Ever since I moved from Android to iPhone at the end of 2021, I’ve struggled to find a way back. Logic tells me that the best Android phones have superior hardware to iPhones in general, having got to 120Hz displays sooner than Apple’s phones and offering bigger batteries and more cameras; looking at you, Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.
I also find iPhones to be terribly dull; brilliant but boring, especially with their incremental upgrades and seemingly slow approach to adopting generative AI.
Yet despite this, and how I often carry around an Android phone as a backup, my main phone has been an iPhone for several years. This is simply down to ease of compatibility with numerous software tools and platforms and the still unbeatable ecosystem Apple offers.
However, that could change if a specific Samsung Galaxy S25 rumor has any weight behind it. A benchmark supposedly pertaining to the rumored Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra has indicated that it could come with the power to blow away the mighty iPhone 16 Pro Max; a device I’m using as my main smartphone right now.
Benchmarks tend to mean naff all to me, as I’m more interested in real-world performance. And in all my experience using a variety of phones, I’ve never found an Android handset that’s been slow. That being said, I do find the power of the recent Pro iPhones, specifically the iPhone 15 Pro Max and aforementioned 16 Pro Max, with their Pro variants of the Apple’s A-series chips, to be very fast.
With the former, you can actually run proper console games, like Death Standing and Assassin’s Creed Mirage, albeit with limited frame rates, but the power of the A18 Pro in the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max brings more gaming grunt to bear, so much so we gave the iPhone 16 Pro Max the gaming phone award in the 2024 TechRadar Choice Awards. So, all that power does mean Apple’s latest flagship phone has my attention.
But if the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra could bring even more power to the smartphone arena, it could be the next phone to try and tempt me away from the house that Steve Jobs built.
Go, go power Samsung
In the current smartphone climate, more power tends to translate to better scope for running artificial intelligence tools and features on-device. But I’ve 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 Galaxy phones, and other flagship Android phones, haven’t had the scope to run proper console ports of Xbox or PlayStation games.
But if the Galaxy S25 Ultra can offer A18 Pro-beating power, that could change. Notably, I could see Samsung leaning on its previous partnerships with Microsoft to bring Xbox games that will run natively on next-generation Galaxy phones.
You might scoff at that and point me to Xbox Cloud Gaming as the means to play the best Xbox Series X games without needing powerful hardware. And while that’s true, and I’m a big advocate of cloud-powered gaming, the latency, reliability and lack of robust super-fast internet connections in the UK – especially in my pokey London apartment – make cloud gaming a reality that’s currently out of reach.
So, the idea of being able to run Xbox games on a phone without the need for an internet connection is an idea I still find very palatable. And one that could tear me away from an iPhone.
Of course, if you’ve been reading my phone thoughts over the past few years, I’ve long held out for a super-powerful Samsung Galaxy, especially when a partnership with AMD was touted, but my hopes were constantly dashed. Equally, I still hold out some hope that things could change, and come early 2025, Samsung may come out of the gate swinging at Apple and beyond, delivering a phone, or series of phones, that see me consign my iPhone to the role of secondary smartphone.