Samsung launched the Galaxy S25 FE smartphone last month. This has the similar 6.7-inch FHD+ 120Hz panel, similar camera, but gets a slightly bigger battery, faster charging, faster SoC, and a sleeker design. Even though it is minor, is this a good upgrade to the Galaxy S24 FE? Let us dive into the review to find out.
| Box Contents |
| Camera |
| Battery Life |
| Conclusion |
Box Contents
- Samsung Galaxy S25 FE 8GB RAM, 128GB storage version in Navy
colour - USB Type-C to C Cable
- SIM ejector tool
- Quick Start Guide and Warranty information
Display, Hardware and Design
The phone comes with a 6.7-inch Full HD+ Infinity-O Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels at about 384PPI, aspect ratio of 20:9. The display is bright, thanks to 1900 nits peak brightness.
It offers good color reproduction and the sunlight legibility is good as well. The screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+, same as the older model. There are minimal symmetrical bezels around the screen.
It has a 120Hz refresh rate screen that offers a fluid user experience with smoother animations, scrolling and gaming. There is no mention of an LTPO panel, since there is only mention of 60Hz or 120Hz adaptive refresh rate. Sometimes it can go to 30Hz and even 1Hz when is is static, so it is likely an LTPO panel.
The phone doesn’t have DC dimming, PWM dimming or any other low brightness anti-flicker mode that is present in some AMOLED screen phones in the price range. I didn’t notice any screen flicker issues in low brightness on the phone. It doesn’t have notification LED, but there is Always on display.
On the top, there is a 12-megapixel camera in the tiny punch-hole, matching other S25 series phones, and an upgrade from the 10-megapixel camera in the older models. The earpiece is present on the top edge that doubles up as a secondary speaker. The punch-hole is small and it is not intrusive.
There is a small bezel below the screen. The phone still has an in-display optical fingerprint sensor towards the bottom part of the screen.
The phone retains the Armor Aluminum frame that has a matte finish. This offers a good grip, and the phone doesn’t slip out of your hands. You can see the antenna bands all around. Coming to the button placements, the power button and the volume rockers are present on the right side. There is nothing on the left side.
The dual SIM slot USB Type-C port and the loudspeaker grill are on the bottom. The secondary microphone is on the top.
On the back there is a familiar triple camera module arranged in a single line, but there is a new camera ring. There is a single LED flash next to the module. Even though the phone has a 6.7-inch screen, it is compact to hold. It is 7.4mm thick, making it 0.6mm thinner, and weighs just 190 grams, making it 23g lighter, even though there is no change in the screen, and there is a slight increase in the battery size.
In addition to the Navy colour variant that we have, the phone also comes in Jet black, and White colours in India. This comes with dust and water-resistant in freshwater to a depth of 1.5 meter for up to 30 minutes, with IP68 certification.
Camera
- 50MP main camera with f/1.8 aperture, OIS
- 12MP 123˚ Ultra Wide sensor, f/2.2 aperture
- 8MP Telephoto camera with OIS, 3X Optical Zoom, f/2.4 aperture
- 12MP front camera with f/2.2 aperture
There are no changes in the rear camera sensors compared to the S24 FE. However, you can see changes in the UI. You can choose 50MP option from the aspect ratio settings on the top, and the default output is 12MP instead of 12.5MP after pixel binning. It also has AR stickers, scene optimizer, portrait video, director’s view, hyperlapse and more modes.
Coming to the image quality, daylight shots are brilliant, and it captures in 12MP resolution after pixel binning. The camera captures a good amount of detail, creates well exposed photos with good dynamic range and detailing, and dynamic range can further be improved enabling HDR mode from the settings, which automatically turns on HDR when needed. Apart from the 3x telephoto zoom camera, the standard digital zoom is also good. The 10x and 20x zoomed photos are good. Autofocus speeds are fast and accurate. Ultra-wide shots from the 12MP camera are good.
There is no macro mode or camera, but you can use 2x from the main camera or use 3x telephoto for close-ups, which is good. Live focus is good at detecting the edges. Low-light performance is good, which can be improved further with Night mode that offers more details. Images with flash is good and is not overpowering.
The 12-megapixel front camera is good, capturing brilliant shots. Software blur in the live focus mode has good edge detection even in low light. Overall, there are not much changes in the camera quality from the predecessor.
Check out the camera samples.
The S25 FE offers 8K video recording at 30 fps s from the main camera, 4K UHD video recording at 60 fps from the main and front cameras, 4K 30 fps video from other cameras. Slow motion 1080p video support at 240 fps and Hyperlapse 4K video support at 30 fps.
The normal stabilization works with both ultra-wide and main camera, but only the main camera has OIS. You can switch between normal, ultra-wide telephoto and front cameras when video recording is in progress, but only in 4K 30fps or less. There is also HDR10+ recording that is enabled by default, and it supports up to 4K 60 fps.
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the phone runs on Android 16 with September 2025 Android security patch. On the top of Android 16, it has the latest Samsung One UI 8, making it one of the first phones to run it out of the box. Similar to other S25 series phones, Samsung has confirmed 7 OS updates and 7 years of security updates for the S25 FE.
There are Galaxy AI tools for communication, productivity, and creativity have been expanded. It still has features like Call Transcript, Writing Assist, and Drawing Assist to offer enhanced functionality and ease of use. With One UI 8 Now Bar and Now Brief that were introduced with the One UI 7 will deliver customized insights and suggestions via curated AI information, supporting task management and daily routines.
This also offers users control over data processing, with options to keep data on-device, as many Galaxy AI features will utilize a hybrid of on-device and cloud-based AI processing. It also brings several features aimed at enhancing everyday convenience.
The Reminder app has redesigned UX intended to be intuitive, especially for tasks like travel planning. File sharing is more streamlined with an enhanced Quick Share feature. A single tap of the Quick Share button in the Quick settings panel will allow for sending and receiving files.
The Device maintenance option lets you manage your device’s battery life, storage, RAM usage, and security all in one place. It comes in 128GB, 256GB and new 512GB options in India. The 128GB model which we have has 106GB free space. It still has 8GB of RAM, even though S25 has 12GB of RAM. Out of 8GB LPDDR5X RAM, about 7.2GB is usable and 2.5GB is free when default apps are running in the background.
There is also a RAM Plus feature, which uses the internal memory of the phone to expand the RAM by an extra 8GB, in addition to the existing 8GB of RAM. This is enabled automatically, but can be disabled.
Apart from the usual set of utility apps and Google Apps, the smartphone comes with Facebook, Netflix, Spotify and Microsoft apps – Microsoft 365 Copilot, OneDrive, LinkedIn and Outlook. You get the option to install apps when you are setting up the phone, which you can choose not to. The phone doesn’t have ads, but shows notifications of new Samsung products occasionally.
Fingerprint sensor and Face unlock
The phone has an in-display optical fingerprint sensor which is good enough to unlock the phone quickly. You can add up to 4 fingerprints, and adding fingerprint is easy. It has support for Face recognition, which doesn’t work well if the lighting is poor in the room, if you use hats or sunglasses. Both these are protected by Knox security.
Music Player and Multimedia
YouTube Music is the default music player. It has equalizer, Dolby Atmos, UHQ upscaler, and Adapt that can be enabled from the settings. All these improve the audio when listening through earphones, and Dolby Atmos also works with speakers. It doesn’t have FM Radio support. That said, audio through earphones is good. Loudspeaker output from the stereo speakers is good.
The phone comes with Widevine L1 support out-of-the-box so that you can enjoy HD content on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and other streaming apps. There is also HDR playback support for Netflix and YouTube.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The Galaxy S25 has dual SIM support and support for 5G SA, with support for several 5G Network Bands in India. Airtel and Jio 5G works out of the box. There is also 4G Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and support for LTE-A or Carrier Aggregation. It was mostly in 4G or 4G + on Airtel, and some places, even Jio showed only 4G+. The Samsung dialer, similar to other Samsung phones, supports auto call recording.
Other connectivity options include, Wi-Fi 6 802.11 ax, Wi-Fi-Calling or Vo-Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.4 and GPS with GLONASS. It has support for USB OTG and NFC that works with supported payment apps.
The Galaxy S25 FE’s head SAR is at 1.31/Kg which is higher than the Galaxy S24 FE, but it is well under the limit in India which is 1.6 W/kg (over 1 g).
Performance and Benchmarks
The Exynos 2400 Deca-Core processor, which was used in the Galaxy S24 in India, powers the S25 FE. This is a minor upgrade compared to Exynos 2400e, which was used in the Galaxy S24 FE.
It uses 4nm 3rd generation 4LPP+ (EUV) process node and has tri-cluster CPU structure that consists of one Arm Cortex-X4 large core optimized for peak performance at 3.2 GHz, five mid-sized core that includes 2 x Cortex-A720 cores at 2.90 GHz and 3 x Cortex-A720 cores at 2.6 GHz for balanced processing, and four Cortex-A520 cores at 2.0 GHz for efficiency.
This promises 1.7x increase in CPU performance compared to Exynos 2200, but there is not much change compared to Exynos 2400e in the S24 FE. It has the Samsung Xclipse 940 GPU with AMD RDNA 3 architecture and hardware ray tracing technology.
We did not face any issues or frame drops in the graphic-intensive games like COD, BGMI and Genshin Impact. In 3D Mark wild life stress test, it scored 48.4%, which is better than the Galaxy S25. Temperature shot up from 38 to 46 degrees. That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
There is 10% larger vapor chamber compared to the predecessor that improves cooling to maintain peak performance for longer durations, said the company. That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
Battery life
Coming to the battery life, the phone packs a 4900mAh (typical) built-in battery, compared to 4700mAh battery in the predecessor. It lasts for a whole day with 5G, dual SIMs, and heavy use. I got about 5 hours of screen on time with 24 hours of use with mostly on Wi-Fi, and occasional 5G use in 120Hz, which is decent for a phone with a 4900mAh battery. With heavy use it should be more.
Samsung has finally upgraded the charging from 25W to 45W. It takes slightly over one hour to charge the phone fully using a 45W charger, and 0 to 50% takes about 30 minutes. It charges faster if the phone is turned off. Even with a 25W charger, it can charge under one and half hours. It still has 15W wireless charging support and wireless power share.
Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy S25 FE stands as a thoughtful and logical refinement of its predecessor rather than a revolutionary leap. It successfully carries the ‘Fan Edition’ torch by cherry-picking key flagship features and packaging them into a more accessible device. The most meaningful upgrades come in the form of a faster Exynos 2400 processor, a sleeker, lighter design, and the long-awaited jump to 45W fast charging for its slightly larger battery.
While the excellent display and versatile camera system are largely unchanged from the S24 FE, they remain strong performers in their class. The promise of an incredible seven years of OS and security updates is a massive value proposition that sets it apart from competitors.
Ultimately, the S25 FE is an easy recommendation for users upgrading from an older device (S22 FE or earlier). For existing Galaxy S24 FE owners, the upgrades are incremental and may not warrant an immediate switch. However, for anyone seeking a near-flagship experience without the flagship price, the Galaxy S25 FE is a polished, powerful, and compelling choice.
Alternatives
If you need a compact phone, the Galaxy S24 Snapdragon Edition which was launched in India recently is also a good option. The Google Pixel 9a is a good alternative at a cheaper price, but it lacks a telephoto camera.
Availability
The Samsung Galaxy S25 FE is priced at Rs. 59,999 for the 8GB + 128GB model, Rs. 65,999 for the 8GB + 256GB model and the 8GB + 512GB model costs Rs. 77,999.
As a part of launch offer, 256GB buyers get 512GB storage option. There is also Rs. 4000 off on Galaxy Buds3 FE + Two years screen protection starting at Rs. 4199, as well as Rs. 5000 Bank Cashback and up to 24 months no cost EMI.
The phone is now available from Samsung.com, Samsung Exclusive Stores, select Samsung authorized retail stores, and other online portals.
Pros
- Excellent 120Hz AMOLED display
- Smooth performance
- Android 16 out of the box, 7 years OS and security updates
- Decent battery life, 45W fast charging
Cons
- The phone can get hot under sustained load
- The rear camera hardware is similar to the predecessor