What happened?

My latest phone is a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. I started off many years ago with an LG flip phone and now have a phone with more computing power than any of my initial game consoles or computers, and is nearly faster than my current computers and laptops. This is amazing.

This review is mainly a comparison with my prior phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 9. It had been quite a while but in the years since that phone new phones have largely homogenized to a similar pattern and I knew I had to bite the bullet and move on.

What I miss

  • Micro SD Card
  • Iris Scanner
  • Headphone Jack
  • Heart Rate Sensor
  • IR Blaster
  • Fingerprint Sensor not under the screen
  • Bluetooth in the Stylus

What I like

  • Battery Life
  • Updates!
  • Camera (although the previous camera wasn’t really that bad)
  • Things working

Rambling and a bit of Reasoning

I really think the Note 9 might have been the last great “Power User” phone and yet it still had problems of its own. There were also phones out at the time that were also pretty good and would have likely matched what I wanted. Things like a removable battery, IR blaster, etc. were features available on some other select phones.

The number one reason I wanted a new phone was specifically for updates. If my old phone had continued to get security updates I don’t think I really would have minded continuing to use it. It did everything I needed it to do with some minor exceptions here and there.

In today’s age, you have to accept that you can’t get everything (at least in the US, some specific markets may have phones that are nearly perfect in all the ways I want). Nowadays, you just don’t get a headphone jack, you lose out on features, you have to accept that this is a commodity product IF you also want the “latest and greatest” flagship. And that is what I wanted, I wanted to make as little sacrifices as possible. Because to me, it may seem extreme to go for something with 12GB of RAM, but when you have 6GB on your old phone and know that the direction were heading will continue to increase the usage further, then that number starts to seem reasonable and future proof.

After years of paying attention to phone launches and seeing the interesting things that come out, nothing really spoke to me like that Note 9. Each year it was one or more things lost and the whole industry seemed to agree and move that way. I even considered the iPhone but at the end of the day, I was still more used to what I could already do with Android that the few benefits here and there didn’t matter to me.

There are obviously huge plus sides to a new phone. As I mentioned before, getting an alleged 7 years of updates is huge for me and will hopefully hold me over till I need to get another. The battery life is actually fantastic. I was using an old phone already so that’s sort of expected but, man, I was not prepared for how great it would be. And that is to say, it’s not even as good as it could be. Due to Samsung’s effective monopoly on Android phones in the US, they have decided to barely innovate and increase prices significantly year over year which is unfortunate. They used to be much better, but at the end of the day, just like Apple, when you have a formula for printing money and no real competition, why bother.

Just some gripes

This Ultrasonic Fingerprint Sensor under the screen, is genuinely awful. I can’t believe they took something that worked nearly flawlessly on the Note 9 on the back, and then put it under the screen and just made it barely work. It does “work”, but that alone was definitely the most jarring change.

My Headphone jack was really one of the biggest things I knew I’d miss. Of course, I went and bought my dongle for my headphones but I just think with all the space I know is available, it could have just been in there. Sadly I can’t imagine any modern smartphone going back. They save some non-zero amount per unit so its worth it in the long run for them. I also have bluetooth headphones but the option is always what was great about a headphone jack.

The Micro SD card slot was another huge thing to me. I am a data hoarder, so I had everything on a micro sd card and with each new phone or swap I would take it out and move it to a new phone and there was everything I ever owned now on a new device. This was another thing I new would not last. I just had to shell out an enormous sum of money instead to get a larger amount of storage. We’ll see how long it lasts, but sad to see the slot go.

Closing

Honestly, I’m very happy with the new phone, but sad about all the things that have changed over the years to knock it down. 7 Years from now, or whenever the updates stop, that’s when I’ll likely do this whole process over again. If you’re not a power user, getting a phone must be so much easier.

TLDR

The S25 Ultra is a great modern phone with all the positives and negatives that come with that. Go for something cheaper unless you already know you want everything this phone offers already.