Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: 3 things potentially worth the upgrade
Incremental annual phone updates have become pretty normal, but even by modern industry standards, the latest Samsung flagship devices feel iterative.
The Galaxy S25 series was unveiled at Samsung's Unpacked event this week with the promise of fancy hardware upgrades and useful new software features. That's...not entirely what we got, though. At first blush, the Galaxy S25 Ultra is very similar to last year's model. Its display specs are nearly identical, and the story is similar with its rear camera measurements. Aside from a new 50MP ultra-wide lens (and I don't want to pretend like that's nothing), little has changed.
After some brief hands-on testing with the Ultra, though, I've identified a couple of things that might make this phone worth a purchase, especially if you're rocking a handset that's getting up there in years.
The new chip is very fast
Probably the biggest hardware enhancement Samsung added to the Galaxy S25 Ultra is the latest and greatest in Snapdragon processing, the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset. After a little bit of time using the phone, I can confirm everything feels very speedy and responsive.
I'll wait until the full review to get into benchmarking scores and whatnot, but the new chip makes a great first impression. Things that seem like they should be hardware-intensive, such as AI features, seem to run without much of a fuss. I can say the same about basic everyday app usage. I haven't spent a huge amount of time with the S25 Ultra just yet, but based on the early goings, the new chip is probably going to be the biggest change for anyone upgrading from an older handset.
Now Brief is interesting
Speaking of AI features, Samsung went whole hog this year with a suite of new AI goodies that, at least for now, seem to be exclusive to S25 Ultra. These include a number of agentic AI features that I haven't had time to properly put through their paces yet, such as the ability to have Gemini look up information for you and add it to your notes or calendar automatically. This did work for me on the first try (I told it to add this weekend's playoff football games to my personal calendar), but I'll need more time with it to fully judge it.
However, one new AI features does stick out to me right away, and that's the Now Brief. This is a widget that lives on your home screen by default that puts things like the day's weather, upcoming calendar obligations, and news stories that are relevant to your interests in one easily scrollable page.
While I am as much of an AI hater as anyone (largely due to its destructive environmental impact), I'll admit that there's some use to this. Being able to quickly see what kind of weather the day will bring, as well as what it is that I have to do that day and what's happening in the news, is convenient. Could I also easily do all of this myself with about 30 seconds of Google searching? Absolutely. But this is slightly more convenient, if nothing else.
The S25 Ultra takes the edge off
Lastly, Samsung made one small change that I really like: The edges of the S25 Ultra are curved.
Previously, the titanium frame on the S24 Ultra had hard corners around the phone, which distinguished the Ultra models from their less expensive brethren, but also made them kind of a pain to actually hold. That's not as true of the S25 Ultra, which I feel has a more natural grip and doesn't dig into your palms like the old cornered edges would. The new phone is also 14g lighter than the old one, for what that's worth.
I'll need more time with the S25 Ultra to fully formulate my thoughts on it, but so far, this phone seems exactly as iterative as you think it is. It's not really a surprise at this point why Samsung's Unpacked stream waited until the final few minutes to actually talk about hardware; there just isn't a lot to talk about. But maybe after some more time with the S25 Ultra, I'll feel differently.