Android & Chill
One of the web’s longest-running tech columns, Android & Chill is your Saturday discussion of Android, Google, and all things tech.
Hey! Do you want a phone that costs too much, has a sub-par camera, a tiny battery, and isn’t as durable? If so, the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is your dream phone.
This phone is a certifiable 100% bona fide flop. Samsung made too many compromises because someone at the company decided that people wanted a thin phone and were willing to spend a whole lot of money on it. It almost sounds like a script for a comedy.
Sadly, it’s not. It’s another example of Samsung testing the waters to see what we can be convinced we want, except this time it failed. But that’s okay; Samsung can afford to fail.
The phone apparently isn’t selling very well, but that isn’t surprising. Samsung going ahead with the idea, even though it’s kinda dumb, isn’t surprising either. The company does this sort of thing and has been successful in the past. You only really know if an idea is worthwhile after you try it.
Samsung’s willingness to do dumb shit brought us the Galaxy Note. If you like using your Apple Pencil, you need to thank Samsung for reminding us that there are times when your finger just won’t cut it. When the first Galaxy Note launched, it was a flop too. T-Mobile actually canceled its version after it was announced and sent to reviewers — I know because they sent me one. Making a big ass phone with a stylus sounded stupid at the time.
Nobody is saying that today; the Galaxy Note has evolved into the best phone Samsung has ever made. Fight me. The company is going to do the same with book-style foldables and has already generated almost all the interest there is for them, simply by saying “YOLO” and doing it. I love it when Samsung does that, and I hope they never stop. Giving us 10 bad ideas is worth it when that good one hits.
That’s why the company decided phones needed to be thinner. Somewhere down the line, they will have perfected a way to do it without all the necessary drawbacks of today’s tech. My opinion? Forcing a design to be this thin means battery tech has to be improved. A flop of a thin phone is step one to having a battery that’s smaller, safer, and lasts longer.
Having said all of this — and I really do mean it all, I understand why this phone was built — let’s take a look at what we actually got: a phone nobody was asking for and nobody should buy.
It’s thin. I don’t think it’s the thinnest phone ever, but you can’t deny that it’s thinner than anything else you can buy today (excluding foldables). However, it’s thin at the expense of other features that make a phone good.
I predicted this last January when I said making a phone very thin using today’s tech would mean you need to sacrifice battery life. I was slightly off; you also sacrificed camera quality, performance, and durability. But mostly the battery.
Right now, the batteries are brand new, and you hear people say they almost last all day or will last all day if you manage it correctly. In 90 days, it will be “I can get by topping it off at dinner time,” and in 180 days, people will need to charge it even more often. That’s how batteries work; the more you use them, the less you can use them.
As someone who used a Pixel 4 for a year, let me tell you that it only gets worse from here. A smartphone is useless without any gas in the tank.
Surprisingly, that’s not enough to kill a phone at launch. People will want it because it’s thin and can get by using a cable and a charger. What killed the S25 Edge was its $1,000+ asking price.
Samsung can pretend that they didn’t compromise to make a phone this thin, but even the people saying that know the truth. This is a prototype of the next big idea, and the only way for it to get better is to build it and work through it all. If it sticks around, we might love what it turns into.
