Living With the Galaxy S25 Ultra: Samsung’s AI Shines in This Year’s Model

I’ve spent a lot of time lately using Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra, the high-end version of Samsung’s latest flagship line. The phone comes packed with a lot of positives, but what stands out to me are the AI features. Not only are they often handy and helpful, but Samsung has managed to add those enhancements while keeping the old Galaxy feel.

Like last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, the S25 Ultra has basically every high-end feature you can think of, including an S Pen stylus, a holdover from the Galaxy Note years. The screen—a 6.9-inch AMOLED display (3,120 by 1,440 pixels)—is slightly larger than last year’s, even though the handset overall is smaller. At 6.40 by 3.11 by 0.34 inches (HWD) and 7.69 ounces, the S25 Ultra is still a large phone, but it’s a bit thinner and lighter than the S24 Ultra.

The new model also has a titanium frame and more rounded corners, which I like more than the very square corners on the earlier one. The cover glass also got a rethink: It’s now Corning Gorilla Armor 2, which Samsung says is even better at resisting fractures. The phone can also resist a quick dip: Like other premium phones, it has an IP68 rating, meaning, in theory, it can handle up to 30 minutes in water as deep as about 5 feet.

(Credit: Eric Zeman/PCMag)

Finishing up our tour of the exterior, the S25 Ultra provides a volume key and a power button on the right side, with microphones on the top of the phone. The bottom of the phone has a dock for the S Pen stylus (more on this later), along with speakers, a USB-C port for the charger, and a SIM card tray. Like most current phones, it lacks expandable storage or a headphone jack, features I would like but don’t expect these days. 

Under the hood, the processor has been upgraded to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, the better to support the AI features. In PCMag’s tests, the phone handily beat others in most benchmarks, although the iPhone 15 Pro Max did a little bit better in single-core performance.

Moving on to the battery, the S25 Ultra has a 5,000mAh unit capable of charging at 45W via cable or 15W wirelessly, just like the S24 Ultra. In PCMag’s tests, it lasted about as long as the one in the S24 Ultra; it was notably better than the Pixel 9 Pro XL, but not nearly as good as the iPhone 16 Pro Max. Samsung continues to set the default screen to FHD+ (2,340 by 1,080 pixels) to preserve battery life. 

As for the rest of the hardware, the S25 Ultra follows its forerunner with the integrated S Pen stylus that docks into the bottom of the unit. I know people who have been fans of styli in phones going back to the early days of the Galaxy Note, and the S25 Ultra remains the top choice in this arena. The new pen is good for sketching or taking notes. It doesn’t seem to have changed much from the previous version, except for one nuance: The device no longer supports Bluetooth, which enabled “Air Actions” tasks, like remote control of the camera. But as far as I’m concerned, this is a relatively minor feature.

(Credit: Eric Zeman/PCMag)

The camera setup hasn’t changed much from last year’s model, either. The main camera is a 200-megapixel (MP) camera sensor with an aperture of f/1.7, optical image stabilization, and an 85-degree field of view. The setup also has what Samsung calls “adaptive pixel,” which supports multiple layers of binning. In most situations, when you use the main camera, the system will combine 16 pixels into one, creating a 12MP image. In the Pro mode, you can switch to capturing 50MP photos, where four pixels are combined into one. If you download the Expert Raw control, you can also set it for 24MP or even 200MP photos, which take up a lot more storage. My guess is that almost everyone will be happy with the 12MP option.

Like the S24 Ultra, the S25 Ultra includes a 50-megapixel f/3.4 telephoto camera with OIS, 5x optical zoom, and a 22-degree field of view; on the back, you’ll find a 10-megapixel f/2.4 telephoto camera with OIS, 3x optical zoom, and a 36-degree field of view. Like last year, there’s a 12-megapixel f/2.2 front-facing camera with an 80-degree field of view; that also worked well.

The ultra-wide camera on the S25 Ultra is a 50-megapixel f/1.9 with a 120-degree field of view, a significant improvement over the S24 Ultra’s 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera. Not only do you get higher-resolution shots, but also a high-resolution macro mode for detailed close-ups that look quite good.

In general, I’ve found the high-end Galaxy phones to take terrific photos, and the S25 Ultra is no exception. I got very detailed images with good colors, though the Samsung pictures are sometimes more saturated than those from other phones.

Zooming In

Empire State Building photo regular, 10x zoom, and 30x (Credit: Michael J. Miller)

Zoom is one area where I’ve always appreciated the top-of-the-line Galaxy phones, and the S25 is no exception. When zooming in on an image, you can easily increase the zoom either by picking a preset or moving your fingers. Samsung also keeps the 100x “Space Zoom” that combines optical and digital zoom. At that level, images aren’t always as clear as you would like, but I’ve been pretty impressed with images up to 30x.  

ESB ultrawide, 50x zoom, and 100x zoom (Credit: Michael J. Miller)

Of course, the S25 offers a variety of video capture options, up to 8K30. Generally, the video looked quite good, though the quality of the image stabilization can vary, particularly if you are zooming.

Galaxy AI Features 

The big change this year is the inclusion of a lot more AI features, grouped under the heading of Galaxy AI. The changes start with the user interface: Samsung has redesigned its One UI 7 on top of Android 15 to take advantage of the AI options. (Samsung says it will provide seven generations of OS updates and seven years of security patches, which is a nice improvement.)

As with the Google Pixel phones, you get to Google’s Gemini AI by holding the power button, then talking or typing. Gemini seems to be working better every month and does a good job responding to requests, like changing a setting. (Samsung’s own assistant, Bixby, is still included on the phone; in practice, I rarely saw it.)

One nice new feature is “Cross App Actions,” which allows you to ask Gemini AI to handle jobs that take multiple steps and use multiple applications. For instance, you can ask Gemini AI to look something up on the web and then email or message the results to someone.

Among other tasks, Gemini AI offers a Browsing Assist that summarizes or translates web pages, a Call Assist that offers real-time translation during voice calls (though I wasn’t able to test that), and a Note Assist that helps you organize your notes (as well as transcribe and summarize voice recordings). Sometimes I found these assistants to be helpful, sometimes less so, but they’ve certainly come a long way in the past year.

Another new feature is the “Now Brief” widget, which appears on the home screen by default and suggests things it thinks you’ll want, like weather, basic news, and a wake-up routine. It seemed to work well, but I can’t say I’ve found it that important.

As with the S24, the S25 supports “Circle to Search,” through which you can identify text and images on the screen.

For images, a Photo Assist feature lets you edit or reimagine images by moving or removing people and objects, or by restyling your images. Within Samsung’s Gallery app, you can now erase things from an image that you don’t want, just as you have been able to with Magic Eraser in Google Photos for some time, and this worked pretty well.

Comic, 3D, Watercolor, and Sketch effects (Credit: Michael J. Miller)

The new image options don’t end there: You can also sketch an item to add to a photo, while a portrait studio will apply a style such as comic, 3D image, watercolor, or sketch (see the photos above). The various effects are fun, but I suspect business users will get more practical use out of the editing tools. And though we’ve all seen AI-assisted drawing tools before, Samsung has integrated these quite nicely.

For videos, in addition to the usual editing features, there’s a new audio eraser that lets you eliminate or at least minimize distracting noises, such as crowd sounds or wind. This didn’t work perfectly for me, but on noisy videos, the results were certainly improved. I can imagine these being quite useful in some business tasks, as well as for personal photos and videos.

I still look at the AI features as a work in progress, and they come with the umbrella caveat for generative AI: You should double-check the accuracy of anything important the system gives you. But overall, Galaxy AI has come a long way, and the S25 Ultra really impressed me with the breadth and quality of its features.

The S25 Ultra’s list price is $1,299.99, so it’s clearly targeted at the highest end of the market. Samsung offers smaller versions with similar features in the $799.99 S25 and the $999.99 S25+, but these models lack the S Pen and the 200-megapixel main camera.

If you want an Android phone that does just about everything—a great camera, S Pen capabilities, and a host of AI features—the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is clearly the top choice.

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About Michael J. Miller

Former Editor in Chief

Michael J. Miller is chief information officer at Ziff Brothers Investments, a private investment firm. From 1991 to 2005, Miller was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine,responsible for the editorial direction, quality, and presentation of the world’s largest computer publication. No investment advice is offered in this column. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

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