A highly anticipated durability test of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is here and it immediately raises a concern: the phone has worse scratch resistance than its predecessor. While many tech enthusiasts are disappointed and asking why Samsung downgraded its latest flagship there is very likely a good reason for it.
The durability test carries out a scratch resistance test where the screen of a phone is tested at varying levels of sharpness. Usually most big name flagship smartphones start showing scratches at level six and get noticeably roughed up at level seven.
Last year’s Galaxy S24 Ultra however improved on this and started getting scratched at level seven instead. Fans were understandably quite pleased and thought that Samsung was finally upgrading the toughness of its displays. But the new Galaxy S25 Ultra is back to the previous standards of scratch resistance which people have taken to mean that a downgrade took place.
Galaxy S25 Ultra kept a lot of the same specs as its predecessor. | Image credit — Samsung
But there is very likely a good reason that Samsung did this: fragility. When a piece of glass is made very scratch resistant it also means that said piece of glass is much harder. This makes the glass much easier to shatter when it drops from a height. A less scratch resistant display on the other hand is softer and more difficult to break into a million pieces.
Much like the removal of Bluetooth from the S Pen I think Samsung realized that its improved scratch resistance was not coming in handy as often as it thought it would. It’s likely that the company found through repair requests that more people were dropping their phones than letting them get scratched. The prevalent use of glass protectors probably also helps matters.
It’s unlikely for your Galaxy S25 Ultra to come into contact with materials that would scratch its display that often. Lint in your pockets or the surfaces you place your phone on are not going to scratch your phone’s screen.
If there’s any reason to not upgrade to the S25 Ultra it’s the less than stellar hardware upgrades as the company focused heavily on AI this year.
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Abdullah loves smartphones, Virtual Reality, and audio gear. Though he covers a wide range of news his favorite is always when he gets to talk about the newest VR venture or when Apple sets the industry ablaze with another phenomenal release.
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