Apple has deservedly received a lot of flak for serving a stale design on its iPhones year after year. The iPhone 16 Pro, for example, continues to flaunt the design DNA introduced with the iPhone 11 Pro five years ago. But it looks like in its quest to one-up Apple, Samsung is doing something similar with the Galaxy S25 series smartphones.
Android Headlines, in collaboration with @OnLeaks, has shared purported renders of the vanilla Galaxy S25. It seems to carry the same fundamental aesthetics that we first saw on the Galaxy S23 and, subsequently, a bunch of midrange smartphones in the Galaxy A and Galaxy M lineups.
Everything seems to be in a familiar shape and place, from the vertical floating lens array at the back to the centrally positioned selfie camera at the top edge on the front. The only notable change is that the bezels look thinner, in the same vein as the leaked Galaxy S25 Ultra renders have shown.
The latest leak predicts a 6.17-inch display on the upcoming phone and a smaller profile along all edges. Notably, Samsung is once again said to take a Qualcomm-first approach for this one, arming the Galaxy S25 with the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 silicon instead of an in-house Exynos processor.
Samsung is reportedly increasing the RAM capacity to 12GB, but the battery capacity will remain disappointingly small at just 4,000mAh. If one goes by the history of Samsung’s Galaxy S launches, the phone might be introduced within the first couple of months of 2025.
A hot concern
Now, this isn’t a bad design, per se. But the claims of a shrunk chassis don’t bring out anything encouraging. On the contrary, the tighter internal space has me worried about how Samsung is going to manage the thermal headroom in such cramped space, especially with beefier internal hardware and a chipset that is rumored to finally catch up with Apple’s A-series mobile processors.
Over the past few generations, I have consistently encountered heating problems on the smallest members of the Galaxy S series phones. Samsung has continued to improve the heat management kit with every iteration, but most of the engineering attention has usually been reserved for the pricey Ultra models.
One of my recurring snags using an entry-point Galaxy S phone has been those pesky “device running hot” warnings, which frequently pop up while you’re out recording high-resolution videos under the sun — or engaged in similar demanding workflows. It’s not only that the phone simply started running uncomfortably hot but it also takes measures like reducing the screen brightness for heat dissipation, which really mars the user experience.
I am all for small phones, and that’s one of the reasons I’ve loved using the Google Pixel phones. However, once again, poor thermal performance has been an unfortunate mainstay.
I am dearly hoping that if Samsung decides to sit out on a design refresh for another year, the Galaxy S25 at least does justice to its silicon prowess by offering a fittingly capable heat management hardware inside the glass-metal chassis.