The Samsung Galaxy A25 brings a few upgrades like a 5G chipset, a higher screen refresh rate, stereo speakers, and 4K video recording.
Table of Contents
Design and build
The Galaxy A25’s overall design is quite similar to before, with the separate camera rings and flat plastic back. The back panel has a fine checkered pattern, and this time the middle plastic frame has a different shape around the power button and the volume key, making the phone feel a little bit nicer in hand. Unlike more expensive A Series Galaxy phones, there’s no official Ingress Protection on the A25.
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Screen spec and feature
The display of the A25 is a 6.5-inch OLED with a 1080p resolution, but this time there’s a faster 120Hz refresh rate. This means that swiping and scrolling should be a bit smoother than last year’s 90Hz panel. The refresh rate isn’t adaptive to save energy, though, and that move may backfire when it comes to battery life. Content looks good here; the panel is sharp and contrasty, and you have plenty of options to tweak the colors.
The bezels are rather large, which is expected from a budget phone, but the A24 screen punches above its weight when it comes to max brightness. We measured around 430 nits with a manual slider maxed out, and this can boost to over 1,000 nits in auto mode in bright sunlight.
Audio
The A25 has a headphone jack and a pair of stereo speakers, an upgrade over last year’s single speaker. The speaker loudness is very good, and the quality is fairly rich with good highs and even some bass.
Fingerprint reader and Storage
The Galaxy A25 has a capacitive side-mounted fingerprint reader, and it’s quite accurate and snappy. You can get the phone with 128 or 256 gigs of storage on board, and that is expandable to microSD.
Software
The interface of the phone is Samsung’s One UI 6 running on top of Android 14. This is the full-featured One UI, as opposed to the core version available on some lower-end Galaxy devices. With One UI 6, the overall experience remains very visually and functionally similar to the previous One UI 5. One of the more obvious changes is a new button layout on the quick panel, and the layout of notifications has also been improved. We have an in-depth video in the works about One UI 6’s specific features, and we’ll leave a link here when it’s up. Finally, for software support, the A25 will get four major OS updates and 5 years of security patches from Samsung.
Chipset
The chipset of the Galaxy A25 is an Exynos 1280 produced by Samsung. It’s a 5G-capable chipset that we’ve seen previously in the Galaxy A53 5G and the Galaxy A33 5G. In benchmarks, the phone does a decent job for this price range. CPU-wise, it outperforms phones running on a Snapdragon 695 or Snapdragon 4 Gen 1, and it does okay in graphics tests as well. The A25 handles your everyday tasks decently well, and there’s enough power here for some casual gaming.
Battery life
The phone has a 5,000 mAh battery, and the battery life is okay but nothing mind-blowing. The A25 earned an active use score of 10 hours and 19 minutes, and we would have liked to have seen some better scores. When it comes to web browsing and gaming, there’s support for 25W charging, but there’s no charger in the box. With a proper adapter, we were able to charge the phone from 0 to 49% in half an hour, and a full charge took 84 minutes.
Camera on Samsung Galaxy A25
You get the same 50MP main cam as last year, but that’s paired with a new 8MP Ultra-wide. The third camera is a 2MP macro shooter. The main camera’s 12.5MP photos are just okay. They’re quite soft when you zoom in closely, but the contrast is good, and the dynamic range is wide enough. In typical Samsung fashion, colors have a bit of an extra pop to them.
Photo quality
Portrait shots are decent as well; the subject is detailed, and the edge detection and separation are accurate. If you zoom in two times with the main cam, you get a bit of extra noise and softness, but still, the quality isn’t too bad. In low light, the main cam’s photos are okay, nothing impressive. There is detail here, but many surfaces look soft and noisy.
There’s good contrast, and shadows and highlights are handled well, but light sources can be blown out. The colors are a bit cold but generally alright. There is a dedicated night mode, which has longer exposure times and does more image stacking. The resulting images are a bit sharper with less noise and cleaner surfaces. Light sources are handled notably better too, unlike last year’s model.
Video quality
The Samsung Galaxy A25 can capture 4K video, and these clips look good with plenty of detail and a vibrant look. Contrast is good, and there’s a wide dynamic range. On the A25, you get gyro-based electronic image stabilization, and with it on, the footage is smooth out, but the resolution is maxed at 1080p.
Ultrawide camera
While the new 8MP Ultra-wide cam is an upgrade over last year’s 5MP one, it’s nothing too exciting. Its photos are very soft and have aggressive sharpening, and the contrast, fast and dynamic range, are alright. In low light, the ultra-wide’s photos are still unimpressive, though the dynamic range is quite alright for this sort of camera. Night mode boosts the exposure a bit but doesn’t help much with the dynamic range. The amount of captured detail remains about the same, with a bit of extra sharpening applied.
Macro cam
The 2MP macro cam can take some usable close-ups with good colors and dynamic range but unimpressive detail.
Selfies are taken with the 13MP front-facing cam. They’re great, with accurate colors and plenty of detail with a balanced rendition.
Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy A25 is a solid mid-ranger for this budget, and the upgrades over the A24 do add up. Just to recap, you get 5G connectivity, a higher refresh rate, stereo speakers, and 4K video recording. My main complaints are the lack of Ingress Protection and poor camera performance in low-light scenarios. But if those don’t bother you, then the Galaxy A25 is a value mid-ranger worth checking out.
