Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge review

Android 15 and One UI 7

The Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge runs on the latest Android 15 OS with the company's proprietary One UI 7 overlay. The handset is entitled to 7 major OS updates and 7 years of security patches, while the enterprise version gets 8 updates.

The One UI 7 went through major visual and under-the-hood changes, but Samsung focused more on bringing new AI smarts to the table. Either way, if you've used One UI before, you will feel right at home.

We recommend checking out the Galaxy S25 Ultra review's software section for a deeper dive into One UI 7.

Home screen • Quick toggles • Notification shade

While the S25 Edge offers the same features as the S25 Ultra, Samsung introduces a new update to the Multimodal AI Agents feature. It gains a visual engine so that you can engage in a visual conversation with the AI assistant. Just point the camera at an object and ask a question about it. For instance, you can ask the Galaxy AI to determine the right washing temperature for your clothes. The visual engine is powered by Google's Gemini AI.

Recent apps • Settings menu • Settings menu

The update to the Multimodal AI Agents debuts with the S25 Edge, but it will reach the rest of the S25 lineup soon.

Benchmark performance

One of the compromises Samsung had to make with the S25 Edge to achieve this footprint is the chipset. Like the rest of the Galaxy S25 phones in the family, the Edge gets a Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy.

The "Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy", means the two prime CPU cores are clocked higher (4.47 GHz vs. 4.32 GHz), and the Adreno GPU runs at higher clock speeds. The Elite chip uses Oryon processor cores, two versions of them - two Prime cores and six Performance cores. These aren't Cortex cores like in MediaTek and Samsung Exynos chipsets, but a custom Qualcomm design. The two Prime cores run at up to 4.47GHz, while the Performance cores are clocked at 3.53GHz.

Then there's the Adreno 830, which is built on a new architecture using a sliced design with dedicated memory for each slice. The 830 has three of these slices clocked at up to 1.2GHz.

There's no surprise memory-wise, though. The device comes in two flavors - 12GB/256GB and 12GB/512GB. The storage type is UFS 4.0.

Now, let's take a look at the benchmarks.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy in the Edge performs roughly on the same level as the standard SD 8 Elite or the SD 8 Elite for Galaxy. The difference isn't striking, though. There's a 7% difference at best in the multi-core CPU tests, which is hardly a meaningful gap in real-world scenarios.

There's an even smaller difference in the GPU-heavy test like 3DMark Wild Life Extreme, likely due to the lower clock speed than the "for Galaxy" edition. But it's just about the same (maybe slightly better) compared to phones powered by the standard SD 8 Elite SoC.

All in all, we find the overall performance adequate for a flagship-level phone, and the performance loss, likely due to the design constraints, is rather trivial. The handset will run pretty much everything you throw at it.

Sustained performance

The sustained performance isn't great, as one would expect from a thin chassis like this one. The Snapdragon 8 Elite's CPU started throttling within the first 5 minutes of the CPU test, while the GPU stability score is below 50%. You can expect considerable thermal throttling during long gaming sessions.

CPU and GPU throttling tests

Here's the maximum temperature the S25 Edge reached on the back and around the frame during our stress testing through the eye of an Infrared camera.

External temperatures

This is the first review where we are using thermal imaging so let us know in the comments whether you'd like this to become a regular feature in all of our future reviews.