Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra practical: Smoothes sharp edges

Announced today, the Galaxy S25 Ultra sheds more of its Note roots this year, with rounded corners and flat edges that align it more with the rest of the S series. It comes with Qualcomm’s latest chipset, an upgraded ultra-wide camera and not much else in terms of hardware. With no price increase over last year’s model — starting at $1,299 — it’s a light refresh of Samsung’s biggest phone, with a heavy emphasis on One UI 7.0’s AI upgrades.

Something about the switch from curved edges to flat sides makes the S25 Ultra stand out fiercely in pictures, as if the Cybertruck were a telephone. But it’s actually slightly smaller and lighter than last year’s device, even with a larger 6.9-inch screen thanks to slimmer bezels. It is equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor that is tuned for Galaxy devices – this applies to all S25 series phones sold in all regions, which has not been the case recently. And it still comes with another strong spec: seven years of OS updates and security fixes.

There are some interesting things not however at Ultra this year. Bixby is no longer the default virtual assistant. It’s still around and you can summon it via its own app. But Google Gemini responds when you long press the wake button on the side of the phone.

The included S Pen, another holdover from the Note era, will be a bit of a downgrade. It no longer supports Bluetooth, so the air movement checks previously offered versions are gone. The S25 Ultra’s included S Pen is just a basic stylus, no magic wand tricks up its sleeve. Bummer.

Camera hardware is largely unchanged from the previous model, apart from a new 50-megapixel ultrawide that replaces a 12-megapixel module. Samsung claims an upgrade to the S25’s algorithmic image processing has improved detail in zoomed images. On the video side, Samsung now offers a Galaxy Log profile along with a custom LUT.

The most interesting changes are the software side of One UI 7.0. My colleague Dominic Preston has a good overview of the new stuff, which also appears on the S25 and S25 Plus models. Unsurprisingly, it all has to do with AI, much of which we were already familiar with thanks to the One UI 7.0 beta. But a few things made me sit up and pay attention.

The first is the ability to use artificial intelligence across apps to take action, like taking a photo of a flyer and having Gemini add the dates to your calendar and email your spouse about it. It may not sound like much, but some of us have to remember what day is “crazy hair day” in kindergarten, when conferences are held, and the deadline to sign up for this season’s football team. Some help would be nice. This will first work across Google Workspace and Samsung native apps, with the addition of WhatsApp and Spotify.

The other thing I’m interested in seeing in action is suggested routines. In theory, the S25 phones will be able to notice if there are certain settings you tend to use at the same time every day or under certain conditions – like turning on Bluetooth every time you get into the car and turn it off when you go out. When it sees a pattern, it should be able to suggest a routine to automatically take care of those actions for you. You’ll be able to customize the routine parameters to your liking, but you won’t have to go through the tedious work of setting it up from scratch. That could be cool!

Thing is, these things aren’t exclusive to the S25 Ultra or even the S25 series. Samsung’s smartphone product manager Blake Gaiser told me that Samsung will bring its new AI features to older devices where possible. The company certainly seems committed to delivering these updates to older phones — but don’t forget that they probably won’t always be free.

We’ll find out soon enough if this is the AI ​​update that will finally deliver on the promise of AI on our smartphones; The Galaxy S25 Ultra and its S25 sibling will ship on February 7.