Samsung Galaxy S25 FE review

One UI 8 on top of Android 16

The Galaxy S25 FE runs on the latest Android 16-based One UI 8. Fun fact: The Fan Edition is the first S25 series phone to run One UI 8, while the rest of the S25 phones are still running the beta version of the OS. And even though the S25 FE is considered a more budget-oriented version, it's still entitled to 7 major OS upgrades like its peers.

We've already seen the One UI 8 in action, and we suggest you go check out the Galaxy Z Fold7 review software section or watch our video review.

Visually, there are only minor changes to the UI design since One UI 7 brought a bigger visual overhaul.

Home screen • Recent apps • App drawer

Seemingly, the Galaxy S25 FE gets all the AI-powered features that you'd find on any other Galaxy S25 phone.

Quick toggles • Settings menu • Settings menu

With One UI 8, the AI upgrades revolve mostly around improving Gemini Live, which now supports natural voice commands for context-based answers and is better at understanding what's on your screen or camera feed.

Galaxy AI features

Circle to Search is now available in-game to help you get to the next stage.

All in all, the device behaves well and the OS runs smoothly.

Benchmark performance

The Galaxy S25 FE gets the full-fledged in-house Exynos 2400 chipset this year, a small step up from last year's S24 FE that had the Exynos 2400e on board.

The Exynos 2400 was launched last year with the Galaxy S24 series based on a 4nm 4LPP+ (EUV) manufacturing node. In terms of CPU configuration, you are looking at one primary ARM Cortex-X4 core, clocked at up to 3.2 GHz, two more 2.9 GHz Cortex-A720 cores, another three Cortex-A720 cores, working at up to 2.6 GHz and finally, four efficiency Cortex-A720 cores, working at up to 1.95 GHz.

On the GPU side, the Exynos 2400 has an Xclipse 940 GPU. It is based on AMD's modern RDNA 3 architecture. The whole thing is clocked at 1,109 MHz, offering around 3,407 GFLOPS of FP32 performance.

The available memory configurations are like last year's - 8GB/128GB, 8GB/256GB and 8GB/512GB. We are reviewing the 256GB variant, which returns UFS 4.0-level speeds in tests, but we suspect that the 128GB version will use a UFS 3.1 chip.

Now off to the benchmarks.

Even though it's a yesteryear SoC, the Exynos 2400 is still a flagship chipset with respectable performance. This puts the Galaxy S25 FE in the upper half of most charts, showing particularly strong performance in the CPU-bound tests.

On the other hand, the GPU leaves a bit more to be desired, at least compared to most rivals powered by modern, higher-end Snapdragon chips.

Sustained performance

The Galaxy S25 FE is advertised to have a 10% larger heatsink compared to its predecessor to take care of the Exynos 2400 during prolonged workloads. However, the phone's sustained performance is somewhat unimpressive. The CPU's clock speed was significantly reduced after just 10 minutes of stress testing and wasn't able to keep steady clock speeds either.

The GPU stability test was also disappointing, dipping below 50% GPU stability.

CPU and GPU stress tests

Update, 30 October: Revisiting the Galaxy S25 FE's performance a couple of months after its release (still under OneUI 8.0/Android 16), we see a notable improvement in the CPU and GPU thermal throttling.

Updated CPU and GPU stress tests

The outer temperatures remain uncomfortable. The hottest part was the frame, and it was unpleasant to hold.

External temperatures