BitDepth#1502 Mark Lyndersay IT'S BEEN a minute since Samsung offered a hands-on opportunity with one of their premium smartphones. That last happened back in 2022 (https://cstu.io/b0b2e8) when we were all still wearing masks and Samsung was still wedded to its curving edges aesthetic. That design cue made for an undeniably appealing visual as the screen seemed to disappear off the edge of the device, like those infinity swimming pools that overflow at one edge. At some point, probably when reviewing its internal history of device damage, the company apparently decided that rugged was better than cool, because the new S25 aligns with the more commonplace design of toughened glass wrapped at the edge with a band of metal. That titanium band wraps around a display made from Corning Gorilla Armor 2 with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 used on the back of the S25 series. The likelihood that anyone spending a minimum of US$1,100 on this premium phone won't be putting it into a protective case approaches nil though, so matters of finish are only important for first impressions and structural robustness. Standby battery life is excellent. The S25 Ultra has a 5,000 mAh battery and in testing, I left the phone on for seven days with just the Wi-Fi radio active, registering a drain of less than 50 per cent. At launch, Samsung leaned in heavily on the new AI features of the S25 series and the improvements introduced to its camera system, so let's consider those first. Samsung has quietly ushered its largely unloved digital assistant Bixby off the premium space offered with a right swipe on the home screen. It's now in the Samsung apps folder. It's a gentle exit for a service that virtually nobody used, but at least the person who still needs it can move it out of its folder purgatory and restore it to the home screen. Or not. Swiping right on the home screen of an S25 device now pulls up a Google aggregation screen that's similar to the one that Chrome offers as a default start screen. To access the new AI features, you can use voice activation for Google's Gemini, Bixby's more muscular successor. Gemini knows everything that Google does, but even so, it was surprising to ask the device, in the middle of children's Carnival in St James, how many bands would be parading and get a response that aligned with lived reality. Depending on what you ask it, Gemini can tap into its on-device database or it will connect to the internet to look up information and present it using the chatty style that Google has been using on its search pages. There are two video modes, a simpler, general-purpose video capture screen and a more sophisticated Pro Video capture option that gives a savvy videographer direct feedback about audio levels and histogram distribution. You'll need to be in Pro Video mode to capture using LOG format, which will give you huge but unsightly files that require post processing. The Gallery app can do a quick and dirty conversion of the footage, but that makes no sense at all, since LOG capture is normally the start of a sophisticated colour-grading pipeline that's intended to create cinema quality footage. To capture RAW stills, you need to use Samsung's Store app and download Expert Raw, a special-purpose app that the company introduced for the S21 that offers pro and pro-adjacent photographers more fine-grained control over their captures. The S25 offers four practical lenses, a 50MP 14mm equivalent f1.9 lens, a 24mm f1.7 semi-wide capable of capturing a 200MP file, a 10MP 67mm short telephoto, and a 50MP 111mm long telephoto periscope lens. The Expert Raw app rather helpfully strips away all the intermediate "zoom lens" steps that the camera system fakes by using plenoptics to merge data from two or more lenses. Expert RAW offers some fresh innovations in manual camera capture, some of which will require a tripod, including controls for extreme long exposures and virtual neutral density filters. The virtual aperture option is just rebranded plenoptic Live Focus, also integrated into Portrait mode in the standard Camera app. In extreme circumstances, very low light and shooting against a bright light source, edges get a bit crunchy and grain in dim light remains intrusive, but in flat, indirect lighting the sharpness and clarity of images across all four lenses is remarkable, drifting firmly into DSLR territory. Overall, the S25 Ultra is a substantial leap over the S20, S21 and S23 models, but S24 owners are unlikely to find much here to justify the cost of upgrading. Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there