Samsung Galaxy S25 - Long Term, REAL WORLD Review!

I pre-ordered the Samsung Galaxy S25 the day it was announced. In this video, I'm going to cover my real-world experience from using this as my daily driver for the last 3 months, so you can decide whether it's the phone for you. So, let's crack on.

Design and Durability

Let's start with design and durability. And if you've used a Samsung device in the last 2 to 3 years, then the design is going to be familiar, very familiar, because very little has changed since the S23. The main design change is slightly larger camera rings compared to the S24. They don't actually add any functionality though and unfortunately tend to collect dust and lint in your pocket, so are actually a bit of a negative. The cameras being in the top left corner also mean that without a case, the phone rocks when you're using it on a flat surface. These are fairly minor issues, but things you notice after using the phone for an extended period of time.

The phone comes in seven colors, including three exclusives from Samsung's website, like the blue-black that I have here. The back of the phone is made from a frosted glass, which in darker colors like this one, shows fingerprints fairly easily. The phone is quite boxy with sharp edges, but it's definitely not uncomfortable to hold in my opinion, and it feels premium despite only weighing in at 162 grams. It's also a pretty thin phone at 7.2 mm thick, which I think is quite unnecessary, but we'll come back to that later.

Aside from the thinness and weight of this phone, I absolutely love the size of the S25. For me, it's the ideal size of phone that just fits in my hands really well. It hits a sweet spot, being small enough for one-handed use, but large enough for watching video or for gaming. It's refreshing to see a phone embrace a smaller form factor when many others are getting bigger. The side rails of the phone are made from color-matched brushed aluminium, which feels nice to hold, but the phone is also generally very slippery to hold in my experience. So, if you're clumsy at all, then I'd recommend picking up a case.

Case Recommendations

And speaking of cases, with the pre-order, I bought Samsung's official magnet clear case. And honestly, it's terrible. Despite costing nearly £30, it felt extraordinarily cheap, offered almost no screen protection, was almost as slippery as the phone itself, and a nightmare to take off the phone. Seriously, please don't buy this case.

In complete contrast, after about 2 weeks, I switched to the Spigen Ultra Hybrid S case, and it's fantastic. It's actually grippy, has good drop protection, built-in magnets, and a kickstand that I use constantly, all for less money than the Samsung case. I'm aware that there is a potential for clear cases to yellow over time, and that was highlighted in the comments by some of you guys on my recent short videos. So, keep that in mind if you're considering this case for yourself. But the difference in quality and usability compared to the Samsung case is honestly night and day. This video isn't sponsored by Spigen, by the way. I've just had a really good experience with this case.

Display and Front Design

Moving around to the front of the phone, and this is where Samsung's design really shines in my opinion. The 6.2-inch screen has very small, perfectly uniform bezels. And the camera hole punch cutout is tiny when compared to the likes of competitors like Google's Pixel 9. This makes the front look extremely clean and satisfying. And it's honestly one of my favorite parts about the design of this phone.

From a durability perspective, the glass protecting the display is Corning Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which has hardly been affected by my usual everyday use. But it has got one very slightly visible scratch from me putting it face down on my desk to film B-roll shots of the phone. If you frequently put the phone face down on a hard surface, then definitely pick up a case or a screen protector.

Under the glass though, the 1080p 120 Hz display is excellent and can get bright enough for use outside in the sun. It can also get extremely dim, which is great for anyone using their phone at night. Under the screen, there is an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor, which has been consistently snappy and accurate in my experience.

Performance and Hardware

And when you unlock the phone, Samsung's One UI 7 Android skin runs super smoothly being powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip. This year, Samsung opted to use the Snapdragon chip globally, unlike in the S24, where only select regions, such as the US, got the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and everywhere else got Samsung's own Exynos 2400 chip. So, we're getting a consistent experience regardless of the region this time. Plus, the Snapdragon 8 Elite is substantially more powerful than the 8 Gen 3 and Exynos 2400 from last year, and this has shown over the last few months.

Gaming Performance

The most intense task I do on my phone is playing Call of Duty Warzone Mobile. But the experience of playing this on the S25 has been very good. Despite the phone having no active cooling and not much space to dissipate heat, it can achieve 90 to 120 frames per second in 6v6 modes with medium graphics settings and a fairly consistent 50 to 70 frames per second in battle royale with low graphics settings with the exception of when I'm dropping into the map where it can drop to lows of about 40 frames per second as it renders a huge area of the map.

You could achieve better FPS with dedicated gaming phones, but considering this is an everyday phone that I happen to also use to game occasionally, I'm extremely impressed with its performance. The phone does get really hot when I'm gaming for a long period of time, but it never overheated on me, and the performance also doesn't dip enough to make it an issue. Gaming like this does chew through battery, though. In a 1-hour session of Warzone Mobile, I used up 36% of the battery.

The chip is also paired with 12 GB of RAM. So, as you can probably imagine, as the phone can handle high-level gaming, it really doesn't break a sweat with pretty much every other task you can throw at it. Whether that is multitasking between apps, scrolling social media, watching video content, or anything else.

Software Experience: One UI 7

The software experience in One UI 7 has also been excellent. It's super customizable, so you can really mess around with how the software looks and functions. I like that Samsung, unlike other phone brands, give you a load of features, and you can decide whether you want to use them or just leave the phone the way it is out of the box.

For example, One UI 7 by default allows you to swipe down from the top right of the screen to see your quick settings and anywhere else to see your notifications, which keeps them separate. I'm personally coming from a Pixel phone, so I actually turn this off to keep them both together when I swipe down, but that's just my preference. You also have the option to take everything off your home screen and keep it clean AF if you want to. Whereas, in contrast, on Pixel phones, you're forced to have the Google search bar on the home screen at all times, which is just going to disrupt that super clean look. However, I personally like having the Google search bar, the weather widget, and my most-used apps available immediately on unlocking my phone. You can also easily customize the themes on the phone and how the lock screen and widgets appear. What I'm getting at here is although I'm not one to customize my phone to a huge extent, I really like having the option if I want to change things up at any point.

New Features: Now Brief and Now Bar

One UI 7 also introduced Samsung's AI-powered Now Brief which aims to show you relevant info at particular times of the day. But in my experience, it hasn't been particularly useful yet often just showing the weather or generic Spotify recommendations. Hopefully, it improves over time as I like the idea of surfacing actually relevant stuff all in one place at key points of the day.

However, there are other genuinely useful features that Samsung has introduced into the software, such as the Now Bar, which shows information about active apps, such as timers and media playing. The part of this I like the most is the way it minimizes things like timers into the status bar, showing as an expanded status notification, which is just a great way to still be able to see that information while you're in other apps moving around the rest of the UI. It also shows football scores when a match is being played from a team or tournament that it has identified that I'm interested in, which is a really nice touch. It's basically a copy of the dynamic island in iOS, but it's a nice, genuinely useful addition nonetheless. The only downside is limited app support currently, but hopefully more developers integrate with it soon.

Voice Recorder and AI

One of the features I've found myself using most frequently is the voice recorder app. I've used it to record meetings or video ideas and then used its transcription feature, feeding that into Gemini to generate customized summaries. You can summarize the recording in the app itself, but the summaries there are more limited than what I can create with Gemini. This is a huge timesaver and great for allowing me to capture fleeting video ideas as they come to me.

Software Support and AI Costs

And the S25 should keep getting more useful features for a long time yet, as Samsung has promised that it will get the same 7 years of software support as last year's S24, taking it up to 2032, which is excellent. However, on the flip side of that, it seems like Samsung are going to start charging for some or all of their Galaxy AI features at the end of 2025. The concerning thing about this is that Samsung have not confirmed what we're going to have to pay for or how much we're going to have to pay. But, I'm not sure anyone will be happy about the prospect of paying another subscription on top of the price of the phone itself.

Camera System

As I've mentioned in previous videos about other phones, I honestly don't really find the AI photo and video editing features useful for me personally, so I'm just not going to cover them in this video as I've barely used them.

Pro Features

However, there are other camera-based features which are useful to me as a content creator, such as the addition of log video. Log, for anyone unfamiliar, allows you to capture a wide range of light and color information in a flat, desaturated image that then gives you more flexibility in post-production to allow you to make the video look the way you want it to. This is a very niche feature that most people won't need, but if you buy the S25 with the intention of making content, then this is something you might use in the future, and it's something I could certainly use for filming extra clips for my videos.

This is just an example of another thing I really love about Samsung phones. They don't limit the camera software functions of the base S series phones when compared to the flagship Ultra. Within Samsung's camera app, you have pro video and pro photo modes, which give you an insane amount of genuinely professional features such as zebras, false color, and the ability to manually dial in all your settings. If you don't know what some of those terms mean, don't worry. What's important here is that if you're someone who wants to take content creation more seriously at some point, Samsung really gives you the tools to grow as you learn, which I think is excellent.

Photo Quality

Beyond the pro software features of the camera, for everyone else, the camera system is pretty versatile and a solid all-round performer. We get a triple camera array on the back of the phone containing a main 1x 50-megapixel camera, a 12MP ultrawide, and a 10MP 3x telephoto camera. I generally prefer the photos from my Pixel phones, but that is totally subjective and you might prefer the look from the Samsung. The main camera stands out as a lot higher quality than the other two cameras as it has a much larger sensor.

The ultrawide is decent for landscape or street photography, but a notable downside is the lack of autofocus, meaning the S25 has no macro mode and has difficulty focusing on close subjects such as my rabbits, for example. The fact we get a telephoto is a nice addition, and because of that, I can't really be too harsh about the results of the 10-megapixel sensor. It's fine for everyday photos that you put on social stories or message to a friend. I don't think you're going to be producing any Instagram bangers from this camera. The relatively low megapixel count isn't even the issue here, but rather that you can't get any natural blur separation between the subject and the background because the sensor is very small.

Samsung allows you to zoom in up to 30 times in the camera app. But this is a gimmick in my eyes as it produces a very clearly AI-enhanced photo that just looks absolutely terrible to me. I don't know what the actual use case for this is to be honest.

Front Camera and Video

Moving around to the front of the phone, and the front-facing 12-megapixel camera is good, but doesn't get quite as wide as the Pixel 9's front-facing camera, which is important because a lot of people use these cameras for group selfies. I think I prefer the processing on the front-facing camera from the S25 over the Pixel 9, though, as it doesn't oversharpen the details of skin, which is more flattering in my opinion.

Within the camera app, you also get access to camera filters, which again are a carbon copy of Apple's photography styles feature. These basically allow you to place a filter on the camera so you can customize how the end result looks. I really like this feature mainly because you can use an existing photo to create a filter that takes the colors and contrast from that photo and emulates them in your camera. So if you have a particular look or style when you edit photos, you can use an edited photo to create a filter on your phone to get similar-looking photos straight out of the camera, which is cool.

We've already discussed the video performance a bit, but the only thing to add here is that the S25 is again a solid performer for video, taking into account the same autofocus and sensor size limitations that we touched on for photography. You can film up to 8K 30 frames per second if you're some kind of maniac who likes to buy extra storage for fun. But for most people, the 1080p and 4K modes will capture your memories of pets, children, family, and friends really well, which is what most people care about.

Battery Life and Charging

Next, let's talk battery life, as it's one of the most important aspects on any phone for me and probably for a lot of you, too. By 2025 standards, where many phones have 6,000 plus mAh batteries, the S25 has a pretty small battery at only 4,000 mAh. Even considering this, the S25 can last a day with no issues with light to medium use. But, as we saw earlier, it can die within a day if you're doing a lot of heavy tasks like gaming or filming a lot of 4K video, which isn't surprising to be honest.

On a standard day where I've used my phone quite a lot for mixed tasks, I'll tend to get between four to five hours of screen on time with around 10 to 20% battery remaining. The performance on Wi-Fi versus mobile data doesn't seem significantly different, which is positive. Overall, considering the smaller battery size, I think this phone has pretty solid battery life, but if battery is your main concern, then I still think the Pixel 9 is a better option. I think this is helped along by the fact the 120 Hz screen can dynamically switch between 1 Hz and 120 Hz depending on the content that is on it, and the Snapdragon 8 Elite seems to be quite efficient for fairly light tasks.

However, I mentioned before that I thought this phone was unnecessarily thin and personally I would have liked Samsung to have made the phone a millimeter thicker and included a larger battery because this would have made this battery even better. When it comes to charging the battery, this phone isn't going to win any awards. It charges a maximum of 25 watts wired and 15 watts wirelessly with Qi2 charging accessories. However, to achieve full Qi2 functionality, it requires a magnetic case as the phone itself controversially lacks built-in magnets and has been branded as Qi2 ready. If you use your phone without a case, this might be annoying, but as I always put a case on my phone, it's not really been an issue for me.

Price and Verdict

Finally, let's talk price. The base 128 GB S25 retails for £800 in the UK and $800 in the US. I managed to pre-order the S25 with 256 GB of storage for just under £600 because I was able to get some pre-order bonuses plus educational discount as my full-time job is in higher education. This is an insanely good price for this phone in my opinion and if you can get it at a discounted price under $700 ideally, then it's a very easy phone to recommend.

The fact that Samsung have basically copied some key iOS features means it should feel familiar to anyone switching to Android from iPhone. And the excellent customization while still staying true to Samsung's core software experience should mean it feels very familiar to anyone upgrading from an older Samsung or other Android device. On that point, I don't think you should consider upgrading unless you have an S22 or older to be honest, as the S23 and S24 are probably still working absolutely fine for most users.

Having owned an S22, the biggest improvement for me is battery life. The S25 all but fixes that while keeping the great screen and versatile cameras that I liked about the S22. Backed by largely flagship-level specs and long software support. While it can be argued that Samsung are just iterating year-on-year with their phones, I think they are building on a proven product that has 95% of the features that most users want. So, I can't really complain. But what do you think of the S25? Let me know down in the comments. And if you want to pick this phone up, then I've put a link down in the description for you. Otherwise, as always, it's been an absolute pleasure and I'll catch you in the next video. Cheers.