spectrum. The S24 Ultra sounds tinny by comparison.
We’re talking about the Gemini assistants in the next part, but to start here, the improved speakers make it more pleasant to talk to these assistants, and their voice is clearer.
It’s all in the side button
On the software side, what you get here is Samsung’s One UI 7.0, the brand’s take on Android 15.
This is headlined by the ability to summon the Gemini assistant, including the conversational Gemini Live variant, by long-pressing what traditionally has been the power button, shown in the photo below. Formerly, the button summoned Samsung’s own Bixby assistant, which will now be relegated to more tasks related to Samsung’s smart home devices.
The switch to Gemini from Bixby — and to be clear, Bixby is still on the phone — really puts the Samsung and Google partnership front and center. While Google has its own Pixel phones, the fact remains that Samsung is still the Android flag bearer by the measure of overall units shipped worldwide.
The Pixel may get more new Google features first, including Gemini Live, which I have praised before for its natural-sounding talking capabilities, but Google needs Samsung, too, to help push out its AI tools to the world.
It was really neat to see Gemini Live being able to whip up a recipe based on what it sees in your fridge or to whip up an order off a restaurant menu based on the budget you say. There are various AI tools that may do something similar already, but the baked-in side button summoning feature is what makes the whole affair a wholly better experience.
Many times, if you could just Google, you’d probably just Google. But, so far, because the side button solution makes things a lot more convenient, I can see myself really accessing the assistant more.
In my early tests, it can look up sports game schedules, and I asked it to look for NBA tickets. What’s nice is that it even suggested that I should probably not get the cheapest seats because the experience wouldn’t be that great. It instead suggested slightly more expensive seats that would have a more palatable view of the game. I liked that it could express insights and helpful suggestions.
However, there are limitations, too. For example, It can’t handle novel names. I tried asking it about music artists such as Chappel Roan or Doechii (sorry, it was Grammy season), and what it kept hearing was “chapel road” or “shuttle run” or, in the latter’s case, “the witchy.” It’s understandable, but it also shows you the limit of AI currently: it can’t process novel information on its own. It has to be trained with data that allows it to recognize those unusual words.
There’s a non-Live version of Gemini on the phone, too. And this is the one that you use for adding items to a calendar (you can connect your Google Workspace apps) or for asking it to send a text message.
Again, this is where the side button’s function is useful. You can press it when it’s your turn to speak instead of having you tap the mic button on the screen. It’s functional design, although there are situations when Gemini turns on the mic automatically for you to speak.
To be clear, the Live version doesn’t need button-pressing once it’s active.
Samsung says Gemini can work with Google, Samsung apps, Spotify, and WhatsApp. We’ve been able to send messages, add items to a calendar, and make notes effectively. You can also ask it to bring up YouTube videos, and you can play the videos directly on the chat thread — pretty neat. I’m sure as we continue to use the device, we’ll get to see the quirks Gemini might have with its cross-app functions, but so far so good.
You can also ask Gemini for information about a YouTube video you’re currently watching or a photo you just took.
One notable new feature is the audio eraser, which uses AI to allow you to remove unwanted noise, increase the volume of people speaking, or conversely, increase the ambient noise. It’s like last year’s feature that lets you edit out photobombers, but for audio.
About the other AI functions: the S25 Ultra’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy — a version of the chip fine-tuned for S25 — claims to have a 40% improvement in neural processing or AI processing for on-device tasks.
A refresher: Some AI tasks such as language interpreter, translation, instant-slow mo, live translate, and chat assist are all done on the device using the processor. But some, such as AI generative edit and text summarization, are done on the cloud.
We haven’t fully tested it yet, but it does seem faster when transcribing and generating slow-motion frames to a video. We’d love to race the S24 Ultra and S25 Ultra when it comes to handling these AI tasks.
Also new on the S25: the Now Brief, which is a page that shows things like the weather, your calendar, news, and music suggestions. The feature is anchored by the Personal Data Engine, which, as Samsung explained, supposedly learns about you as you use the phone more to help provide more relevant information for you. It’s still a little bare on my end, so we’ll see how Now Brief fills up in the next months.
There’s also a new Now Bar on the bottom of the screen when it’s locked, which gives you quick access to things like the Now Brief, Spotify, and Youtube, among other things, without having to unlock.
Of course, most, if not all, of these features on the One UI 7.0 will eventually be on the older Samsung flagships, so if the extra weight and the design of the S24 Ultra (now down to P71,990) is fine with you and you just want the new Gemini features, you can go that cheaper route as well.
Macro, a nice addition
The new 50MP ultrawide camera is the biggest change, camera-wise, on the S25 Ultra. It retains the 200MP main/wide, the 50MP 5x tele, the 10MP 3x tele, and ditches the 12MP ultrawide for the 50MP one. Not only that, the ultrawide gets a wider f/1.9 aperture compared to last year’s f/2.2.
The ultrawide, as always, is super useful when you’re taking shots in a small space or simply want to capture more of the scenery. Hence, it’s great that we’re getting higher resolution shots from this camera.
But my favorite part is that the new ultrawide now does macro shots. The S24 Ultra didn’t have this feature, and neither does the base S25 and the S25 Plus. Macro is a fun thing to have in the bag for me, so it’s certainly a plus. Macro has been around on a lot of phones, so it’s not novel, but it’s great to see it here, and it’s great that the S25 Ultra does it well.
You can get in pretty close with the S25 Ultra’s macro, allowing for some pretty cool shots, although Samsung hasn’t released full specs for minimum focusing distance — the closest you can get to a subject before the camera is unable to focus.
For comparison, here’s how close I was able to get with the S24 Ultra’s main shooter (left) and the S25 Ultra’s main shooter (right). Click to zoom.
The phone shifts automatically to macro mode when it detects that you’re getting close to subject.
As always, the cameras are among the main reasons why the Ultra is something you might consider over the base and Plus models. The Ultra’s main and ultrawide shooters have higher resolutions and have a wider max aperture than the cheaper models, so it’s better for lowlight, can take sharper photos in regular lighting, and have more robust zoom cameras.
Since we’re talking about the camera here, we’ll mention that the LOG video capability is a new function on the S25 phones, which allows you to take videos with the most color-neutral profile for more control with color correction and grading. Here’s a quick demonstration of color grading results via LOG from tech YouTuber Mary Bautista.
AI at forefront
The S25 phones, not just the Ultra, along with One UI 7.0 are a continuation of Samsung’s push for AI on mobile phones, highlighted by a side-button design that makes it easier to access Gemini more than ever, along with Gemini Live and a processor that promises key improvements to neural performance.
If this is only what you’re looking for, do consider the base S25 (starts at P51,990) and the S25 Plus (starts at P67,990) as they are cheaper and will have the same Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor and all these AI features.
One caveat regarding the AI features by the way: some AI features for the S25 phones are still only guaranteed free until the end of 2025 — the same as the S24 phones. So, what that means is that there is some possibility that there will be a charge for these AI features down the line. This might apply especially to tasks that use cloud-based AI processing. (We have a chart here of what uses on-device and cloud-based processing to give you an idea of what those are.)
Hardware-wise, we see seemingly incremental changes but the design tweak really makes the Ultra easier to hold than last year’s version, and I appreciate the lighter weight a lot. The camera’s only hardware change is the new ultrawide, so it’s a little thin on that end. But if you love macro shots, then trading in the S23 Ultra or S24 Ultra might be worth a consideration.
This is a review-in-progress, but, so far, this year’s doesn’t represent an overall generational leap but rather a continuation of what the S24 started — you continue to see Samsung’s shift from a hardware and camera focus to a focus on AI features. It’s a more refined S24, so it’s great, but if you’re looking for bigger hardware upgrades, you might have to sit this one out and hope the S26 tilts the trajectory back a little toward cameras and all — if those are what’s important to you.
But if AI is your thing, the S25 Ultra lays down some good ideas for AI being a day-to-day life assistant. It still feels foundational at this point, but it also feels the messaging on AI is clearer than last year’s S24 Ultra, which had all these AI features but didn’t always feel cohesive. – Rappler.com
Samsung lent a review unit.
