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Galaxy S25 Ultra vs iPhone 16 Pro: Should you go Apple or Samsung?

Samsung and Apple are two of the biggest names in the smartphone industry, but which company’s phone is right for you? We’ve pitted the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro head-to-head to determine which flagship phone comes out on top. 

Samsung announced the Galaxy S25 line – led by the high-end Galaxy S25 Ultra – in January 2025, four months after Apple unveiled the iPhone 16 range, with the iPhone 16 Pro (and Pro Max) sitting at the top. 

We’ve reviewed both phones, giving us full insight into the design, cameras, performance, battery life and features. Now, it’s time to decide which one is right for you. Keep reading to learn how Galaxy S25 Ultra vs iPhone 16 Pro compare in all the important areas. 

Spec comparison

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Price 

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is available to buy from Feburary 7 2025, with preorders open now. Prices start at £1249 for 256GB and go up to £1349 for 512GB or £1549 for 1TB. 

The iPhone 16 Pro launched in September 2024, four months ahead of the S25 Ultra. Prices for the 16 Pro start at £999 for 128GB. Other configurations available include £1099 for 256GB, £1299 for 512GB and £1499 for 1TB of storage. 

Design and screen

  • The Galaxy S25 Ultra has a larger, brighter 6.9-inch display 
  • The Galaxy S25 Ultra comes with the S Pen stylus 
  • The iPhone 16 Pro features the Dynamic Island and Camera Control button

When it comes to their displays, the Galaxy S25 Ultra has a larger 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X screen with a QHD+ (3200 x 1800) resolution, 120Hz refresh rate and 2600 nits of brightness. If you want a more pocket-sized S25 Series phone, you’ll need to downgrade to the regular S25. 

The display is more durable than the Galaxy S24 Ultra’s screen thanks to Corning’s latest Gorilla Armor 2, allowing the phone to survive a head-height drop onto concrete. The iPhone 16 Pro offers its own durable display thanks to the Ceramic Shield. 

The iPhone 16 Pro has a 6.3-inch Super Retina XDR display with a 120Hz refresh rate, 2622 x 1206 resolution and 2000 nits at peak brightness. If you want a larger 6.9-inch display, you need to pay more for the iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

One more unique feature on the iPhone 16 Pro is its Dynamic Island. This is an Apple-exclusive feature that repurposes the previously obstructive notch into an interactive box for notifications and alerts. The Galaxy S25 sticks with a standard holepunch notch. 

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Moving on to the design, the S25 Ultra has also seen a design update that makes it shorter, slimmer and thinner than its predecessor, which we found made it feel nicer in the hand. However, the S Pen has seen a downgrade, with the stylus no longer supporting Bluetooth and thus losing its air gestures. That said, the iPhone 16 Pro doesn’t support a stylus, so at least the S Pen is still present. 

The iPhone 16 Pro hasn’t seen a big redesign this time around, though the phone is slightly larger and heavier than the iPhone 15 Pro. Like the S25 Ultra, we found the iPhone 16 Pro very comfortable to hold. 

There is a new Camera Control button on the side of the phone, joining the Action Button introduced on the iPhone 15 Pro. This button makes it quicker to open the camera, move between shooting options and capture photos and videos with the phone, though it can be quite fiddly. This is something that Samsung doesn’t offer an equivalent to, though it isn’t completely unique to the iPhone with the Sony Xperia VI offering a similar function. 

Winner: Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

Camera 

  • The Galaxy S25 Ultra has a larger 200MP main sensor and includes two zoom lenses, though the optical zoom range is the same on both phones 
  • The iPhone 16 Pro offers more accurate colours 
  • 4K/120fps on the iPhone 16 Pro looks cinematic

The Galaxy S25 Ultra takes advantage of a quad camera setup, consisting of a large 200-megapixel main sensor, 50-megapixel ultra-wide sensor and two telephoto cameras – one 50-megapixel and the other 10-megapixel. This allows the phone to reach up to 5x optical zoom. 

The iPhone 16 Pro, meanwhile, features a 48-megapixel main camera, a 48-megapixel ultra-wide camera and a 12-megapixel telephoto camera with 5x optical zoom – the same zoom range found on the S25 Ultra. 

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We found the hardware on the Galaxy S25 Ultra to be very familiar, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing as the phone still takes some brilliant photos. There is some improvement in the processing when it comes to the telephoto lens, but there remains an award zone between 3x to 4.9x before the higher-res telephoto camera kicks in. 

Photos snapped with the S25 Ultra are consistently good, with vibrant colours that look great on social media, but perhaps aren’t as accurate as the colours captured by rivalling handsets. Low-light shots offer plenty of detail and vibrance, while the new Galaxy Log support allows for more flexibility when editing the 8K/30fps video captured by the phone. 

Hardware upgrades aside, some of our favourite improvements on the iPhone 16 Pro were the new Photography Styles. These allow you to personalise the way images are processed on your phone, from the warmth to the shadows, and set that style as default. 

We found shots from the main camera to be colour-accurate with realistic skin tones, making images look a bit more realistic than those shot with the S25 Ultra. The iPhone 16 Pro also performs well at night, though the night mode can be a little slow. Video is particularly good, with support for silky 4K/120fps making everything look very cinematic and new audio tools to reduce background noise. 

Winner: iPhone 16 Pro

Features 

  • The Galaxy S25 Ultra is powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite, which performed best in our benchmarks 
  • The iPhone 16 Pro runs on Apple’s own A18 Pro chipset 
  • Both phones are packed with AI features, though these can be very hit-and-miss at this stage

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s latest flagship chipset, the Snapdragon 8 Elite. More specifically, this is a version custom-made for Samsung, which the company claims can offer a 37% boost in CPS performance, a 30% uptick in GPU performance and a 40% improvement in NPU performance compared to its predecessor. The latter means improved AI performance, with more tasks being completed on-device as opposed to in the cloud. 

The iPhone 16 Pro, meanwhile, runs on Apple’s own A18 Pro chipset. This is another hugely powerful custom-designed flagship chipset. In the past, Apple has blazed past the competition, but the Snapdragon 8 Elite has given it some real competition with the second-gen Oryon CPU architecture helping it to outperform the A18 Pro in benchmark tests

The iPhone 16 Pro came out on top in our Geekbench 6 single-core tests, while the Galaxy S25 Ultra took the lead in all other benchmarks, including multi-core and GPU tests. This puts the Samsung phone in the lead in terms of performance, though both phones are seriously fast and capable of running AAA games and performing complex AI tasks. 

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When it comes to AI, Galaxy AI did feel somewhat half-baked in our experience, with the Now Brief functionality delivering our reviewer the weather and a shortcut to a Spotify playlist full of songs he hadn’t heard of, as opposed to the range of information, photos and plans it claims to offer. 

There are other features like the writing assistant, text summaries and Google Circle To Search but nothing that particularly stands out for the Galaxy. 

The iPhone 16 Pro is equipped with its own Apple Intelligence features, though there wasn’t much to speak of at the time of our review. Headline features like ChatGPT integration, Genmoji and Image Playground had yet to arrive, and results from the Clean Up photo editing feature were poor. The Summaries tool is also present, though it doesn’t always understand the point of the conversation or pick up on nuances such as sarcasm. 

Winner: Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

Battery life 

  • The Galaxy S25 has a larger 5000 mAh battery 
  • Both phones charge fairly quickly, but the Galaxy S25 Ultra still wins 
  • The iPhone 16 Pro supports Apple’s MagSafe wireless technology

Finally, the Galaxy S25 Ultra packs a large 5000 mAh battery that is quite a bit bigger than the 3582 mAh one in the iPhone 16 Pro. Despite this difference, we found that both phones offered an all-day battery life, though you’ll be running low by the evening with heavier use. 

The Galaxy S25 Ultra features optimised charging compared to its predecessor despite both being 45W. The phone also charged faster than the iPhone 16 Pro’s 30W charging in our tests, though both phones charge fairly quickly. 

One perk to buying an iPhone is its MagSafe charging capability. While the S25 Ultra does support Qi and Qi2 wireless charging, there’s no MagSafe onboard for that added convenience. 

Winner: Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

Verdict

The Galaxy S25 Ultra and iPhone 16 Pro are two very powerful flagship phones with similar camera capabilities, chipsets and AI capabilities. However, each still has its strengths and weaknesses.

Buy the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra if…

You want a bigger phone with a more powerful chipset, faster charging and a camera that capture vibrant social media-ready snaps.

Buy the iPhone 16 Pro if…

You want a more pocket-sized phone with plenty of power, a customisable camera, cinematic video capture and the convenience of MagSafe charging.

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