Consumer Reports Kept the Galaxy S25 Ultra on Top

Consumer Reports gave the Galaxy S25 Ultra an Overall Score of 87, the top Android mark in its July 2025 ratings table. A year sold on Gemini assistants and folding screens still ended with a February slab in first.

On September 9, 2026, the same labs said the top six models sit 2 points apart. You do not have to buy rank 1 to get a phone they will recommend.

A February Slab Finished Ahead of Foldables

Samsung spent January 22, 2025, pitching the S25 series as a true AI companion at launch. Google spent the spring and August putting Gemini on a midrange Pixel and a 100x zoom on the Pixel 10 Pro. The Z Flip7 and Z Fold7 arrived in July with bigger cover screens and a 200-megapixel Fold camera.

CR’s composite did not follow the launch calendar. The Ultra, on sale February 7, 2025, at $1,299, sat at 87. The Galaxy S25+ from the same week scored 86 at $999. Last year’s S24 Ultra also sat at 86 in that table. The new Ultra’s lead over its own predecessor was 1 point.

Year-end roundups that wanted one Android per product line still opened with that Ultra. The five-phone Android shortlist then ran the Flip7, Fold7, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 9a under it. The scoreboard under those names is a camera-and-drop ranking, not a prize for the demo that played best on stage.

The Tests Behind Those Overall Scores

CR buys phones at retail and runs them through lab checks, then folds in brand-level survey data. Courtney Lindwall, a Consumer Reports tech writer, is the byline on the S25 and Z-series pieces. The buying guide updated September 2, 2026, still describes a robot that taps through a fake day of use, plus hinge checks on folding phones.

WHAT GOES INTO A CR PHONE SCORE

• Battery robot: A machine mimics real use; top models last 30 to 50 hours per charge in that test.
• Tumbler drops: Phones go through repeated falls; the S25 line was judged after 100 cycles.
• Cameras: Stills and video are shot in a bright studio and in simulated sunlight, then judged on calibrated screens.
• Display and hinges: Brightness, sharpness, and foldable hinge behavior all feed the lab side of the score.
• Year-two breakage: Predicted brand reliability estimates problems by the end of the second year of ownership.
• Would you recommend it: Owner satisfaction is the share of surveyed members who are extremely likely to recommend the phone.

Those last two inputs are not a teardown of one SKU. They are brand marks applied across a maker’s phones, which is how a strong Samsung survey history props up a new Ultra before that specific unit has a two-year track record.

HOW THE SCORED GALAXY MODELS COMPARED

The Plus is 1 point behind the Ultra and $300 cheaper. The Fold7 is 6 points behind and $700 more. The Flip7 matches the Fold at 81 and costs $900 less. If you came for a single champion, the table is a warning.

Why the Galaxy S25 Ultra Still Won

Lindwall’s S25 review, updated March 6, 2025, is blunter than the marketing. The 6.2-inch S25, 6.7-inch S25+, and 6.9-inch S25 Ultra all got a new Snapdragon 8 Elite chip, 12 GB of RAM, and a slightly tweaked camera system. She wrote that if you set the AI suite aside, the other improvements look thin, and that battery life was a hair worse than the S24 line.

The Ultra still did the things CR scores hard. It weighs 7.8 ounces on CR’s spec line, uses a 200-megapixel main camera with a 50-megapixel ultrawide, 10-megapixel 3x, 50-megapixel 5x, and 12-megapixel front camera, and lasted 48 hours in the robot test, among the longest CR recorded. All three S25 phones survived 100 drops in CR’s tumbler. The Ultra came out with no dents. They also survived the dunk tank CR uses to check water claims.

Lindwall called the Ultra’s stills among the strongest CR has measured, with clean color, exposure, sharpness, and low noise. Video from the rear cameras scored superb. The hardware bump that actually changed a lens was the ultrawide, from 12 megapixels to 50. She liked the macro shots of her houseplants and did not call the swap make-or-break.

Galaxy AI was the launch theme. Holding the side button raises Gemini as a chat bar. In her hands it summarized a YouTube book list and turned a library flyer into a calendar event. It also failed the demo Samsung had shown, a fridge-to-recipe trick, and it could not flip Dark Mode or change font size, jobs Bixby still handled.

Instead of helpful recipes, Gemini spit out random meal ideas that didn’t align with the ingredients I had on hand.

Courtney Lindwall, Consumer Reports, S25 review

She found Now Brief, the lock-screen digest, mostly weather and a YouTube Short after a few days. Now Bar, which shows live scores and music on the lock screen, was useful and close to Apple’s Live Activities. Drawing Assist made a watercolor apple tree from a text prompt. Her line on the suite was that the new AI upgrades do not quite live up to the marketing hype, and that it is hard to find a compelling reason to upgrade if the phone you already have is fine.

Samsung still spent the next holiday season selling the lab result. On December 23, 2025, Samsung Mobile US posted that the S25 Ultra had been named best phone camera by Consumer Reports.

You deserve to capture your holiday memories at their best. 📸 Samsung is here for it with #GalaxyS25 Ultra, named Best Phone Camera by Consumer Reports. 🏆 #GalaxyAI

Read more here: https://t.co/XdHJRJqypI pic.twitter.com/9HuShrRmD1

— Samsung Mobile US (@SamsungMobileUS) December 23, 2025

Flip7 Matches Fold7 at 81

Both 2025 Samsung foldables landed on 81 in CR’s ratings modules. That is the same number, $900 apart, and 6 points under the Ultra. Foldable convenience did not beat a slab in this scoring system, and the book-style Fold did not beat the clamshell Flip either.

CR’s foldable preview, updated October 28, 2025, lists the Fold7 at $1,999, $100 above the Fold6 debut, and the Flip7 at $1,099. Lindwall held the Fold7 at 215 grams and 4.2 millimeters unfolded next to a Fold6 and called the older phone chunky. The outer sheet is 6.5 inches. Open, it is 8 inches, and both panels took the highest display mark CR gives. The Fold7 drops the S Pen slot the Ultra still has.

The Fold7’s 200-megapixel main camera is the same class of sensor as the Ultra’s. CR’s testers called it a step up from the Fold6’s 50-megapixel camera and still short of the S25 Ultra. That is the year in one sentence: the foldable got the headline camera and lost the camera ranking to the slab it was supposed to outgrow.

On the Flip7, Samsung killed the black bezel around the cover panel. The FlexWindow is 4.1 inches, up from 3.4. You can answer Gemini with the phone shut, which you could not do on the prior Flip. Open, the 6.9-inch sheet is the same size as the Ultra’s and near the top of CR’s display scores. Pocketability is still the point of the product.

THE 2025 ANDROID LAUNCH CALENDAR

1. January 22, 2025: Samsung unveils the S25, S25+, and S25 Ultra around Galaxy AI and Gemini.
2. February 7, 2025: The S25 Ultra goes on sale in the United States at $1,299.
3. April 2025: Google ships the Pixel 9a at $499 with Tensor G4 and a 5,100 mAh battery.
4. July 2025: The Galaxy Z Flip7 and Z Fold7 arrive at $1,099 and $1,999.
5. August 2025: The Pixel 10 Pro lands with a Tensor G5 chip, 16 GB of RAM, and 100x zoom.

People who watch Samsung’s yearly cadence treated the Ultra’s early CR win as a prize for a small bump. Replies to the April ranking posts called the camera tests easy to stop reading and the S25 Ultra a lazy flagship. The lab notes do not prove a paid review. They do show why a conservative test battery keeps handing the year to a polished slab.

The $499 Pixel With Last Year’s Flagship Cameras

Google’s 2025 argument sits in two phones CR liked for different jobs. The Pixel 9a is the cheap one. The Pixel 10 Pro is the camera one. Neither caught the Ultra’s 87, and both are the models a shopper who does not need an S Pen actually weighs.

The Pixel 9a starts at $499 with 8 GB of RAM, a 6.3-inch Actua display, and a dual rear camera, 48 megapixels wide and 13 megapixels ultrawide. CR lists it at 6.6 ounces, tested on Android 15 with 128 GB. Lab language is cooler than the ads: overall performance was very good, and ease of use was excellent. Google rates the 5,100 mAh pack for 30-plus hours; CR did not publish a robot-hour figure in the open listing.

BGR-style recaps called the 9a the first non-flagship Pixel with Gemini Nano on device, and they said its cameras sat with the prior year’s high-end phones. The constraint is memory. At 8 GB, on-device Gemini is a smaller build than the one on Pixel 9 Pro-class phones. Circle to Search and the usual Pixel photo tools still run. The fuller memory-hungry extras do not.

The Pixel 10 Pro opens at $999 for the 6.3-inch model, with the 6.8-inch Pro XL from $1,199. CR’s open test write-up calls overall performance excellent and puts the 50-megapixel main camera at the top of its stills ranking. The ultrawide and 5x telephoto are 48 megapixels each. The selfie camera is 42 megapixels and rated very good. Battery life in CR’s robot test was 38 hours, above average and 10 hours short of the Ultra. Software support is seven years of updates, the same promise Google has been printing on recent Pixels.

That $999 sticker is the lowest launch price among 2025 Android phones CR has given a perfect rear-camera mark, which is the value claim the Pro actually won. It did not win the composite, and the base Pixel 10, listed at $799, ran 39.5 hours in the same robot test, longer than the Pro.

Owner Surveys Still Favor Samsung

CR’s Overall Score is not a pure bench. Predicted brand reliability and owner satisfaction sit on top of the lab work. The reliability article updated August 24, 2026, says members are more likely to rank a problem-free phone above premium features and even price.

The 2023, 2024, and 2025 summer surveys cover 186,933 smartphones bought new from 2019 through 2025 and owned no more than five years. The model estimates how likely a brand’s phones are to have problems by the end of year two. Satisfaction is the share of members who would strongly recommend the device to friends.

In the July 2025 ratings table, Apple’s brand reliability mark was 97/100, Samsung’s 90/100, and Google’s 84/100. That 6-point Samsung-over-Google brand gap is not an Overall Score, and it is not a lab camera result. It is survey history, and it follows every Pixel and Galaxy into the ranking. A Pixel can win stills and still trail a Galaxy on the composite if the brand mark is lighter.

Lindwall’s S25 review already pointed at the pattern: Samsung flagships routinely sit at the top of CR’s charts on camera and battery. The 2025 Ultra extended that streak. Fan accounts marked it as a second straight year after the S24 Ultra, which sat at 86 in the same July table.

Two Points Separate the Top Six Now

The 2025 Android argument aged into a flatter chart. CR’s September 9, 2026, guide covers 73 smartphones. All but five of those 73 earned a recommendation from the labs. The recently tested list already includes the Galaxy S26 Ultra, Galaxy S26+, Galaxy S26, and Pixel 10a, so the February 2025 Ultra is no longer the new object in the room.

CR’S SEPTEMBER 2026 SNAPSHOT

• 73 phones rated: The current table is larger than the 70-model sheet from July 2025.
• 2-point spread: The top six Overall Scores sit that close to each other.
• Five miss a recommendation: The other 68 clear CR’s bar for a recommended phone.
• 30 to 50 hours: That is still the robot-test band CR cites for the longest-lasting models.

iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and the folding iPhone Duo were due at retail on September 18, 2026, with CR saying it would rate them once they were in stores. The Android side of the guide still groups “best for most people,” low-priced models, large screens, cameras, and foldables as separate jobs. That is the honest use of a list that once got sold as a single best phone of 2025.

If you want the CR Android winner from that year, it is the S25 Ultra, 87, 48 hours, 100 drops, $1,299. If you want the phone those same tests said was almost as good for $300 less, it is the S25+. If you want the foldable they would actually score, the Flip7 and Fold7 are a tie at 81, and the Flip is the one that does not cost $1,999. If you want the camera Pro without the Ultra tax, the Pixel 10 Pro is the $999 stills champ. And if you want the 2025 Android that makes the ranking look expensive, it is the $499 Pixel 9a.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the Galaxy Z Fold7 Include an S Pen?

No. Consumer Reports’ foldable write-up notes that the Fold7 no longer supports the S Pen, a change from earlier Fold models, while the S25 Ultra still hides a stylus in the chassis. Buyers who want a tablet-like inner screen and a pen have to pick which half of that pair they will give up.

How Much Does the Galaxy Z Flip7 FE Cost?

Samsung priced the Flip7 FE, the Fan Edition, at $899, which is $200 under the Flip7’s $1,099 start. CR says it keeps the clamshell shape, cameras, and Galaxy AI suite, with the smaller screens of the Flip6, a weaker chip, and fewer colors, and that it ranks only a few points behind the Flip7.

What Battery Life Did CR Measure on the Pixel 10?

The base Pixel 10 lasted 39.5 hours in CR’s robot test, 1.5 hours longer than the Pixel 10 Pro’s 38 hours. Both sit in the above-average band, and both trail the S25 Ultra’s 48 hours. The Pro is the camera phone in that pair, not the endurance phone.

How Long Do CR Members Expect a Smartphone to Last?

Three years is the average expected life span CR’s survey methodologists record for smartphones. Predicted reliability for the category is built around problem rates in the first two years, which is a shorter window than the seven-year software promises Google and Samsung print on these 2025 flagships.