The rumors of the Galaxy S25 Ultra beating the iPhone might tempt me to return to Android
Since then At the end of 2021 I switched from Android to iPhoneI’ve been struggling to find a way back. Logic tells me that the best Android phones have superior hardware than iPhones in general, are more likely to have 120Hz displays than Apple phones, and offer bigger batteries and more cameras; I’m looking at you, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
I also find iPhones terribly boring; brilliant but boring, especially with their incremental upgrades and seemingly slow approach to adopting generative AI.
But despite this, and despite the fact that I often carry an Android phone as a backup, my headset has been an iPhone for years. This is simply due to the easy compatibility with numerous software tools and platforms and the still unbeatable ecosystem that Apple offers.
However, that could change if there is any weight behind a specific Samsung Galaxy S25 rumor. A benchmark supposedly relating to the rumored Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has indicated that it could have the power to blow away the mighty iPhone 16 Pro Max; a device that I currently use as my main smartphone.
Benchmarks are usually boring to me because I’m more interested in real world performance. And despite all my experience using different phones, I’ve never found an Android device to be slow. That said, I find the power of the recent Pro iPhones, especially the iPhone 15 Pro Max and the aforementioned 16 Pro Max, with their Pro variants of the Apple A-series chips, to be very fast.
The former allows you to actually run real console games, such as Standing dead And Assassin’s Creed Miragealbeit with limited frame rates, the power of the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max delivers more gaming grunt, so much so that we gave the iPhone 16 Pro Max the gaming phone award at the TechRadar Choice Awards 2024. So all that power means Apple’s latest flagship phone has my attention.
But if the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra could add even more power to the smartphone arena, it could be the next phone to try to lure me away from the house that Steve Jobs built.
Go, go power Samsung
In today’s smartphone climate, more power usually translates into better capabilities for running artificial intelligence tools and functions on the device. But I have yet to fully embrace this new wave of AI, so my interest is in mobile gaming.
Samsung’s Galaxy S series has long offered good performance for mobile games, including some of the more demanding ones. But despite this, I feel like Galaxy phones and other flagship Android phones haven’t had the option to use proper console ports of Xbox or PlayStation games.
But if the Galaxy S25 Ultra can offer the A18 Pro’s beating power, that could change. In particular, I saw Samsung leaning on its past partnerships with Microsoft to bring Xbox games that will run natively on the next generation of Galaxy phones.
You could scoff at that and point me to Xbox Cloud Gaming as the way to play the best Xbox Series X games without needing powerful hardware. And while that’s true, and I’m a big believer in cloud gaming, the latency, reliability and lack of robust super-fast internet connections in Britain – especially in my small London apartment – make cloud gaming a reality that is currently no longer exists. of range.
So the idea of being able to run Xbox games on a phone without needing an internet connection is still very palatable to me. And one that could tear me off an iPhone.
If you’ve read my phone thoughts over the last few years, I’ve obviously been waiting a long time for a super-powerful Samsung Galaxy, especially when a partnership with AMD was touted, but my hopes were continually dashed. Likewise, I still harbor some hope that things might change, and in early 2025 Samsung might come out of the gate, take a swing at Apple and beyond, and deliver a phone, or a series of phones, with my iPhone taking on the role of secondary smartphone.
