Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge

Samsung has long wanted to make a flagship phone that is less heavy and business-oriented. The Ultra is a fantastic phone, but it is also large, bulky, and very much geared towards professional use. The answer is the Galaxy Edge - a phone that has been slimmed down to such an extent that it is quite enviable. It is only 5.8 mm thick and weighs just 163 grams. The latter is quite crucial; during the test period, I also had other phones in my hand, and they all felt large and clunky in comparison.

It comes in three attractive colours: white, black, and a very light blue, with a titanium frame. It's super stylish, and the ceramic Gorilla Glass 2 is, as always, very pleasant to touch and operate. The design is very similar to how Samsung has designed phones for a number of years - there is nothing new or innovative under the hood, but that doesn't matter when it's solid, functional, and classic.

The camera is Samsung's 200 MP model with wide angle and a 12 MP ultrawide. There's only 2x optical zoom on the main camera, but something is missing... there is too little. I want at least 3x, and preferably 5x, optimally up to 10x optical zoom on the camera module when I'm asked to shell out £1,100 for a mobile phone in 2025. It's simply not good enough. And AI-enhanced or not, I don't think it's up to the same level of image quality as the 50 MP lenses in the Ultra model. There is also more image noise in photos with little or poor lighting. I'm missing a telephoto, periscope, or something else; a macro lens wouldn't have been bad either.

The Gemini AI system is getting better and better. There are a lot of little things, and I'm particularly happy to get the weather forecast without having to ask for it. The new One UI 7 took some getting used to, but it's also quite nice to use. You get free Google One AI Premium with your purchase - including 2 TB of storage - but only for six months. After that, it costs around £17 per month. In my opinion, it should be 24 months when you buy such an expensive phone, but on the other hand, premium subscriptions for other services that come with it are typically only three months. So maybe I'm just complaining unnecessarily - but it adds up to a lot of money in the long run.

The combination of the Snapdragon 8 Elite CPU and 6.7" AMOLED 2X display with 120 Hz is really good. The colours in particular deserve praise, and the speakers are actually surprisingly good for such a narrow phone. It's particularly well suited for gaming and films/series/videos, and whether it's AI or not, the upscaling is remarkably good.

The battery is not that big - 3900 mAh - and frankly, that is too little. I can easily use up 12-13% of the battery per hour, and on average the battery lasted 18.5 hours. I don't know if it's because you use a phone more than usual when you're reviewing it, or if the software can't manage things well enough. Automatic screen off and other light power-saving features were not turned off, but that's not enough for a phone that needs to be charged twice a day to ensure you have enough power. Here, you really miss the battery from the Ultra model, which is more than 25% larger. And like all other Samsung phones, the charging speed is over an hour when the battery is completely drained - I don't have time to wait for that.

It comes with 12 GB of RAM and either 256 GB or 512 GB of storage space - and, as always, you get the large capacity for the price of the small capacity in the introductory offer. However, it should be noted that the phone, if not limited, will only be produced and distributed in a limited edition. It is therefore not certain that there will be many with the small capacity available for sale, regardless.

This puts me in a bit of a quandary when it comes to giving it a rating. It has a very attractive, lightweight, high-quality design with a first-class screen. But the battery life is notoriously poor, and I simply cannot accept that there are such limited options with the camera when you have to pay £1,100 for even the cheapest version, which is extremely annoying, because there are so few phones that I review that I am seriously considering buying myself after the test period, and this one is one of them. But maybe I'm just being overtly critical because I'm privileged enough to get to try most of what the market has to offer.