What’s Old is Thin Again
Wes Davis, reporting from Samsung Galaxy Unpacked for The Verge:
Samsung just teased the Galaxy S25 Edge — the new ultra-slim entry into the Galaxy S25 lineup. The phone isn’t out yet, and Samsung hasn’t provided any details, but now we know it’s real. And we have pictures.
Like pretty much every phone, it’s a thin silver slab. It’s got two cameras on the back, rather than the three cameras you’d get with other S25 phones. The Edge is rumored to measure just 6.4mm thick, but my colleagues Allison Johnson and Vjeran Pavic, who are on the ground at Galaxy Unpacked and took the below photos, weren’t able to actually hold or measure the device to confirm.
We’re trying to get closer so we can show perspective, but the place is mobbed with people. There’s a lot of excitement about this phone. By comparison, though, the regular Galaxy S25 is 7.2mm thick. So, it’s… even thinner.
So apparently, 2025’s overarching phone theme is thinness, which reminds me of 2014 when Apple debuted the easily-bendable-to-the-point-of-ridicule iPhone 6 Plus. News outlets (Bloomberg) have been pretty relentless in saying Samsung “beat Apple to the market” with the Galaxy S25 Edge, but the phone isn’t even out yet. Apple is rumored to announce a slim iPhone later this year at its annual September event, and Samsung provided no release date for its thin phone. If I had to guess, that’s because it doesn’t exist.
Each of The Verge’s shots in the article shows the phone with a beige, swirly (figure eight?) wallpaper and nothing else. There is no software interface or any other identifiable features, probably because it doesn’t even have a processor to run software on. From what I can tell, it’s just a plastic replica with a screen attached and connected to some computer in the back. The S25 Slim isn’t real — it’s just a publicity stunt to “beat Apple at its own game.” Research and development on the product has presumably started, but Samsung doesn’t have a single functioning prototype of it yet. Typical for Samsung.
Samsung always follows in Apple’s footsteps, almost to its own chagrin. The company rarely ever has new features that haven’t been blatantly copied off of some other company’s flagship product. So this time, it wanted the news cycle for itself — in other words, the marketing department got control over the reigns for a bit. There’s always been daylight between the Samsung engineering teams — who make the second-most popular smartphones in the world — and the marketing team, whose focus is solely on making a fool of itself every September. When Samsung ridiculed Apple for removing the power adapter from iPhone 12’s box, it did the same just a few months later with the Galaxy S21 line of phones. When it teased Apple for removing the headphone jack in 2016, it followed right along just a few years later. It’s constant.
Samsung’s marketing team is slowly coming around to realizing the world has caught on. I can’t believe it took so long after Samsung literally copied the orange accent of the Apple Watch Ultra on its high-end Galaxy Watch Pro last year. So this time, thin is in, and Samsung quickly whipped up a 3D-printed block of metallic-looking plastic to get ahead of the curve. It’s so unsurprising and yet so shockingly blatant — how the world’s No. 1 smartphone manufacturer can, time and time, get away with copying Apple to such a high degree. I can’t tell if it’s overconfidence, malicious intent, or both.
About the name: I would bet every dollar to my name that Samsung’s marketing executives mulled over calling it the S25 Air, mirroring Apple’s rumored name for its thin phone, but (rightfully) decided against it for copyright reasons. In haste, they came up with “Galaxy S25 Edge,” borrowing the “edge” moniker from the “waterfall edge”-style S7. “Edge” used to mean something — users would be able to swipe from the side of the phone up toward the main display to invoke a control panel of sorts, similar to the new Control Center in iOS 18, for easy access to certain apps. Samsung ditched the Edge a few years ago because people hated it, and it doesn’t look like the S25 Edge has one either. But, alas, the phone is still called the Edge. Never change, Samsung.