With questionable Y2K fashion choices returning in recent years, I suppose it was inevitable – thin phones are back. I'm old enough to remember the original Motorola RAZR V3 in 2004 and just over twenty years on Samsung has tapped the early 2000s design trend with the new Galaxy S25 Edge. Only this time, it doesn't really make sense.
When the Motorola RAZR V3 launched, it was a genuine marvel. People would come down to the store room of the technology magazine I worked at just to look at it. Of course, it had an advantage that the Galaxy S25 Edge doesn't have – phones back then were largely ugly bricks.
But the RAZR V3 also actually fulfilled its design promise. Because of its clamshell design, it was under 14mm when closed – and almost worryingly-slim at its thinnest point. Its aluminum body and keyboard (made from a single sheet of metal) made it different and genuinely desirable.
The Galaxy S25 Edge badly wants to be a modern-day equivalent of the RAZR V3. We know very little about its specs, but rumors suggest it's about 6.4mm thick – which looks about right based on our brief glimpses at the S25 Unpacked launch.
But there's a problem – smartphones now need to have powerful cameras and pesky physics can't make them the same size as the RAZR V3's VGA module. So Samsung's done the only thing it can and stuck a huge protruding camera module on the back.
What's the point of having a 6.4mm thick body with large protruding cameras, if there's no design innovation to make that work? I'm still none the wiser. Samsung says the phone is a "culmination of Samsung’s most-innovative technology" and that this is “packed into a form that is sleek, powerful and unlike anything you’ve seen before".
Unfortunately, the history of phones is littered with examples of designs that we hadn't seen before, but also made no sense (see the new Nokia Design Archive). The main aim of the S25 Edge seems to be bursting the rumored iPhone 17 Air's bubble. But for phones buyers, it seems Samsung also forgot to do anything beyond reanimating the corpse of a design trend that has no real benefit in 2025 – and that Motorola has already successfully reprised in the Motorola Razr Plus.
The case against
I'm sure the Galaxy S25 Edge will be a technological marvel, in many ways. It's expected to pack in a 6.7-inch display – and there's a chance it could even be the first Samsung phone to feature a tandem OLED display.
It's also expected to pack in two cameras, which will probably be a main one (perhaps with a 200MP resolution) and an ultra-wide. Samsung could get away without a telephoto camera by going big on the resolution of the main camera and touting its AI-assisted cropping potential. That's not as good as a telephoto, but it could be enough.
These kinds of specs make the RAZR V3 look like the dinosaur it is. But a truly classic phone captures the zeitgeist in a way that goes beyond specs and dimensions – and from what I've seen so far, I doubt that the S25 Edge will achieve that.
Unlike in 2004, the majority of phone buyers use a case with their phone – particularly ones that cost as much as the S25 Edge is likely to (probably somewhere between the S25 and S25 Ultra). Alongside the camera bump, that largely negates the Edge's thinness claims or practical benefits.
Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh, but the Edge also seems to represent the laziest interpretation of phone innovation. At CES 2025, I was enamored by the TCL 60XE, which can switch its screen from color to grayscale with a button-press.
Sure, it's not true E Ink and only works with certain apps, but it was a piece of design that tapped into modern-day phone needs – namely, a need to escape from our always-on apps and a clever way to extend battery life. I didn't see anything at the S25 Unpacked event that beguiled me in the same way – just a tidal wave of AI features and the S25 Edge.
Of course, I'll reserve final judgement on the Edge until we get one in for review. But so far, it looks like nothing more than a reheated design trend that doesn't make much sense in 2025.
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