Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge Review

Introduction

After months of teasers, Samsung’s ultra-thin Galaxy S25 Edge is finally here – and it really is slim.

Measuring in at 5.8mm thick, the Galaxy S25 Edge is undoubtedly the thinnest flagship smartphone on the market – and by a country mile. Samsung’s clearly flexing its R&D muscles with this top-end flagship.

However, to achieve such a slimline design, some areas of the phone aren’t quite as capable as they should be – especially for a phone that starts at £1,099/$1,099 – just £150/$150 less than the all-singing, all-dancing (but much thicker) Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. 

The biggest hurdle for many, I suspect, will be battery life. The combination of a big, high-res screen and a smaller battery than the compact Galaxy S25 will leave many wanting much more. It’s safe to say that those who invest should be prepared to carry around a power pack.

The question, then, is whether the ultra-slim trade-off is worth it? I’ve spent the past week with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, and here’s what I’ve learnt. 

Design

• Ultra-thin and light
• 5.8mm thick and 163g
• A dream to hold and use

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is thin. No, scratch that; it’s absurdly thin. In a world where smartphones regularly come in at around 8-9mm thick, if not thicker, the Galaxy S25 Edge measures at an incredible 5.8mm thick. 

It’s hard to quantify if you’ve not got a ruler to hand, but it’s the exact width of a stack of seven credit cards, and anecdotally, it’s around the same thickness as the Vivo V200 Ultra’s camera bump. Not the whole phone; the camera bump. 

That would be impressive enough, but it also measures in at a rather impressive 163g, lighter than even the lightest plastic-made budget phones you’ll find in 2025 – and this thing is far from a piece of lightweight plastic.

Instead, it is crafted from the same combination of titanium and glass as the top-end Galaxy S25 Ultra, and it actually eschews it with upgraded Gorilla Glass Ceramic 2 screen protection – the first smartphone on the market to offer it. That’s paired with Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection for the glass rear, along with IP68 dust and water resistance.

To be honest, I was sceptical about the appeal of an ultra-premium thin phone that doesn’t offer the bells and whistles of thicker flagships, but as soon as I picked it up, I got it. 

The feeling of holding a phone that thin and light isn’t something I’ve experienced since the early days of smartphones. It felt oddly nostalgic in the best way possible.

It felt great in the hand, making my regular Galaxy S25 Ultra feel like a thick brick in comparison. Heck, put next to the Galaxy S25 Plus that we praised for being thin and light, and it looks dated. 

It’s a pleasure to use, particularly one-handed, and feels nice in the palm despite the angular design and large 6.7-inch screen – likely down to its lightweight nature. 

It also doesn’t have as much presence in my pocket as a regular 6.7-inch phone would, with much less heft overall. 

It’s genuinely a marvel of smartphone engineering, though I suspect it’s something you’ll have to see in the flesh to truly appreciate. Photos just don’t seem to do it justice. 

Screen

• 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display
• Bright, gorgeous and great for HDR content
• QHD+ resolution is a blessing and a curse

Despite the push for an ultra-slim design, Samsung hasn’t compromised on screen quality. The S25 Edge sports a gorgeous 6.7-inch AMOLED screen – the same as that found in the S25 Plus – complete with slim bezels, an adaptive 120Hz LPTO-enabled refresh rate and a pin-sharp QHD+ resolution. 

Samsung’s signature vibrancy is here in full force, delivering rich colours, deep blacks, and excellent contrast that makes everything from social media feeds to HDR content look great. 

Viewing angles are also excellent, as is to be expected, with barely any colour shift or brightness loss, making it easy to glance at incoming notifications from awkward angles. 

One of the subtler additions is ProScaler. Introduced on the S25 Plus and Ultra earlier this year, Samsung’s new upscaling tech is designed to boost the quality of lower-res content on the high-res panel. It’s hard to quantify its impact without side-by-side comparisons, but in general use, everything from TikTok videos to graphics-intensive games looks good and well-defined. 

There is a caveat to that pixel-packed QHD+ resolution though; it draws much more power. I will dig into this a little later, but in essence, don’t be surprised if you end up switching to the lower-res FHD+ mode to extend longevity. It’s still more than usable in its FHD+ form, but you do lose a bit of that crispness in text and app icons. 

That caveat aside, it’s still one of the best displays you’ll find in a phone, let alone one this slim. 

Cameras

• 200MP main camera
• 12MP ultrawide with autofocus
• No zoom lens, but it doesn’t matter

There are sacrifices to such a thin, lightweight design, and the first is apparent when looking at the camera setup. Despite the fact that the cheaper Galaxy S25 offers a trio of lenses consisting of main, telephoto and ultrawide lenses, the S25 Edge offers only a main and ultrawide.

It looks even worse when compared to the S25 Ultra, which is just £150 more and comes with not one but two dedicated zoom lenses. 

The lack of a telephoto isn’t exactly surprising, given that zoom lenses need physical space to magnify – something the S25 Edge is short on – but it doesn’t make it any less disappointing to see here. Or so I thought.

To offset the lack of a dedicated telephoto lens, the S25 Edge packs a 200MP main camera. It’s not the exact same sensor as the top-end Galaxy S25 Ultra, with Samsung slimming the sensor down by 80% to fit in the slimline chassis, but the results look just as impressive in most scenarios.

And, crucially, it allows the phone to use that excessive number of pixels to deliver a better-than-average digital zoom alternative. I’d argue that, at the 2x and 4x mark, there’s very little giveaway that it’s not provided by a dedicated zoom lens. 

Images are still packed with detail, and as it uses the same 200MP sensor across the zoom range, colours are more consistent than usual too.

Things begin to falter at around the 10x mark, with slight artefacting and telltale signs of over-processing, but beyond showing your friends how far your phone can zoom, how often do you actually use it? In my experience, anyway, very rarely. And, if you do, that’s also fine – that’s what the S25 Ultra is there for. 

Outside of digital zoom, the 200MP lens does a great job of capturing detailed, vibrant shots. Samsung’s signature oversaturation of blues and greens is present and accounted for, but it does make images ‘pop’ more than true-to-life alternatives like the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL. 

Low-light is also decent, though it’s here that you can tell that the S25 Edge’s sensor isn’t the exact same as that of the S25 Ultra, with slightly darker, softer shots overall. Still, for a casual low-light shot, I don’t think most will have much to complain about.  

Alongside the main lens sits a lower-res 12MP ultrawide lens. It’s not quite as remarkable as the primary snapper, but it’s the same as that found on the rest of the S25 range, complete with autofocus for macro use. 

It does a pretty good job at capturing those scenic vistas, and the inclusion of autofocus tech means it does an equally great job at group selfies and extreme close-ups. Colours are also pretty much in line with those captured by the main lens, though it falters in low-light with much darker, muddier shots than the alternative lens. 

Also, the S25 Edge matches the S25 Ultra’s 8K video recording capabilities, though with such large file sizes, I’d recommend the vast majority of people to 1080p or 4K. 

Performance

• Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset
• 12GB of RAM and 512GB storage
• Can get warm, even in average use

As a member of the flagship Galaxy S25 family, the S25 Edge packs the same custom Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset as its siblings, coupled with 12GB of RAM to handle the various Galaxy AI experiences on offer. 

That’s both a blessing and a curse; the Galaxy S25 Edge has absolutely no trouble in day-to-day use, flying through app menus, scrolling through apps and taking photos without even a hint of stuttering – but the slimline design does mean it can get warm quite quickly.

Even when performing what I’d describe as average tasks like scrolling through TikTok for long periods, the phone will get a little warm on the rear. I’m not talking about being too hot to handle, but definitely warm enough to notice. That also had a knock-on effect on benchmark tests, with the S25 Edge scoring lower than the S25 Ultra despite offering the same chipset and RAM. 

That issue is more prevalent when gaming as, even in low-demand games like the 2D top-down shooter Archero 2, the phone got quite hot on the sides after just 20 minutes of gameplay. 

Again, this isn’t a demanding title like Genshin Impact or Call of Duty Mobile. It can handle those games, but throttling becomes apparent after just a few minutes of gameplay if you crank the visual settings to the max. If you are a serious gamer, I’d recommend a gaming phone with more effective cooling. 

That said, for average use, including the use of the Galaxy AI tools I’ll come to shortly, the phone is rapid, and it’ll likely continue to be the case for quite some time with such an excess of power from the custom Snapdragon 8 Elite chip.

Core performance aside, connectivity is top-notch with support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, with NFC for mobile payments also present and accounted for. 

Software & AI

• OneUI 7 based on Android 15
• Galaxy AI smarts are fine, not game-changing
• Seven years of OS upgrades

The Galaxy S25 Edge comes with Samsung’s OneUI 7 based on Android 15 and all the benefits that come with it, from the redesigned UI to boosted Galaxy AI smarts. 

I’ve already waxed lyrical about the OneUI 7 update in my review of the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, so I’m not going to rehash old ground here, but everything I said in that review is just as true here. It’s a notable upgrade to the overall OneUI experience with new icons, new animations, redesigned widgets and more that make it feel more polished overall. 

The S25 Edge also benefits from the complete suite of Galaxy AI features, including the Now Brief introduced on the S25 range earlier in 2025. This is one of the more wide-ranging AI toolsets available on smartphones right now, covering everything from on-device translation to writing tools, photo and video editing tools, image generation tech and more.

It also includes Samsung’s Now Brief tech – though that’s pretty underwhelming unless you’ve got a Samsung wearable to get health data from. Without health and sleep data to present every morning, the Now Brief is surprisingly sparse, showcasing basic elements like weather and calendar events without much context or help.

That’s my experience of Galaxy AI overall; it’s extensive and very handy in hyper-niche situations, but I can’t say that I’ve used many of the features outside of dedicated testing to make sure they work as advertised. 

The ability to transcribe recordings is handy as a journalist, but it’s not the game-changing experience that Samsung’s marketing leads you to believe. It’s still the same old smartphone experience, just a little bit smarter – and that’s fine, as long as that’s what you’re expecting. 

Like the rest of Samsung’s flagship collection, the Galaxy S25 Edge will enjoy the same seven years of OS upgrades and security patches, matched only by the likes of Google and, more recently, Honor. 

Battery life

• 3900mAh battery
• Struggles to last a single day
• Relatively slow 25W charging

Battery life is, as expected, where the Galaxy S25 Edge stumbles hardest. In fact, I’d say that it stumbled, fell off a cliff and face-planted into the ground below. 

Despite the large 6.7-inch QHD+ screen and Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset, Samsung equipped the phone with a relatively small 3,900mAh battery – smaller than the more compact Galaxy S25.

That’s a baffling mismatch, and one that’s evident in everyday use. I couldn’t even make it through a full day on my first outing with the phone, and that was before I’d switched the screen from FHD+ to QHD+. 

Once I enabled the higher resolution – which, frankly, should be on by default if Samsung is advertising a QHD+ resolution – battery life dropped even further. One particularly bad day saw the phone drop from 100% to just 3% over the course of just 10 hours, with only 2.5 hours of screen time mainly composed of streaming music and checking messages.

Even on quieter days, I’d still find myself topping the phone up mid-afternoon just to make it to bedtime with single digits of charge left. 

I wouldn’t recommend gaming on your morning commute either; 30 minutes of the 2D top-down shooter Archero 2 drained 16% of the battery – a figure three to four times worse than what most of the competition is offering in 2025. 

Clearly, the S25 Edge isn’t built for sustained performance without a hit to battery longevity. It looks like you might have to dust off that old power bank if you do opt for the S25 Edge… 

It’s not hard to feel like this was avoidable either. The slim and lightweight design makes including a larger battery difficult, but that’s where silicon carbon battery tech comes in. 

It allows for higher energy density in the same, or even smaller footprint, and it’s used in abundance in high-end flagships including the Honor Magic 7 Pro, Oppo Find X8 Pro and OnePlus 13. Samsung, still seemingly cautious post-Note 7, has resisted this shift, and the S25 Edge pays the price. 

I’d have been somewhat placated if the S25 Edge charged quickly, minimising the amount of time spent charging as much as possible, but that’s not the case either. In fact, at 25W, it’s slower than the 45W of the S25 Plus and Ultra. 

And, using the Anker Prime 250W charger, it peaked at just 19W. That translates to a 50% charge in 25 minutes, and a full charge in 55 minutes. Not the slowest by any means, but also ideal for a phone that drains quite this fast.

Should you buy it?

FAQs