Samsung announced a new phone on Monday, so you know what that means: It’s time to do some comparing and contrasting.
This time, we’ll be looking at how the ultra-thin Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge matches up against old reliable, the iPhone 16 from Apple. One of them is the meat-and-potatoes base model for an entire lineup, while the other is the flashy new member of the family with a specific selling point. Let’s hash them out.
Apple might increase iPhone prices this fall
Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge vs. iPhone 16
Besides the obvious (iOS vs. Android), here is how the new Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge and iPhone 16 compare to one another. And if you’re looking for the tl;dr version: the iPhone 16 is the standard iPhone of the moment, while the S25 Edge is a thinner version of the flagship S25 Ultra. The S25 Edge doesn’t sacrifice many flagship features, but it’s smaller, thinner, and more affordable.
Specs and price
Credit: Kimberly Gedeon/Mashable
There’s one thing we need to get out of the way immediately: The $1,099 Galaxy S25 Edge is a substantially more expensive phone than the $799 iPhone 16. As such, the expectations for specs and features are a little different for these two phones. Here is what Samsung is working with:
-
6.7-inch AMOLED display with 120Hz adaptive refresh rate
-
Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset
-
12GB RAM
-
256GB/512GB storage
And here is what you get from the iPhone 16:
-
6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display with 60Hz refresh rate
-
A18 chip
-
8GB RAM
-
128GB/256GB/512GB storage
If we were declaring winners and losers here, obviously the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge would win in the specs department because it’s a more premium phone. You get a much bigger display with a significantly better refresh rate, more RAM, and more starting storage.
Design
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
The big selling point of the Galaxy S25 Edge lies here, but first, we need to talk about colors.
The iPhone 16’s color palette is a lot more interesting than the Galaxy S25 Edge’s. You can choose from black, white, pink, teal, and blue. Samsung, on the other hand, is offering three looks for the S25 Edge: Black, silver, and blue. Boring.
But color isn’t the big reason to pay attention to the S25 Edge. The entire gimmick with Samsung’s new phone is that you get premium specs in an unbelievably thin body. At 5.8mm of thickness, it’s a good deal thinner than the 7.8 mm-thick iPhone 16. Samsung’s phone is also lighter, clocking in at just 163g compared to the iPhone 16’s 170g.
Aside from that, the two phones actually look fairly similar at a glance. Both of them have two rear camera lenses situated at the top left corner of the phone’s backside, for example. Neither company is really pushing the envelope here, outside of Samsung making a flagship phone that’s really, really skinny. It should be noted that Apple is reportedly working on the same thing.
Performance
This is one category that’s impossible to really evaluate right now because we don’t have both phones in hand yet.
That said, the iPhone 16’s A18 chip is a really solid performer, rarely slowing down or introducing any kind of noteworthy issues in day-to-day life, which I can confirm as an iPhone 16 owner. And the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chipset in the S25 Edge was similarly brilliant in the other S25 phones, which launched earlier this year. There may be differences that emerge in testing, but there’s no reason to believe either of these phones has severe performance problems.
Battery
The one big knock against the Galaxy S25 Edge is that its 3,900mAh battery is smaller than any of the other Galaxy S25 phones, even the cheaper base model. That’s a compromise Samsung had to make in order to achieve that level of thinness. Still, impressively, it’s bigger than the 3,561mAh cell in the iPhone 16.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the Galaxy S25 Edge will outpace the iPhone 16 in practical battery testing, which we haven’t done yet. It could be poorly optimized or inefficient, for all we know. Speaking from personal experience, you can get about 24 hours out of one charge of the iPhone 16, so the S25 Edge needs to match that number to stay competitive.
Camera
Credit: Alex Perry/Mashable
Lastly, the cameras. One more time for those who just got here: We haven’t done any head-to-head testing yet, so a final evaluation will have to wait.
We can compare specs, though, and Samsung’s phone will win every time if that’s the fight. The Galaxy S25 Edge comes with a staggering 200MP wide lens on the back, to go along with a 12MP ultra-wide lens. The iPhone 16 also has a 12MP ultra-wide lens on the rear, but you only get a 48MP wide lens to go along with it.
Samsung packed the same premium lens from the Galaxy S25 Ultra into the Edge, which could certainly be a selling point. We can’t wait to find out how the photos actually look, in practice.
Source : Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge vs. iPhone 16: Which should you buy?
