Galaxy S25 Ultra Review: Everything, Including the Kitchen Sink
Samsung has never made a more capable phone, or a heavier one. The S Pen remains the reason to pick this over anything else.
Maya Okonkwo
Size and handling
At 232g with corners you can feel, this is a two-handed device and Samsung has stopped pretending otherwise. The flat display makes the S Pen genuinely pleasant to write on, which the curved generations never quite managed.
Cameras
The 200MP main sensor bins down to detailed, slightly over-sharpened 12MP shots. Samsung has dialled back the saturation this year and images look considerably more natural. The 5x periscope is the standout — the best long telephoto on any phone right now.
Software
One UI 7 is dense but no longer cluttered, and Samsung has committed to seven years of updates. There is still more duplicated first-party software here than we would like.
Specifications
| Spec | Detail |
|---|---|
| Display | 6.9in LTPO AMOLED, 120Hz, 3120 x 1440 |
| Chip | Snapdragon 8 Elite |
| Memory | 12GB RAM, 256GB storage |
| Cameras | 200MP main, 50MP ultrawide, 10MP 3x, 50MP 5x |
| Battery | 5000mAh, 45W wired |
| Weight | 232g |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent fourteen days as the reviewer’s only phone, SIM included. Screen at a metered 200 nits, adaptive refresh left on, the same twelve apps installed on every handset, and a fixed 5G network in the same building.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Screen-on time | A scripted day — four hours of mixed browsing, an hour of video, thirty minutes of camera, the rest idle — repeated three times and averaged. |
| Sustained performance | Twenty minutes of continuous load, reporting the figure at the end rather than the peak in the first ninety seconds. |
| Charging | From 2% to 100% with the fastest charger the manufacturer sells, at 22°C ambient, timed to the minute. |
| Camera | The same eighteen scenes on every phone — backlit portrait, indoor low light, moving subject — shot in the default mode with no editing. |
| Thermals | Surface temperature at the hottest point after the sustained run, measured with a contact probe. |
We deliberately do not report synthetic benchmark totals quoted in isolation, and any figure supplied by the manufacturer.
The honest caveat: Battery results are specific to our routine. A heavy camera user will see materially less screen-on time than these numbers suggest.
How it compares
The closest alternatives on price are Xiaomi 15 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro. All three have been through the same tests, so the figures below are directly comparable rather than collected from different reviews.
| Model | Price | Our score | Standout | Weak point |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galaxy S25 Ultra (this review) | £1249 | 4 / 5 | Outstanding periscope telephoto | Heavy |
| Xiaomi 15 Ultra | £1299 | 4 / 5 | A one-inch main sensor with genuinely optical depth falloff | Heavy |
| iPhone 16 Pro | £1099 | 4 / 5 | The best sustained performance of any phone | Iterative to a fault |
Nothing at this price scored higher in our testing, which is the strongest argument for the Galaxy S25 Ultra.
Is it worth the money?
At £1249 the Galaxy S25 Ultra asks £330 more than the category average of £919, against an average score of 4.1 out of 5 across the smartphones we have tested. Its own 4 works out at roughly £312 per point. Paying above average for a below-average score only makes sense if readers who want outstanding periscope telephoto describes you precisely.
If the budget is the binding constraint, the Galaxy A56 at £399 is the floor we would still recommend — below that the compromises stop being ones you can live with.
Living with it
Two weeks in, the figure that stopped mattering was display — 6.9in LTPO AMOLED, 120Hz, 3120 x 1440 is more than adequate and you forget about it by the third day. What kept surfacing instead was that heavy, which is easy to shrug off in a spec comparison and harder to ignore at 6pm on a Friday. On the other side, outstanding periscope telephoto turns out to be the sort of detail you only appreciate after living with the alternative.
What we liked
- Outstanding periscope telephoto
- S Pen is still unmatched
- Bright, flat, enormous display
- Seven years of updates
What we did not
- Heavy
- Expensive
- Duplicated first-party apps
Verdict
The most capable Android phone you can buy, provided your hands and wallet are up to it.
Score: 4 / 5 · £1,249 as reviewed (256GB)
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the smartphones we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Galaxy S25 Ultra Review: Very Good, With Caveats and Galaxy S25 Ultra vs Galaxy A56: Is the Galaxy S25 Ultra Worth £850 More?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
