[Music] the Galaxy s25 Ultra is an excellent phone and I think you should get one and that's a wrap I am done with this video while I do think it is an excellent phone I find it more interesting and even frustrating because as its name suggests it's supposed to exceed the other phones on the market it's supposed to go above and beyond in fact Ultra literally means Beyond in Latin with the word Pro being slapped on every product ever products names have begun to lose their meaning but I'd still like for them to mean something and while breakthroughs and jaw-dropping Innovations have nearly peaked for this candy bar form factor as a fan of these phones I can't help but be disheartened by Samsung's stagnation with its top-of-the-line ultimate Flagship let's talk about it this video is sponsored by anchor okay so I bought this phone myself and I opted out of trading anything in for it after taxes and a $24 rewards Point discount this thing cost me $14239.04 too so that's cool the phone is more comfortable and easier to get a grip on it's not like the s24 ultra looked bad or ugly or anything I still like that design in fact I've seen quite a few people say that they prefer that look to this year's I prefer this one it was time to retire that one anyway they kept it for 3 years straight either way this is one attractive premium phone and I like what they did with its looks the speakers sound superb I am genuinely impressed by them probably the best in any phone at the moment so thumbs up for that the fingerprint scanner works as it should it's nice and quick but the haptics are still about the same as they've been for the last few years it's not a deal break or anything it's just noticeably behind what we have in the pixel 9 and the OnePlus 13 boy has the display had some controversy surrounding it why exactly well it's not 10bit and it retains low frequency pwm dimming what does that mean in English it doesn't have the latest and greatest display technology and that could be an issue if you're an avid pixel peeper or you do have genuine PW M sensitivity even if you don't care about these things they absolutely should have been addressed by now for a phone like this huh add those to the list huh regardless this screen is still pure eye candy it's a bright crisp colorful and highly efficient ltpo panel whatever you're doing on here will look and feel great the bezels are nice and slim it's got the upgraded gorilla armor too and that anti-reflective coating that was introduced last year just makes everything so much better I'm really going to need other oems to hop on this band wagon as soon as possible it makes a significant difference especially when you're Outdoors speaking of outdoors I haven't seen much of that stuff to start the year aside from being under the weather for a little while I've admittedly been a complete and total hermit I haven't taken a ton of pictures so I want to get this out of the way now but we are indeed looking at the same Hardware as last year with the exception of the ultra wide camera which got a bump to 50 megapixels up from 12 hooray but yeah same exact Hardware depending on how you look at it that can be a good or a bad thing good because last year's Hardware pushed out great enough shots already bad because this year it's the same case but with an asterisk on it yes the camera Hardware is still more than capable there's no way you're going to look at these and tell me oh these are trash they're they're just not however nitpickers unite because once you start making comparisons then yeah that's when it can get a little iffy I mean we've seen what's possible from oem's overseas a phone you'll probably see mentioned a decent amount is the Vivo X200 Pro which has outstanding cameras it would be so great if Samsung made it a point to keep up with the likes of that right sure but Samsung's not too worried about that and I'll tell you why a little later this is still a great camera array no matter which way you spin it one nice addition is that you can now shoot in log format this flat image profile that gives you more dynamic range and preserves more information for greater flexibility in post-processing it's a good feature to have for sure even if it is very Niche the camera experience is what we've come to expect at this point not the absolute best but still pretty darn good and it's even better if you're an actual photographer and know what you're doing unlike me battery life has been okay so far but it leaves a bit to be desired if I'm being honest for me anyway battery capacity sits at just 5,000 milliamps which is a bit of a let down 6,000 milliamp hours would have been perfect even 5,500 or something I mean it gets the job done I'm still able to get through a full day's use on a single charge with about 6 hours of screen on time but I haven't been able to get that extra half day that I've gotten on the pixel 9 Pro XL and the OnePlus 13 I get better battery life on my 9 Pro XL but its battery is only a hair larger at 5,60 milliamps perhaps updates with better optimization could help with this I don't know I've seen others get stronger results so as always your mileage may vary take my experience with a grain of salt I would just like to get more out of it and maybe I'm asking for too much but I don't think so not for a $1,300 phone the s26 is rumored to be adopting silicon carbon Battery tech that's what the OnePlus 13 uses which will allow for smaller physical batteries but with larger capacities that'll likely lead to faster charging speeds too thank goodness because unfortunately we're still stuck with 45 W wired to charging here it does go from 0 to 100% a little faster this year which is nice and I use this tiny little wall adapter from anchor to get that done I have been buying and using anchor products for well over a decade and they have always delivered as they don't skimp on quality and performance and this little guy is no exception this is their 45w charger that provides the same power output as Samsung's own 45 wat adapter but with some added benefits for one it's 30% smaller making it incredibly easy to keep in a pocket or a backpack or something like a tech pouch it takes up little to no space at all and that's also thanks to its foldable design another thing that Samsung's doesn't have it's got Gan technology for better efficiency and better heat dissipation and it's got a bunch of multi-protect safety features too it's got 10 of them things like short circuit protection high voltage protection and temperature control all in an effort to keep both you and your devices safe now in addition to all of this it's less expensive than Samsung's adapter 2 it's like less than half the price Samsung continues to insist on not including a wall adapter in the Box your Galaxy deserves the best so give it the best this can charge a bunch of other phones at full speed too including the iPhone so go grab one using the links in the description General performance is topnotch I would say as expected I'm not a benchmark head but it's apparently one of the better performing chips on paper as one would hope this phone flies and with upgraded animations in one ui7 this thing is straight butter if you know you know gaming performance is a little bit of a different story from what I've seen though it's still very good just not the best compared to what's out there I did feel some heat when playing games like this at Max settings but that's normal in other daily use I may feel a little warmth here and there but nothing major you can attribute that to the 40% larger Vapor chamber under the hood and boy does this processor really get cooking when I play a turn-based engine building card game about birs but for real though my use case isn't one that'll push this phone to its absolute limits one y7 has been pretty good so far I like the facelift the new widgets and some of the tweaked and baked in UI elements that previously required manual customization little things like the vertically scrolling app Jore the Stacked recent apps layout and swiping down on the right for quick settings and being able to quickly swap between this and the notification panel some of the animations in one7 still needs some work for sure like like this one uh it's funny I posted a clip on Twitter about it and someone accused me of Faking that video trying to push a false narrative it was it was pretty hilarious actually anyway the buffed animations are absolutely noticeable they're very fluid and with the updated home up extension in good lock you can adjust this more granularly now granularly I've never used that word before I've used granular but not granularly okay sorry oneui is a favorite for many and for good reason as always the feature set is borderline endless but something that's been absolutely ridiculous is Samsung not being able to get one ui7 to previous Galaxy devices at least as of this video users have been understandably frustrated because timely updates are just as important if not more important than long-term ones they really got to get it together okay so this new now bar is a neat idea and it works pretty well it's barebones and basic right now so it can only do some many things but I'd be down for added functionality moving forward it can keep track of sports scores and it displays timers now playing media voice recording sessions stuff like that then of course you have all of the AI goodies that Samsung's betting will be the reason people end up buying these phones in all honesty though a lot of these help make for quite the quality of life feature set you can quickly customize long paragraphs and articles you can erase noisy background sound in your videos it's easier than ever to find what you're looking for inside of the settings and the gallery app AI select lets you quickly copy cut generative edit and share different elements on your screen and you can also use this to create a gif or set things as your wallpaper directly and the object eraser here is probably the best of its kind right now it works impressively well and if you're on Tech Twitter you've likely seen a lot of cool test results of this feature Google Gemini integration is here too of course and Gemini live is always fun to use and mess around with Gemini as a whole does okay with basic tasks but will definitely need more work if I'm going to rely on it for more complex tasks oh and these new now briefs definitely need more thirdparty app support to be something worth using regularly but like with the now bar it's a neat idea that has some potential it'd be nice to see this fleshed out a bit more and interestingly enough apparently all of this AI stuff won't be free after a while and as of now we don't know how much it's going to cost which is odd business move likely who knows we'll cross that bridge when we come to it also it's looking like the now brief may not make its way to previous Galaxy devices due to them needing a stronger npu weird that's a shame if [Music] true let's talk ESP pen shall we I know you know where this is going a feature that this beloved integrated stylist has had for what 6 7 years is now gone Bluetooth the thing that allowed for air gestures and remote camera control seemingly as I'm sure you've seen by now one of if not the only reason for its Omission is that nobody used it less than 1% of users and that's still like 100,000 people or close to it now my Spen usage was admittedly already dwindling not because I don't like the Spen I love this thing it's simply because my day-to-day use has called for it less and less over time but when I needed it it was always there and the main thing I used it for was remote camera control it was perfect for group photos I didn't use it every single day but again it was there when I needed it and it's something that no other phone has in this form specifically now let me be clear here this is still the S Pen and there still isn't anything on its level in a smartphone it is still fantastic but instead of getting rid of Bluetooth why not add on to its functionality and give people more reasons to use it especially if its Omission doesn't result in any added benefit whatsoever I don't know the justification just isn't there when Samsung got rid of the headphone jack and removable storage it was oh we want to make more space for Hardware components like bigger batteries and bigger and better camera Hardware we also want to make phones Slimmer and sler and water resistance would have been a challenge you know things like that now they won't admit to this but they were clearly cutting costs to not only get users to buy models with higher storage capacity but also to sell their wireless earbuds it's a very effective business strategy that puts the customer in the back seat or in the trunk or trailing behind on some roller blades anyway as annoying as it was having to see those features taken away at least Samsung's verbal excuses gave us something to chew on and consider with this nah now I could have lived with it if they said well there were some complications with the charging coil for the Spen and the new chi2 charging magnets on the back of the phone but no we we couldn't even get those magnets it could have been a cost cutting move or maybe it was a last minute decision B Bas on poor preparation or something I don't know this makes me worry for other Niche features that don't get the love they deserve yeah what about deck that's a great feature let's appreciate it while we still have it heck let's appreciate the S Pen while this phone still has it Long Live AI though right it's pretty clear that the theme with this phone is playing it safe if I'm being honest with you and I hate to say this but from a business perspective it actually makes a bit of sense the 1plus 13 it Towers over the s25 ultra in terms of overall value and undercuts it by 400 bucks and there are other phones with better cameras bigger and better batteries better gaming performance faster charging speeds more up-to-date display and Hardware technology and so on but guess what Samsung ain't worried because they know they get to take a big old bite out of the US market pie and the oems making those other phones haven't established a presence here in the states even one plus still has its work cut out for it think about this I've gone back and forth between the s25 ultra and the OnePlus 13 I thoroughly enjoy both of these and having to choose between the two would be a challenge the 13's value proposition is awesome the fact that I get all of this for 900 bucks is music to my ears and a sight for S eyes and with how Samsung played it this year going with this phone should be a no-brainer but I left out an important factor I'm not only a reviewer but I'm a tech Enthusiast that to mess around with all kinds of phones so let's say that I wasn't either of those things the OnePlus 13 should still be my pick right I mean I could buy the Nintendo switch 2 when it comes out with that extra 400 bucks huh well in that scenario I'd actually end up picking the Galaxy it might be significantly more expensive but not only is it more easily accessible with it being available on most carriers giving me the best coverage options it gets longer support with 7 years of OS updates and security patches provided they can actually push out those updates and I get to take advantage of that one stinky word that everybody has to mention when talking about any Apple product ecosystem the amount of devices that work in tandem with this and the amount of first and third party accessories this thing has greatly surpasses what any OnePlus device gets at the moment this is why it's frustrating to me this could have been the greatest phone ever made and this video would have been way shorter this $1,300 device has missed out on quite a few things that I didn't think it had to and this is not just some pipe dream Samsung is more than capable of making these things a reality but Samsung didn't think it had to now after saying all of that is there a phone that does it better with all of the complaining I just did about what it does or doesn't have can anything realistically touch what this phone has to offer the answer is no at least for right now look this is why the s24 ultra was the best phone of 2024 for so many people this is why Samsung sold nearly 17 million of them completely dominating the flagship Android market for last year this may not be the best phone for you and your personal tastes but objectively speaking when it comes to the full body of work top to bottom All Things Considered you'd be hard pressed to find anything that can legitimately top this thing smartphones have gotten so good that rankings and comparisons and the context behind them them can get unnecessarily convoluted when I say that something's not the best that doesn't make it bad if I'm ranking phone cameras in a top five for example the s25 Ultras may not land here but they could easily rank here though couldn't they that would still make them some of the best out there even with increasingly tough competition and this goes for pretty much every other main category this phone qualifies for and it is as plain as day that as long as these phones continue to sell well Samsung is perfectly fine playing it safe by not pushing the envelope and it looks like they're perfectly fine with this phone not living up to its [Music] name like I said at the top of this video this is an excellent phone it's a little harder to recommend at $1,300 straight up but we know Samsung's got some great discounts and trade-ins and whatnot and there are still other available options as well including last year's s24 Ultra being a great pickup at a discount believe it or not I like like this a lot I just like to get a little overdramatic about what we know this phone easily could have and should have been how frustrating it is seeing a company make strange decisions that are eerily similar to that of a certain fruit company and how willing they are to play ketchup don't forget to grab one of these small yet powerful wall adapters from Anker using the links in the description I seriously cannot recommend this thing enough because it is genuinely that good thanks again to Anker for sponsoring this video if you made it to this point of the video you are awesome and you know the deal drop a potato in the comments if you're part of the potato gang and thank you so much for watching [Music] [Applause] [Music]