Is it worth the upgrade?

Samsung has revealed the Galaxy S25 collection including the new, shiny Galaxy S25 Ultra – but how does it compare to the Galaxy S23 Ultra and, more importantly, is it worth the upgrade?

While there may not be many differences between the Galaxy S25 Ultra and last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra, there’s way more to appreciate here when coming from the two-year-old Galaxy S23 Ultra, with a new design, new materials, better cameras and much more.

With that said, here’s how the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra stacks up to the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra to help you decide whether you should upgrade. 

Pricing and availability

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is a premium device with a price tag to match, starting at £1,249/$1,299 with 256GB of storage. It’s available to pre-order now, with the phone set to ship on 7 February 2025.

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra cost £1,249/$1,199 at launch back in early 2023, though that price has dropped considerably with the launch of the subsequent S24 Ultra and now S25 Ultra. That means that you can get it on the cheap, coming in at just £643 at Amazon at the time of writing. 

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has a more ergonomic design

The most obvious difference between the two models of Galaxy Ultra is the design; while the Galaxy S23 Ultra sports the traditional ‘Ultra’ look inspired by Samsung’s popular Note collection from the 2010s, the Galaxy S25 Ultra sports rounded corners, flat edges, and a flat screen to match. 

This not only brings the S25 Ultra in line with the design of the rest of the Galaxy S25 collection, but it makes for a more comfortable in-hand experience without those sharp corners digging into the palm.

That continues with the shift in materials; the S23 Ultra offers a regular aluminium frame, but the S25 Ultra offers a more durable titanium frame. It’s also 16g lighter and almost a millimetre thinner than the S23 Ultra, while offering more advanced Gorilla Armor 2 glass protection that Samsung claims can survive a head-height fall onto concrete. 

The display is also a little larger at 6.9 inches, but with way thinner bezels than the S23 Ultra, the S25 Ultra is actually narrower and shorter than the older model. 

That said, other key design elements, like IP68 dust and water resistance and S Pen support, are consistent among the two.

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has more capable cameras

The top-end Galaxy Ultra has always been about cameras, so it shouldn’t come as much surprise to learn that the newer Galaxy S25 Ultra has had a few upgrades in the camera department compared to the older Galaxy S23 Ultra.

While both share the same main 200MP camera, there are plenty of differences with the accompanying lenses. The S23 Ultra boasts a 10MP 3x telephoto, a 10MP 10x telephoto and a 12MP ultrawide lens, but the S25 Ultra boosts that offering with not only a 50MP 5x periscope lens in place of the 10MP 10x sensor, but with a new 50MP ultrawide lens.

Combined with improvements to Samsung’s ProVisual Engine that powers the camera experience, the Galaxy S25 Ultra certainly seems better placed to take a great photo than the older Galaxy S23 Ultra – though we’ll have to confirm once we’ve finished our in-depth testing of the new model. 

Interestingly, the two share the same 12MP selfie camera, so if most of your camera use comes from the front-facing camera, you won’t notice any difference at all.

The Galaxy S25 Ultra can also record in up to 4K@120fps for slow-mo, compared to the 4K@60fps limit on the S23 Ultra, though both phones cap out at 8K@30fps if you really want to push it that far. 

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is way more powerful

New smartphones pretty much always come with newer, more powerful chipsets than those that came before, so it’s safe to say that the two-year-old Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy can’t quite compete with the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy within the Galaxy S25 Ultra. 

In fact, even compared to last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, the 8 Elite boasts significant improvements including a 45% boost to CPU speeds and a 40% boost in the GPU department, along with massively boosted NPU smarts and better power efficiency, so the gap between the 8 Gen 2 and 8 Elite is fairly substantial.

It essentially means that the Galaxy S25 Ultra should not only be able to run games at higher framerates, especially at its full QHD+ resolution, but it’ll likely remain faster and more responsive for much longer than the Galaxy S23 Ultra – though we’ll confirm this with rigorous benchmark testing over the coming days. 

The S25 Ultra also has more RAM options, with the phone available with either 12GB or 16GB of RAM depending on the storage option you go for, while the S23 Ultra has either 8GB or 12GB. 

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra gets the full Galaxy AI treatment

Despite Galaxy AI not making an appearance until the launch of the Galaxy S24 last year, the Galaxy S23 Ultra also received much of the GenAI-powered features including headliners like generative edit, live translation, chat assist and transcription capabilities via an OTA update. 

However, the Galaxy S25 Ultra takes it a step further with not only improved performance from existing Galaxy AI features (as well as moving previously cloud-based tasks like generative edit onto the device), AI is baked directly into the operating system itself. 

This allows the onboard AI to perform tasks across apps, like finding your football team’s fixtures on Google and adding them to your Google Calendar, as well as provide personalised summaries in the morning and evening in the form of Now Brief.

It’s unclear whether the Galaxy S23 Ultra will get access to any of these tools once it receives the OneUI 7 update further down the line, but it certainly won’t be able to run as many features on-device as the S25 Ultra, meaning performance will likely be a little slower on the older model. 

The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra has a more advanced S Pen

While the Galaxy S25 Ultra seems to be an all-round upgrade on the Galaxy S23 Ultra, there is one key area where the older model comes out on top: the S Pen.

The integrated S Pen has been a staple of the Galaxy Ultra for the past few years, having made its first appearance on the Galaxy S22 Ultra, and the experience has largely been consistent with the same low-latency performance and handy additional features – until now, that is.

While the S Pen within the S25 Ultra might look the same as that found within the S23 Ultra, there’s a key difference: the new S Pen no longer offers Bluetooth support. That doesn’t have much effect on note-taking capabilities, but it does mean that you can no longer use the S Pen as a remote camera shutter to take group photos, nor can you use it to remotely change slides in presentations, and air gestures have also disappeared as a result.

Those are fairly niche uses of the S Pen, but it does mean that the S23 Ultra’s S Pen is technically more capable than that of its newer sibling. 

Early thoughts

While there may not be many big differences between the Galaxy S24 Ultra and the new Galaxy S25 Ultra, there’s more to appreciate coming from the older Galaxy S23 Ultra. 

The new smartphone is not only more ergonomically shaped, lighter and thinner, but it also has a larger, more durable display, more capable cameras, a way more powerful processor and new Galaxy AI smarts, all of which could make for a tempting upgrade for Galaxy S23 Ultra users coming to the end of their two-year contracts.

We’ll save our final thoughts until we’ve fully benchmarked and tested the newer Galaxy S25 Ultra however – head back soon to see our final verdict. 

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