Camera hardware is largely unchanged from the previous model, except for a new 50-megapixel ultrawide
Our Bureau
Washington, DC
The Galaxy S25 Ultra, announced on Thursday, 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 ultrawide camera, and not much else, hardware-wise. 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 major emphasis on One UI 7.0’s AI upgrades, according to a report in The Verge.
Something about the shift from curved edges to flat sides makes the S25 Ultra look hefty in photos. But it’s actually slightly smaller and lighter than last year’s device, even with a bigger 6.9-inch screen thanks to slimmer bezels. It’s equipped with a Snapdragon 8 Elite processor tuned for Galaxy devices — that’s true for all S25-series phones sold in all regions, which hasn’t been the case recently. And it still comes with one more strong spec: seven years of OS updates and security patches, says the report in The Verge.
There are some interesting things not on the Ultra this year, though. Bixby is no longer the default virtual assistant. It’s still present and you can summon it through its own app. But Google Gemini will answer when you long-press the wake button on the side of the phone, says the report in The Verge. The included S Pen, another holdover from the Note era, gets a bit of a downgrade. It no longer supports Bluetooth, so the air gesture controls that previous versions offered 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, except for a new 50-megapixel ultrawide, replacing a 12-megapixel module. Samsung claims that 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 software-side in One UI 7.0. My colleague Dominic Preston has a good rundown of the new stuff as it also appears on the S25 and S25 Plus models. Unsurprisingly, it all has to do with AI, and much of it we were already familiar with thanks to the One UI 7.0 beta. But a couple of things made me sit up and pay attention. (With agency reports)
