Samsung did something a little different this year. Four months after the launch of the Galaxy S25 series, we’re getting the slim Galaxy S25 Edge. However, this “remarkable feat of engineering” is not as groundbreaking as it seems.
As all press releases do, Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy S25 Edge is full of embellishment. The company calls it a “revolutionary” and “category-defining slim smartphone.” It claims the phone “reimagines nearly every element of smartphone design.” This all sounds great, and it does look like an awesome phone, but this is not a new concept.
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The Super-Thin Galaxy S25 Edge Has Arrived
Samsung has officially revealed its super-thin flagship phone for 2025: the Galaxy S25 Edge. It’s available to order starting today, but as you might expect, Samsung had to make a few compromises to achieve the super-slim design.
Thin Phones of 2016
Let’s step into the Wayback Machine and visit the distant year of 2016. David Bowie died, Pokémon Go dominated the Summer, the Cubs won the World Series, and a gorilla had a very bad day. Shortly after the Rio Olympic Games concluded, the Moto Z was released.
This phone was special for a few reasons. First, it launched a brand new modular accessory system called “Moto Mods.” These Mods were things like a bigger speaker, a battery pack, a pico projector, and decorative shells. They snapped onto the back of the device with magnets and pogo pin connectors.
Slapping an accessory on the back of your phone adds thickness. So, to compensate for that, the phone itself, without any Moto Mods, was a mere 5.2mm thick. Now, that didn’t include the thickness of the camera bump, but that’s how phone thickness is almost always measured. It was quite impressive for the time, and it turns out it was impressive for today, too.
Thin Phones of 2025
To recap, the Moto Z launched in 2016 and was 5.2mm thick. Thanks to smartphone historian Michael Fisher, we know that wasn’t a dream, but everyone else seems to have forgotten.
Samsung’s 5.8mm Galaxy S25 Edge pushes no real boundaries and, at $1099, seems poised to steal sales from the more interesting Galaxy Flip. Given Motorola’s release of a 5.2mm phone 9 years ago, it’s tough to get excited about life on this particular “edge.” 📷: www.instagram.com/p/DJkqeMGRVHl/
— Michael Fisher (@captain2phones.bsky.social) 2025-05-13T00:14:43.249Z
The Galaxy S25 Edge comes in at 5.8mm at its thinnest point. If you include the camera bump, it’s about the same thickness as the standard Galaxy S25, minus its camera bump. But no one ever counts the camera bump, so we don’t care about that.
In doing research for this article, I searched Google for “world’s thinnest phone.” The results are littered with mentions of the 5.8mm Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge and the 5.75mm Tecno Spark Slim. Neither of which is thinner than the 5.2mm Moto Z.
Finding the real “world’s thinnest phone” is not easy, but I think it might be the Vivo X5 Max from all the way back in 2014. This phone was a crazy 4.8mm thick, and it barely had a camera bump sticking out past that. Unsurprisingly, the battery was only 2300 mAh, but still! That’s what I call a “remarkable feat of engineering.”
What Samsung Got Right
The “super slim” phones of 2025 can’t seem to surpass the slim phones of yesteryear in sheer thinness. Is that a bad thing, though? There’s a lot that Samsung got right that Motorola couldn’t do.
First of all, the Galaxy S25 Edge and Moto Z have very similar footprints, yet the Edge has a much larger display (6.7 inches vs 5.5 inches). The same can be said for the battery, which is often a big concern with slim phones. The Edge is only 0.6mm thicker, but its 3900mAh battery has 1300mAh more capacity than the Moto Z’s.
That alone is worth not being the world’s thinnest smartphone—which Samsung is not claiming, to be clear. There’s no point in using a cool-looking phone if it’s going to die on you in less than a day. 3900mAh is only slightly smaller than the standard Galaxy S25’s 4000mAh battery. It’s definitely on the smaller end, but it’s not unreasonable.
Of course, there are many improvements across the board due to nine years of technological progress. The Edge’s secondary camera is nearly as good as the Moto Z’s primary camera. It has three times the amount of RAM, eight times the amount of storage, and faster charging. Future!
At the end of the day, Samsung is guilty of doing what every company does: hyping up a new product. Is the Galaxy S25 Edge a “remarkable feat of engineering that reimagines nearly every element of smartphone design”? Not really. But is it a very cool-looking phone with fewer trade-offs than its even thinner predecessors? I would say yes. The Moto Z series slowly got thicker over time, ending up at 7.4mm in 2019. It will be interesting to see which direction the Galaxy S25 Edge goes.
