iPhone 16 Pro vs Galaxy S25 Ultra: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change?
iPhone 16 Pro or Galaxy S25 Ultra? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Priya Raghunathan
The short answer
iPhone 16 Pro 7h 10m, Galaxy S25 Ultra 7h 30m — the same test, run the same way. Where they part company is who they suit: the iPhone 16 Pro is the one to get if you are anyone shooting video, or already invested in the Apple ecosystem, the Galaxy S25 Ultra if you are people who write or draw on their phone, and long-range shooters.
Price difference: The iPhone 16 Pro undercuts the Galaxy S25 Ultra by £150. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | iPhone 16 Pro | Galaxy S25 Ultra |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £1099 | £1249 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Display | 6.3in LTPO OLED, 120Hz | 6.9in LTPO AMOLED, 120Hz |
| Chip | A18 Pro | Snapdragon 8 Elite |
| RAM | 8GB | 12GB |
| Battery | 3582mAh | 5000mAh |
| Charging | 25W wired, MagSafe | 45W wired |
| Weight | 199g | 232g |
| Screen-on time | 7h 10m | 7h 30m |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent fourteen days as the reviewer’s only phone, SIM included. Screen at a metered 200 nits, adaptive refresh left on, the same twelve apps installed on every handset, and a fixed 5G network in the same building.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Screen-on time | A scripted day — four hours of mixed browsing, an hour of video, thirty minutes of camera, the rest idle — repeated three times and averaged. |
| Sustained performance | Twenty minutes of continuous load, reporting the figure at the end rather than the peak in the first ninety seconds. |
| Charging | From 2% to 100% with the fastest charger the manufacturer sells, at 22°C ambient, timed to the minute. |
| Camera | The same eighteen scenes on every phone — backlit portrait, indoor low light, moving subject — shot in the default mode with no editing. |
| Thermals | Surface temperature at the hottest point after the sustained run, measured with a contact probe. |
We deliberately do not report synthetic benchmark totals quoted in isolation, and any figure supplied by the manufacturer.
The honest caveat: Battery results are specific to our routine. A heavy camera user will see materially less screen-on time than these numbers suggest.
Where the iPhone 16 Pro wins
- The best sustained performance of any phone
- Video quality nothing else matches
- A display that needed no calibration out of the box
It also has the edge on the intangibles: it lost only 11 percent of peak performance over a thirty-minute load.
Where the Galaxy S25 Ultra wins
- The best long telephoto on any phone
- The S Pen remains unmatched for note-taking
- A flat display that suits stylus work
And in day-to-day use, Samsung dialled back the saturation this year and images look far more natural.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The iPhone 16 Pro has one clear weak point — iterative to a fault — and the Galaxy S25 Ultra has its own: heavy at 232g. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the iPhone 16 Pro costs £150 less. Unless the best long telephoto on any phone is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the Pixel 9a at £499 — it scored 5 out of 5 and suits almost everyone — the sensible default recommendation. If the budget will not stretch, the Galaxy A56 at £399 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the iPhone 16 Pro the thing you adjust to is iterative to a fault, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its display (6.3in LTPO OLED, 120Hz) is the part you stop thinking about. The Galaxy S25 Ultra asks for a different accommodation: heavy at 232g, against a display of 6.9in LTPO AMOLED, 120Hz that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The Galaxy S25 Ultra is 1 year newer, which usually means 1 more year of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: heavy at 232g on one side, iterative to a fault on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the iPhone 16 Pro, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the iPhone 16 Pro for the best sustained performance of any phone. Buy the Galaxy S25 Ultra for the best long telephoto on any phone.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the smartphones we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are iPhone 16 Pro vs Nothing Phone 3: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change? and iPhone 16 Pro vs OnePlus 13: Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change?.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
