Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra first impressions: What’s new with the new Ultra?

Calling Samsung’s yearly ‘Ultra’ phone iconic would be an understatement. For years now, the Ultra has been not just the best Samsung has had to offer, but it has also been one of the best Android phones of each year.

That is precisely why it is understandable why Samsung has not made drastic changes to the Ultra phone. Something that’s quickly evident with this year’s Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra as well.

We got a hands-on experience of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra at the launch event, and for all of you wondering if you should sign up for the pre-order, here are our first impressions of the device.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: What’s new?

At first glance, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra looks and feels very similar to the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra (which also felt quite similar to the S23 Ultra). However, there were a few changes evident pretty quickly.

For starters, while the S25 Ultra doesn’t feel big compared to its predecessor, the screen does. This is due to the smaller bezels, making the display feel a tad larger. At 6.9-inches, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is the largest screen Samsung has put on a phone to date. It is also the exact size as the new iPhone 16 Pro Max, which also had a size upgrade a few months ago.

The design also feels more squared than previous years. While the in-hand feel can be subjective, we do think that the new design makes the phone look more premium. The placement of all buttons and the S-Pen is the same as last year, as is the placement of the camera sensors on the back.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: More power, more battery

Using the S25 Ultra for a bit, we were quickly reminded of how different Android can feel with hardware like this. The phone is driven by raw performance, and you can feel that throughout the new One UI 7 skin – which by the way, now offers even more customisation, along with the privacy perks of Android 15.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset under the hood doesn’t make itself evident compared to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered S24 Ultra immediately, and it may be a couple of years down the line when you get to see the actual benefits of the chip, when other apps and games become as demanding. That said, there are some invisible changes that the new chip brings to the table.

Being a 3nm architecture chip (Samsung’s first ever), the Snapdragon 8 Elite ensures all that that flagship performance is fuelled by the battery as efficiently as possible. This is precisely why you’re likely to have the same 5,000mAh battery last longer with the same usage compared to last year, although we couldn’t test this right away.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: New Galaxy AI features

The new chip also comes with a slightly more powerful NPU (Neural Processing Unit), which means more Galaxy AI features. While there are a few small changes to features Samsung introduced last year like Circle to Search and real-time translations and transcriptions, there are also a couple of new highlights.

ALSO READ: What is an NPU?

The first is a blend between Galaxy AI and Google’s Gemini, which brings you a new hybrid assistant when you long press the power button. This assistant has the power of Gemini, but with a deeper integration with the phone, allowing you to execute more complex tasks, and not just look up information. The assistant also supports multiple commands in one go, which you can see in the video below.

There’s also the ‘Now Brief’ page, which offers a personalised page of AI-powered suggestions around your daily plan, sports scores, upcoming meetings, and more. Other features include AI Select, ProScaler and Audio Eraser, all of which you can read about in our detailed look at the new AI perks.

ALSO READ: Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra vs Galaxy S24 Ultra: What’s different?

There aren’t a lot of new camera changes either, and we’re not sure if we needed any to begin with, since the S24 Ultra was a tank when it came to taking pictures, during the day or night. What does matter, is the new 50MP ultrawide sensor, which finally makes ultrawide shots high-res. Since the sensor also doubles up as the macro shooter, you can get more details on your close-up shots too.

The other major addition is support for LOG-format video, something Apple has been offering on its Pro iPhones for a couple of years now. Shooting in LOG adds a lot more data to your videos, so while LOG output clips look greyish and washed out, you can really pop the colours out during post-processing.

That was our first look at the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. We will be delivering our verdicts on all phones in the series soon, so stay tuned to Unboxed by Croma for an in-depth review of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra too.