Galaxy S25 Ultra Setup Guide
How to set up the Galaxy S25 Ultra properly: the first-run checklist, the settings worth changing immediately, and what to do if something goes wrong.
Last revised
A first-run checklist for the Galaxy S25 Ultra. These are the settings worth changing before you start using it properly, in the order we would change them.
Before you begin
Charge to at least fifty percent and connect to a network you trust. Have your previous device to hand if you intend to transfer data directly, which is almost always faster than restoring from a backup.
First-run checklist
- Complete the initial setup wizard, but decline optional analytics and personalised advertising prompts.
- Install pending firmware immediately — launch software is frequently a revision behind.
- Sign in to your account and let the initial sync finish before judging performance or battery.
- Review app permissions in one pass rather than approving each prompt as it appears.
- Set the display to a fixed brightness for a day so you have a baseline to compare against.
- Configure backups before you put any data on it, not after.
Settings worth changing straight away
- Turn off any preinstalled promotional notifications, which are usually enabled by default.
- Set an automatic update schedule for a time you are not using the device.
- Review what is permitted to run in the background — this is the single largest battery variable.
- Enable device encryption if it is not already on by default.
Specific to this model
One thing worth knowing about the Galaxy S25 Ultra in particular: Samsung dialled back the saturation this year and images look far more natural. Its main limitation, heavy at 232g, is also worth being aware of before you set expectations.
What to change, and what it costs you
| Setting | Change it to | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Promotional notifications | Off | None. These are advertising, not alerts. |
| Background refresh | On for messaging, off for the rest | Some apps update more slowly when opened. |
| Automatic updates | On, scheduled overnight | Occasional overnight restart. |
| Display brightness | Fixed for the first week | Slightly worse in changing light, but gives you a baseline. |
| Location access | While using the app only | A handful of features that genuinely need background location stop working. |
| Backups | On, before you add any data | Storage cost, which is trivial next to losing everything. |
Settings we would leave alone
- Adaptive brightness — it is better than a fixed level once it has a week of data to learn from.
- Background app refresh for messaging and calendar; disabling these is the most common cause of "notifications stopped working".
- Automatic security updates, which should never be deferred no matter how inconvenient the timing.
- Storage optimisation features, which are conservative by default and rarely worth overriding.
Establish a baseline in the first week
Spend the first week recording what normal looks like. Note the display behaviour on a typical day, roughly how much charge is left when you stop using it, and how warm it gets under load. The Galaxy S25 Ultra quotes 6.9in LTPO AMOLED, 120Hz, but the number that matters is yours, measured on your usage. Without that baseline you have no way to tell six months from now whether something has genuinely degraded or whether you have simply started expecting more of it — which is the question behind almost every "is my device slowing down" search.
If something goes wrong
Do not factory reset as a first step. Most first-run problems are a pending update or a permission that was declined during setup, and both are quicker to check than a reinstall.
Behind this page
This reference page is written from the same testing notes as the reviews it supports, and it is revised whenever the hardware or the software underneath it changes. Where a figure appears here it has been measured rather than quoted from a specification sheet.
If something on this page no longer matches what you are seeing, it is out of date rather than disputed — tell us and it gets checked again.
Related reading
The reviews this page supports go into the measurements behind these figures, and the knowledge base collects every reference page we keep.
Elsewhere in setup guides: Galaxy Tab S10 Ultra Setup Guide, Galaxy Tab S9 FE Setup Guide and Galaxy Watch 7 Setup Guide.
