What's that? S25 Edge S1 didn't kill himself. Whoa, you are edgy. That's
right, folks. We finally got our hands on the Galaxy S25 Edge, whose main claim
to fame is that it is like the Galaxy S25 packed with all of that AI goodness,
but edgier than ever before. Actually,
there are Wow, it is skinny. But I have
to say I'm a little less impressed than I would have been if I hadn't been
playing around with my old phones the other day and picked up an iPhone 6S and
gone, "Wow, what happened to modern phones? They got they've really gone to
seed." Even picking up my Note 9 compared to a lot of modern phones makes
me miss the days of slim, sleek devices
that um performed pretty decent but kind of had mediocre battery. and Samsung is
here to answer my call. On the surface,
there is a lot to like here. Okay, the camera bump does make it actually a
little bit thicker at its thickest point compared to my Note 9. But if you look
at the actual thickness of the body, that is darn impressive. Like, we
finally got a phone that is thin enough that they can actually justify not
having a headphone jack on it. Congratulations, industry. And I got to
admit, in the hand, I kind of like it.
Like, do people kind of hate this thing? Because I feel like I'm going to end up
contrarian here. You've got all the usual IO you'd expect. We've got our
lock button and volume rocker over on the right. A whole lot of not much going
on on the left, so you never risk accidentally mashing a button on the
opposite side. Noise cancelling mic on the top. And USBC, SIM card, and of
course, speaker on the bottom. that is
really skinny. We've got a 200 megapixel wide angle with 2x optical zoom quality,
which basically means it doesn't have an optical zoom. We've also got a 12 megap
ultrawide and a built-in flash. And that pretty much does it for the outside.
Wow, that is a really slim bezel on an absolutely gorgeous display. It's just
6.7 in compared to 6.9 in on the full
fat Galaxy S25 Ultra, but everything from the adaptive refresh rate up to 120
Hz for nice smooth scrolling to the advertised 2600 nits peak brightness
appears to be right in line with its bigger brother in terms of performance.
In fact, we actually found that with auto brightness enabled, we were able to
exceed 2600 nits, and we regularly saw
well in excess of 1,000 nits when playing back HDR content. And in the
brightness boost mode, even SDR was getting as high as around 700 800 nits,
I think it was. Dude, it's so light and the bezel is so small and the image
quality is so good. It feels like holding a little portal into whatever it
is that's happening. Do people not like this thing? Okay, they're just they're
not that impressed, dude. Kind of love it. I mean, there's still things that I
would want to fix about it, you know? Love it if it had a headphone jack, but
like this is awesome. Yep, that's an HDR
display. All right, but what did it cost us? We'll talk about what cost us. Wait,
Lionus, I'm going to let you finish, but Dbrand paid us to interrupt and let you
know about their easy apply prism screen protectors and thin, transparent,
durable ghost cases. But instead, I'm going to show off this sick card Dbrand
sent us. each personalized with their name and loaded up with some cash to
spend on their site. I'd definitely grab a prism and ghost case if I didn't
already have one. So, uh, screw it. Maybe I'll grab another pair of some
more glow circuit skins, too. Anyways, go to my boss's very short.com and pick
up some for yourself, too. Okay, Lionus, back to you. Ah, yes. The first thing it
cost us was battery life. Instead of the
5,000 mAh battery on the S25 Ultra, we
have a very similar SoC, but with only a
3900 MIA battery. This resulted in both
a proportional difference in recorded battery life during our video playback
test, as well as slower charging speeds
compared to the S25 Ultra. It should be
noted that our tests were done on the S25 Ultra back when we got that phone
and we don't have it anymore, but it should give you a rough idea of what to
expect. Another thing it cost us was performance. While it has the same 3nm
Snapdragon 8 Elite and 12 GB of memory as its bigger brother, and we can see
that in any sort of shortterm benchmark runs. As soon as we threw 3D Mark
Wildlife at it, which runs over and over and over again, you can see that the
performance drops off substantially. And this is just down to not being able to
fit as much cooling into a tiny little phone like this. But I'm not
even mad about that. You know, you knew there were going to be trade-offs, right? Like, am I mad my wife doesn't
run marathons and powerlift? No, she's good at lots of stuff. Like, everyone
says her voice sounds nice. Maybe this has the same advantages. So, the machine
itself opens up like that. Speakers, maybe they're awesome for their size.
Let's see. Stereo speakers. Not
bad. Not as good as some of the bigger phones on the market, but considering
its size, honestly, I'm actually really impressed. That's very usable. What
about the camera? Okay, cool. Do my classic photo. Look at that. Let's see
how edgy you are. See, Belle, would it kill you to be more like Reese and just
smile for the photo? You know, you never smile for the photo. You will smile.
Well, yeah. I can't tell today, though. Kind of washed out. Honestly, this is
not the best dynamic range I've ever seen. But I also do wonder if part of it
is that it just decided in its auto exposure that it was really important to
grab all the detail in this light. Um, I mean, we're capturing everything. To its
credit, it's capturing a lot of the detail. This is just the kind of thing I
would definitely want to play around with in an image editor a little bit.
It's amazing what a difference like 30 g makes. Like that's about the difference
between this and other flagships, right? Just it feels
so slim. You know what? That's actually
not bad. A lot of the time Android devices just struggle with smooth
panning. Honestly, pretty okay. How
about the selfie camera? It's a video. Well, uh, now we know what I I never do
selfie videos for these. Maybe I should choose a color tone. Yeah, natural,
please. I didn't shave. Whoops. Well, now we know that. Also, I never noticed
my ear was this pointy. That's That's weird. Am I the only one that thinks
that's kind of weird? Let me look at your ears. I hate that the first thing
edit does is not markup. That's always what I want to do. I understand other
people want to do different things, but I don't. I legitimately like miss One
UI. Not because it looks or feels great out of the box, but they just mostly get
out of your way and let you do your thing. Like I can be like, "Yeah, I want a huge grid for my home screen, because
that's what I want." And it is none of your business if that's what I want. Why
is everyone doing the Apple thing now? We had a perfectly good thing going on
Android where you could pull down from anywhere on the top of the phone and
just all your stuff would be there, all your notifications and all your
settings. No, we have to do it the Apple way now because Apple doth saith so.
Next, you're going to take away my buttons. I didn't actually think about
this before. Typing on it. Honestly, not that
comfortable. Like, it's really thin.
It's uh like it's, you know, it's like farther away. You're kind of clawing a
little bit more. It's not much, but it's so light. Um it's a little
disconcerting, actually. It really is really sleek. I don't love the whole
punch camera. I do find it quite distracting in full screen content. But
hey, at least it's a lot smaller than like freaking dynamic island that Apple
tries to sell as a feature. And there's a lot more to love here, too. It's got
support for Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 7. I
didn't even mention wireless charging yet. Yes, it does support it. No, it's
not particularly fast, but hey, at least it's as fast as the S25 Ultra. It's just
something that Samsung has been pretty conservative about. The only thing
people seem to be pretty upset about is the battery life. And I can kind of see
where they're coming from. On the one hand, um, you know, given the SoC and
the performance that's on tap here, it kind of is what it is. But on the other
hand, if Samsung knew that they weren't going to have enough cooling for a top
tier chipset, maybe they would have been better off going with a slower chipset,
but one that could ek a little bit more battery life out of this smaller
battery. The other thing that might have done is lower the price. At over $1,000
for either variant of this, it's very much priced like a flagship, even though
for gaming, for instance, it might not hold up against other flagships. I'll
let you guys debate whether those trade-offs are worth it. For my
part, I'm considering trying it. I'm
still looking for a daily driver after all this time. And I'm just not sure if
especially coming from the Pixel 9a where functionally I don't even think
about charging this phone if I'm going to be able to handle this. Subscribe to
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