Samsung S25 Ultra 2 Weeks Later - iPhone User's Perspective

[Music] so I've been using the Samsung Galaxy s25 Ultra for the past two weeks now and I have a lot of thoughts about this phone now I am primarily an iPhone user you know I've been using iOS for the better part of almost 10 years now so you will see me making a lot of comparisons to the iPhone in this video whilst this might not be the most well-rounded technical review I wanted to share my experience using this phone and cover what's important to me the design Samsung have continued to refine their iconic design for

the Ultra Series this year and as someone who was initially drawn to the iPhone for its design I have to say the s25 ultra is really impressive it looks super mean and stealthy especially in the titanium jet black color which I've gone for in fact I've been saying over the past two weeks that if Batman was to own a smartphone I think it would be the s25 ultra this year Samsung have rounded off the corner slightly to give the phone a more comfortable hold however the sides have also become more squared off to give it

a more futuristic design personally I do find the iPhone to be a bit more comfortable to hold in the hand however considering most users will be using their phone with a case this isn't really something to be concerned about I found that the squared of design of the screen along with its minimal hole punch layout allows for a much more immersive experience when consuming content compared to the iPhone especially with the reduction in bezels which are 15% smaller than last year one thing that Samsung smartphones are known for is their display quality the s25 ultra

features a 6.9 in AMOLED screen capable of refreshing up to 120 htz along with an anti-reflective coating that's designed to block out glare from surrounding light sources it wasn't something that I was initially expecting to care much about until I compared the screen glare on the s25 ultra to the iPhone 16 Pro Max you can see that the s25 ultra does a much better job at reducing glare which is probably also helped by the fact that it can reach up to 2,600 its a peak brightness Outdoors compared to just 2,000 nits on the iPhone I

also found that the colors generally looked a lot sharper and more vibrant than the iPhone 2 especially when you have the full resolution toggled on however like the pixel 9 Pro which I tested last year one weird qu work is that you have to manually enable the high resolution mode in the settings app when you unbox the phone it will have the standard resolution on by default the cameras the camera setup on the s25 ultra is pretty insane it features a 200 megap Main camera a 50 map Ultra wide a 5 map 5x lens a

10 map 3x lens along with a 12 map front-facing camera I definitely do appreciate the inclusion of the 3x telephoto lens as much as I love the 5x lens on the iPhone 16 Pro Max there are times when the zoom is a bit too much for me and in those cases I would like to have the 3x lens to fall back on I'll show you a group of some photos that I've shot on the s25 ultra and the iPhone so that you can compare between them overall I think that the quality is fairly similar across

both cameras sure you could point to the iPhone taking more consistent photos than the Samsung and the Samsung taking photos with more contrast by default but I think you really have to cherry-pick to tell the images apart where things got slightly more interesting was shooting in raw this is how I shoot most of my photos on the iPhone because shooting in raw just gives me a bit more flexibility to edit the photos exactly how I want them without the phone's overprocess and getting in the way and weirdly this was something that I sort of struggled

to do with the s25 ultra I found that the raw images just didn't come out how I expected them to and when I exported them to Lightroom I noticed that a couple of them had this weird red tint that effectively rendered them unusable I'm not sure if this is just an issue with the way that I've shot the photos but if anyone does have a fix for this it would be great to know in the comments this year Samsung have also introduced the ability to shoot in log format log is essentially a flat color profile

that looks sort of weird at first but it's designed to give you a lot more control when it comes to color grading your footage and getting the exact look that you want those of you who have been following this channel for a while now will know that I shoot all of my videos on this channel exclusively in the Apple log format on my iPhone so I was very much interested to see how the Samsung compared and I'll be honest I wasn't the biggest fan of how the footage on the s25 ultra turned out I found

that the videos the camera took were quite noisy especially in low light environments which is how I tend to shoot in fact part of me wanted to use the s25 ultra to shoot the aoll for this video but unfortunately the quality of the footage just wasn't at the level that I wanted obviously the caveat here is that I don't expect most Samsung customers will care about log you know it very much is a niche feature however if you are an aspiring content creator and you're looking to shoot videos with your smartphone I would still recommend

commend opting for the iPhone for now not least because a lot of apps like Instagram and Snapchat continue to perform a lot better on the iPhone both in terms of the way that you navigate through them as well as the quality of the photos that come out of them which you can see on screen when it comes to the battery the s25 ultra continues to rock the same 5,000 mAh battery as previous generations which arguably does lag behind other Android competitors within the space however as an iPhone user this was actually a decent upgrade for

me I'd say overall the s25 ultra offers similar levels of battery life as my iPhone 16 Pro Max when you account for the fact that my iPhone has more data stored on it and is also a couple of months older it's enough to get me through a full day of heavy usage even with the mobile data turned on and in many cases you could probably go one and a half days without needing to charge it if you're using it lightly however what I also like about the s25 ultra is that you have these other battery

features like being able to fast charge using a 100 W power brake or being able to charge other devices using the back of the phone or even being able to see an estimate for how long the phone's going to take to charge to 100% you know these are all extremely useful features which go beyond just how long does the battery last one thing that every smartphone company seems to be talking about nowadays is AI Samsung have introduced a bunch of new AI features this year ranging from Gemini integration to the nowb bar which somewhat mimics

the dynamic Island on the iPhone however one thing to note is that a lot of these AI features are also coming to previous Samsung models and in some cases other Android phones as well being able to summon Gemini using the power button is a killer feature for me and it comes in handy whenever I want to quickly look up something without searching through every article on the web and with the wider system integration in one UI you can ask Gemini to perform system tasks like setting reminders and creating timers and even getting Gemini to summarize

emails from your Google workspace orbe it with the caveat that you have to be quite specific about which email you're referring to and you can take it a step further by issuing multi-step requests like asking it to find out when a football game is and setting a reminder about it in your calendar and overall it does make Siri look like a bit of a joke in comparison I also found that certain features like cleaning up photos just work a lot better on the s25 ultra compared to the iPhone I'll show you some examples on screen

so you can see the difference the Samsung does a much better job at filling in the gaps compared to the iPhone which almost looks like it's trying to do a cheap Lightroom job I also found that my iPhone overheated a lot when trying to use the cleanup feature whereas the Samsung had no issues at all overall the AI features are very fun to use at first however I don't know if the technology is quite yet at a point where I trust it on a regular basis to perform tasks for me and I find that using

the tech summarization feature what's sometimes useful doesn't always summarize paragraphs in the way that I'd want this Tech will of course improve over time and realistically it's not like apple have done much good in the space either but I wouldn't purchase this phone just for the AI features unless you consider yourself to be an early adopter who wants to get their hands on this technology early on it's also worth noting that whilst these AI features are free to use right now Samsung have said that they will eventually start charging for them although from my own

research it wasn't entirely clear what the pricing would look like and of course a lot of the Gemini integration features will also be coming to other Android phones too over time touching very briefly on performance the s25 ultra is boasting the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip with 12 GB of RAM and as noted before I did find this made a bit of a difference when it came to processing some of those on device AI tasks however during General use it shouldn't come as a surprise that I didn't really find much of a need for all of

that extra horsepower you know outside of recording these videos and listening to music and podcasts I don't actually use my phone as much as people might think and so I'm probably not the best person to speak to things like performance of course as an iPhone user one thing I was super Keen to test out was the software on this phone and how it compares to iOS Android is quite different to iOS in that each Android manufacturer is able to apply their own version of Android on their smartphone so the software that runs on the s25

ultra is technically slightly different to the software that's powering the Google pixel9 pro which many of you will know I had a few issues with last year Samsung are using one ui7 on the s25 ultra which I'd say overall offers a very userfriendly experience it was relatively easy to pick up within a couple of days and it has many similarities to iOS which should make the process of switching a relatively pain-free experience one thing that I particularly liked was how you can scroll through widgets on one UI it's super useful when it comes to viewing

my calendar schedule in advance and in control sensor you can swipe down on the controls to reveal even more shortcuts which I think is a much cleaner solution than the pag solution Apple introduced in iOS 18 also as I mentioned in my pixel 9 Pro review being able to split screen apps comes in handy a lot more than you might think like when you're watching YouTube videos whil browsing through other apps which effectively gives you a YouTube premium like experience for free or if you need to run a quick calculation whilst you've got other information

on your screen and then there's Samsung decks which you can sort of think of as being like Samsung's version of stage manager on the iPad it lets you hook your phone up to an external display and loads up a mini desktop like experience it's super impressive and easy to use and if I ignore some of the lag I was experiencing with the mouse it was probably my favorite feature of this entire phone I'd go as far to say that it offers a much better Computing experience than the iPad does and it's perfect for those looking

for a mini Computing experience of course you can go a step further when it comes to customizing your phone using the Galaxy store but to be honest I've never really been too fussed with customizing my phone you know I usually like to keep things pretty simple another thing that impressed me was that Samsung are offering up to 7 years of support and OS updates for these smartphones it remains to be seen if this phone can live up to that promise when factoring in battery degradations and performance slowdowns over time but it is really impressive and

it might make the price tag of £1,250 a lot more palatable for some people overall I still prefer the look and feel of iOS compared to oneui however I think part of this is just down to the fact that I've been using iOS for the better part of 10 years now and so in that regard it just feels a lot more familiar to me touching quickly on the Spen situation many of you will have seen that Samsung have removed the Bluetooth functionality from the S Pen this year so you can no longer use the side

button to perform actions like capturing photos or controlling the phone remotely Samsung have said that this is because less than 1% of users were using this functionality however given that the Ultra Series is meant to be targeting that 1% of Enthusiast users I do think that not having it on this phone is a bit of a Miss once I didn't find myself using the S Pen a lot during the past two weeks I can see it being useful for when it comes to signing documents and jotting down quick notes of inspiration when they come and

I am hoping that Samsung don't give up on this feature going forward so overall whil it's on paper the s25 ultra might seem like a small upgrade compared to last year's model if this is your first time trying a flagship smartphone from Samsung I think you're going to have a great experience obviously this is just my impression based on 2 weeks of usage you know if you want an actual buying recommendation I suggest watching a proper review from somebody who's actually used this phone for multiple years rather than these two we review videos because there

are going to be so many small quirks and nuances with using a Samsung smartphone that I've just not been able to capture or cover within this small video which is why I probably won't be titling this video a review per se personally I won't be switching over to the s25 ultra mainly because it doesn't really make much sense given my current workflow you know I need an iph camera to shoot these videos and I don't think the s25 ultra could properly replace it you know I use a Mac to edit all of these videos with

I use an iPad for studying and for not taking so having an iPhone just works better with that setup for me personally however if you are getting bored of the iPhone and you're looking for an Android experience that isn't too dissimilar to the iPhone then I think that the s25 ultra is definitely one to consider hopefully you guys enjoyed this video make sure to follow me on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe for the next one [Music]