Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge review: In pursuit of slimness
The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge offers a stunningly thin and light design. Does it go beyond its obvious talking point to deliver a great smartphone experience overall?
I’m old enough to remember when the Edge series in the Samsung portfolio meant something else altogether. Previously reserved for the curved screen version of the Galaxy S series flagships, it’s come to represent the pursuit of slimness above all, in the new Galaxy S25 Edge ( ₹1,09,999). This is a phone that’s been teased and hyped right through from the Unpacked and Mobile World Congress (MWC) events in January and March… and finally sees the light of day in May.
Now, I’ve been reviewing smartphones since before they were smart, in form-factors that range from the traditional to the highly unconventional, so it’s rare for a new device to downright wow me. But wow me the S25 Edge did, with just how shockingly thin and lightweight it is, much lesser than what one would expect.
Mind you, this is no concept phone that’s thinned down just for the record books—this is a proper flagship you can go out and buy right now—although the S25 Edge comes very close to it, at just 5.8mm and 163 grams.
For context, the Edge with its 6.7-inch screen is about 20% slimmer while weighing just 1 gram more than the base S25 with its 6.2-inch screen. On the iPhone 16 and its 6.1-inch screen, the gap extends to 25% and 7 grams, and on the S25 Plus which has the same sized display, that difference stretches to 27 grams. It's hard to convey how impressively lightweight and thin it feels without trying it yourself.
In the past week of using the device, I would casually hand it over to friends and acquaintances and wait for the inevitable “wait a minute, what phone is this, is it even real or is this a dummy unit?" The reactions are that striking and visceral. It slips into the tightest of jeans pockets and disappears into the thinnest of bag pockets and is such a relief from hauling the bulkier flagships one typically ends up with, particularly after you start holding it with a modicum of confidence. I’d go so far as to say that holding anything else feels outdated—maybe Samsung is truly onto something we didn’t know we needed?
And yes, it’s even back-pocket friendly—you’re not going to turn this unintentionally into a foldable—courtesy the titanium frame, Corning Gorilla Glass Ceramic 2 on the display along with a Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on the rear. It took a few falls on hard flooring and didn’t look any the worse for wear, and it can take a dip in water just like the rest of the S25 series.
Place it on a table and there’s no missing the elements of the S25 family in which the Edge steps in, right from the titanium frame and the 200-megapixel primary shooter from the Ultra to the 6.7-inch display from the S25 Plus and the Snapdragon 8 Elite processor you'll find across the other three S25 devices. It’s gotten a raised camera module unlike the rest of the series, which I suspect would be to give the cameras some space to work with, and since it doesn’t impact the ease with which it goes into my pocket, I’m tempted to give Samsung a pass on this one. Just the two colour options though—Titanium Jetblack and Titanium Silver—for something this chic, a rose gold wouldn’t have been missed.
The reduced bulk brings even more attention to the 6.7-inch, 1440p resolution OLED display, and it has all the hallmarks of a good Samsung display—fluid 120Hz refresh rate, a maximum peak brightness of 2400 nits coupled with a 1 nit minimum for bed time use, and punchy colors that are a joy for content consumption and gaming… though I do miss the Ultra's anti-reflective coating, which does a better job of reducing glare in brightly lit environs. What’s surprising, shocking even, is how good the audio output is, given what one was expecting from such a slim chassis. As for biometrics, you get an ultrasonic fingerprint scanner and face recognition, and I preferred the former for just how snappy it was in daily use.
Equally snappy was the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip found across the range—yes, with no cores disabled to favor thermal management over performance—and the 12GB with either 256GB or 512GB of memory (if you’re preordering, you’re paying the same 1,09,999 for either variant). Samsung has made a larger vapor chamber to handle the physics of packing a highly performant chip into a rather constrained space, and it does well to stay close to the more spacious S25 Plus in terms of benchmarks, between 5-12% depending on what test (CPU/GPU performance) is run.
What that translates to is that you’re going to have a perfectly acceptable flagship experience on the S25 Edge, with no caveats needed around extended duration use. And while I enjoyed light gaming on this phone, it’s capable of handling the latest games though I wouldn’t exactly pick this as my gaming phone of choice. What it does do is run the latest One UI 7 on Android 15 really well—it’s one of the most refined skins out there and will be supported seven years down the line… if you’re holding on to the phone for that long. For now, there’s little to fault it on software, and the duo of Samsung’s and Google’s AI smarts are among the best AI implementations on smartphones around.
The cameras do not surprise as such, since the phone uses the same 200MP main camera sensor as the pricier Ultra, plus the 12MP ultrawide from the Plus. There’s no telephoto camera, which doesn’t come as a surprise at all, though you can use all the extra detail from the high-resolution main sensor to punch in 2x lossless and 4x digitally and still get a decent shot. Images shot on the primary sensor are detailed and rich in colors, with a respectable dynamic range under good light. Low light images are softer but still color accurate. The ultrawide turns out good images, although they suffer from distortion around the edges and see some amount of color science parity issues when compared to the primary sensor. Video at 4K video at 60fps across all sensors (8K 30fps as well) is consistent with the rest of the S25 series.
There’s this old adage about pain being an integral part of fashion, and the somewhat painful compromise of the sleek dimensions is the 3,900mAh battery, a smaller battery than the base S25 model. Even as it is optimized for efficiency, you’re only going to get anywhere between 4 to 5 hours of screen-on-time, which translates into a full day of use if you don’t use the camera too much or game a lot. Reminds me of the line from the HBO Chernobyl series—“3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible".
Of course, there are going to be days when you’re going to head out for an unusually long day or out on a weekend trip, taking photos and staying away from the charger longer than usual—then, you’re going to want to carry a power bank along. Yes, the irony is all too evident—slim a phone down to exceptional levels, then go the bog-standard route of having to lug along a power bank. If there was a device for Samsung to experiment with the denser-yet-thinner silicon carbon batteries, this would have been it. What doesn’t help is that charging speeds are at 25W wired and 15W wireless, relatively slow by any standards.
Verdict
At ₹1,09,999, the S25 Edge lands bang in the middle of the portfolio—pricier than the S25 Plus but about twenty grand less than the S25 Ultra. I don’t blame Samsung one bit for testing the waters with the S25 Edge, and the result is a phone that genuinely feels different in the hand…in a good, almost ‘airy’ way, without losing out on features and capabilities you’d expect in a phone that’s north of a lakh.
It’s easy to like the S25 Edge, but one has to be careful who one recommends this phone. If you buy this phone, you’re prioritizing form factor over everything else, and as long as you are aware of its longevity limitations and factor them into your lifestyle, this featherweight will delight you in more ways than one.
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