Smartphone Awards 2025!
Marques Brownlee presents his annual Smartphone Awards 2025, recognizing the best, most improved, and most disappointing phones released throughout the year across multiple categories. The episode showcases 14 featured devices and highlights how smartphones remain central to personal computing despite the emergence of AI devices, smart glasses, and XR headsets.
Key takeaways
- • Silicon carbon battery technology marks a major breakthrough in 2025, with several flagship phones now exceeding 7,000 mAh capacity while maintaining thin profiles and offering faster charging than previous generations.
- • The base iPhone 17 finally delivers a complete feature set at an affordable price point, including 120Hz display, dual cameras, and doubled storage capacity—making it the easiest iPhone to recommend in the entire lineup.
- • Foldable phones have become significantly thinner and more usable in 2025, with improved cover screens and refined form factors that blur the line between traditional phones and tablets.
- • The Oppo Find X9 Pro achieves the best overall smartphone camera system through consistent photo quality, advanced telephoto capabilities with a detachable Hasselblad lens, and professional video features like 4K 120fps Dolby Vision.
- • Budget smartphones have improved dramatically, with the CMF Phone 2 Pro delivering flagship-like performance at $279 including a 120Hz display, modular design, and optimized software—proving premium features are increasingly accessible at lower prices.
- • Apple's iPhone Air represents a controversial design statement by prioritizing thinness and minimalism over practical features like dual cameras and large batteries, creating a polarizing but visually distinctive luxury phone.
Recommendations (14)
"Pixel 9a has got to be on anybody's list who's after a more compact option. This is a 6.3 inch screen and they did a lot of things. Still great software from being a Pixel. Really good cameras on t..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 13:22
"If you deleted all the slab phones in the world somehow and made me daily drive something that folds, it would be this one. Not because it's the thinnest or has the best specs or the best cameras. ..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 21:47
"This is a 6.8 inch screen size and packs in a huge triple camera system on the back, including a 200 megapixel telephoto sensor. There's a ton of RAM and storage. There's a custom button. They put ..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 1:55
"This is a really big phone that is really loaded with features. First of all, it's a 6.9 inch phone, so basically as big as a phone gets before as a tablet, but it also feels like the most phone yo..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 2:42
"The iPhone 17 Pro which also leveled up again this year both in the photo and video departments. The larger main sensor looks really good. They also bumped to a 4x telephoto which I think is the ri..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 9:36
"For $279, this phone is modular, cheap, and fun. They built a phone that feels like it's literally double the price. This is a 6.8 inch 120 Hz screen that's actually good-looking and bright. There'..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 11:34
"This phone feels as good as anything they've made, and that's a good thing. Like, it's got a huge screen. And it's got a really, really big battery, decent cameras, decent software, headphone jack...."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 12:49
"I actually used a phone this year that got me not two but three full days of like all day carefree high brightness mixed use. like 10 plus hours of screen on time from a 7300 mAh battery. This phon..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 15:43
"What they've ended up with is a phone that feels crazy. It feels impossibly light. It looks impossibly thin. It kind of resembles a piece of jewelry in many ways, but also really appeals to the min..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 18:24
"This is the Fairphone 6, a phone that looks relatively normal, but that's the point because this just so happens to be the most repairable, the most sustainable, and most modular phone basically of..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 20:47
"There were a bunch of other foldables that I saw and one other one that I actually daily drove this year for an extended period of time and it was this one, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold. And this one is r..."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 22:37
"People always want to know also what's the phone that I used the most during the year, which I mentioned in a previous video, but I will say it was Galaxy S25 Ultra for a long time."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 31:51
"It was Galaxy S25 Ultra for a long time and then it was Pixel 10 Pro for a long time and now lately it has been OnePlus 15 in my pocket."
Marques Brownlee · ▶ 31:56
Mentioned (6)
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