Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review: Not enough to justify an upgrade
Phone companies are going to need to start doing new releases every two or three years instead of annually if this is how things are going to go from now on. Annual phone upgrades started looking incremental to regular people years ago, but the tech-savvy among us could always point to at least one or two changes that were actually meaningful. With the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, we might have finally passed the rubicon where even I, a professional tech writer, can't really muster a reason why anyone with a somewhat recent Android phone would need to upgrade to this device. The differences between last year's model and this one are so marginal as to almost not exist. Yes, the display is very slightly bigger, and there's a new chip inside that puts up nice scores in benchmarks. But much of that new processing power is devoted to AI applications that are mildly useful at best, gimmicky on average, and outright hostile to human creativity at worst. The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is not a bad premium flagship by any means, but it's really difficult to think of a reason why you should buy one. Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra: Price and specs Volume and power. Credit: Joe Maldonado/Mashable Starting at a staggering $1,299 (which, to be fair, is the same price as the Ultra model a year ago), the Galaxy S25 Ultra includes these specs: 6.9-inch AMOLED display with adaptive 120Hz refresh rate and 3120x1440 resolution Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy processor 256GB/512GB/1TB storage options 12GB RAM 5,000mAh battery For the sake of comparison, the display is a tenth of an inch bigger than the S24 Ultra, while the new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip is top-of-the-line phone hardware at the moment. Those are your two functional differences between the Galaxy S25 Ultra and its immediate predecessor. Display resolution, storage and RAM options, and even the size of the battery are all identical between the 2024 and 2025 models. Samsung actually has a comparison page on its website that highlights just
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review: Not enough to justify an upgrade