A few days ago, Samsung officially released its super thin and ultralight S25 Edge smartphone. I’ve been using this phone for quite a bit now. In fact, it’s actually been my main device for the last few weeks in preparation for what’s coming in the fall, the iPhone 17 Air. What it’s like to live with the phone whose main feature is the bold design choice. And of course, the consequence of said choice is less battery capacity. Well, I will go through all of that and what I’ve learned so far. The number one thing is ultra thin and light is not a gimmick. At first, I kind of thought it was, but if it’s done correctly, I can totally see why people would want a phone like this. Samsung absolutely knocked it out of the park. This is one of those things where I could show you on camera and put it next to a lot of other devices, which is what I’m going to be doing here, and show you how thin it is in comparison, but it’s the weight that’s pretty jarring at first. So, you kind of need to hold it. It’s so light and so thin that it almost feels like one of those plastic dummy units that you’d find at like a mall kiosk or even at like Best Buy where it’s not quite the real phone. You know, they’re fake with the sticker for the screen. It’s kind of like that, but in a good way, not a cheap way. The S25 Edge weighs only 163 g. It’s 5.8 mm thin, but it also carries a 6.7 in beautiful AMOLED display. Flagship quality. You’re not losing out on anything there. And it’s kind of unreal to have something this large feel this comfortable in your hands and in your pocket. It’s not weighing you down. I know most people will say, “Who cares? I’m just going to throw a case on it or who cares how heavy it is, bro. You need to go lift weights. It’s not like I can’t lift the phone, but it’s the fact that it’s not, you know, with all the other things we carry on us on a daily basis, just having less weight is much appreciated. But I really think that you should try it with or without a case. At least get the thinnest possible hands-on experience and then get the thinnest possible case that you like and it’ll still make a world of difference compared to other phones that you’d throw a case on. So yeah, I can definitely see why people would want something like this. It’s really appealing and something that I really want to try from an Apple perspective, which is great because as I mentioned earlier, we have in the fall a rumored iPhone 17 Air. So it seems like one of them caught wind of this, either Samsung or Apple, and decided to beat the other one to the punch. And obviously that was Samsung. Apple has been all about getting thin slabs of glass and metal together lately, as you can tell by its M4 iPad Pro, being one of the thinnest devices that I’ve ever used and that Apple offers up until the S25 Edge. And it looks like we’re going to get an iPhone version of this really soon, which I’m really excited about. Now, there are a few tradeoffs that I’m unsure about, and it’s also kind of the same trade-offs that we get with the S25 Edge. So, let’s talk about how those trade-offs have been treating me over the last few weeks. So, trade-off number one, it’s obvious. How is the battery life? Well, obviously, it’s not great compared to what I’m used to, which is an iPhone 16 Pro Max. And if you have the Samsung equivalent, the S25 Ultra, it’s not going to be as good. Obviously, I think we all knew this was going to be the case, but I will say for my daily use, it actually hasn’t been as bad as I thought it was going to be. I definitely got through a normal day’s use with some battery to spare, like a very small amount on some days, but that’s usually during the work week where, you know, kind of cheating a little bit. I have access to chargers, whether it be for a quick second on a wireless charger, in the car, on the drive, and another wireless charger or I have, you know, wired chargers available at pretty much any time. And so, I’m not worried about it. But on the weekends when I’m, you know, moving about with the kids, doing things and I don’t always have a charger, maybe just rely on the car one, which by the way, I don’t know about you, but car chargers, at least in mine, probably eat up more battery because it just gets everything so hot than it actually charges it. So yeah, it’s mostly dying towards the end of the early evening. But I did find a little performance hack, battery hack, that if you go into the performance profile setting that can help with battery efficiency, you switch it to light mode and that will prioritize battery and cooling over performance. So, you’re going to take a hit there. But I don’t really notice anything all too crazy with performance because well, if you’re a big mobile gamer, then you’d probably hate this. But or maybe constantly using AI features and apps that generate content like that, doing things that needs a lot of power, then yeah, you’re probably going to want that performance mode. But for me, I’m a social media browsing, video watching, music listening, messaging kind of guy. That’s pretty much all I do with my phones. I don’t do anything crazy. So, it can handle all of those tasks just fine in that light performance mode. So, final TLDDR on battery. Uh, it’s not good, but I don’t think it’s terrible for my own personal use case. If your use case sounds similar to what I just talked about, then you’ll probably be fine. But if you’re somebody who is constantly doing a lot of crazy things and just using their phone all day, every day, and don’t have access to chargers, then uh, yeah, it’s going to be a problem for you, and you probably shouldn’t get this phone. But ultimately, we want these companies to switch to the new silicon carbon battery technology, which can allow for bigger batteries in a smaller footprint. Or you can just keep the phones the same size and have massive amounts of battery, which is what uh OnePlus did with its OnePlus 13, having a 6,000 mAh battery in that phone. Or you can shrink down the form factor and have battery life that’s relatively on par with what you’re currently used to. Lastly, the cameras on the S25 Edge are a bit of a trade-off in the sense that you get a lesser quality 12 megapixel ultrawide camera than the flagship models, but here’s the opposite. You do get the same 200 megapixel sensor that’s only found in the S25 Ultra, aside from the Edge now, which is very good and a lens that I’ve tested quite a bit over the last six months to a year. I don’t know how long it’s been out. Six months. Six months. So, photos, which is very good and a lens that I’ve tested for over the last 6 months now. So, photos with the main sensor are very familiar and will be great for anyone and everyone looking to take some excellent photos at sort of this normal 1x focal length. If you want to zoom in, well, use a telephoto lens. That’s not going to happen because this device uh just has those two that I mentioned. So, ultra wide and the main 200 megapixel sensor. But the good news here is that the uh 200 megapixel sensor is allowing for you to crop in quite a bit without it being terrible, but it’s obviously not going to be as good as having a five or 6x optical zoom capability. I got some pretty decent photos from a far distance, but if you don’t want to take a ton of photos like these, uh then you don’t have to. You can just get another phone that has three cameras or four cameras, whatever the case may be. Uh, but if you want to take better photos from something close, then you’re just going to have to physically move closer to the subject. The good news for Samsung is that they already beat Apple if the rumors are true because the Air will likely only feature one main 48 megapixel lens that we have on the current iPhone now as the main sensor and will not have an ultra wide nor a telephoto, but will likely rely on digital crops as well. Personally, I don’t switch lenses a ton, but when I do, it’s almost always zooming in rather than zooming out. So, I would have liked Samsung and Apple to include not the ultrawide or not just one lens, but do the main and the telephoto. But that’s just me. Would love to hear from you in the comments down below on what you use the most. I know that we’ve talked about this before on our podcast, and lots of people say they do use the ultra wide a lot, but uh I personally just don’t. But if I had to choose again another lens, it would be telephoto. So, overall, I do really like the S25 Edge. And I think I can totally understand why this phone will do really well. And hopefully it sells a lot and hopefully Apple sells a lot so that this can keep going and we can explore these thinner form factors and hopefully increase the battery. Uh but it’ll just be interesting to see what happens with the upcoming 17 Air. But Apple needs to not follow Samsung in one area and that is pricing because this is where it kind of loses me. There are trade-offs that the Ultra or S25 Plus do not have and are only a few hundred apart. The S25 Edge sits in between those two phones. And the S25 Plus has better features than the S25 Edge. And then, you know, obviously the Ultra, which is a little bit higher. Yeah. So, this is over $1,000. Let’s not do that if I were Apple. If Apple’s rumored price point is true, or at least where it sits in the lineup, it would be between the standard iPhone and the first Pro model. So, right where the Plus was at around $8.99. And if that’s true, I think that makes a lot of sense. But then we’ve also heard rumors about maybe a potential price hike. So that’ll be at $9.99. I just I don’t want to be paying $1,000 just for the sake of a phone being super thin. But again, would love to hear from you in the comments down below. What do you think? Would you buy a phone like this, but running iOS? Or if you’re platform agnostic and you just wanted to know about the S25 Edge, I would recommend it to you 100%. If you love this form factor, go check it out in person. And if you think you can get through all of the battery obstacles, then I think you’ll absolutely love it. But let me know in those comments down below. This has been with Mac Rumors. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you around in the next video.