Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge Hints at What an ‘iPhone 17 Air’ Could Look Like

Samsung Unpacked Galaxy S25 Edge teaser
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It’s Samsung week, and along with the expected Galaxy S25 lineup announced during today’s Unpacked event, Samsung also debuted its first take on an ultra-slim flagship in the form the Galaxy S25 Edge.

Unlike the Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25 Plus, and Galaxy S25 Ultra, which are the usual year-over-year upgrades and available for preorder now, the Galaxy S25 Edge still isn’t quite a full product. Samsung merely teased it toward the end of its event, telling us the name and showing us a slimmer version of the standard S25 without saying anything about exactly how slim it will be.

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It’s clear Samsung’s goal here is to beat Apple to the punch since rumors of an ultra-slim iPhone have been piling up since last spring. The consensus is that Apple will replace the iPhone Plus with an “iPhone 17 Air” or “iPhone 17 Slim.” That name depends on which report you read, but the “Air” moniker certainly seems more like Apple’s style.

Leaving the name aside, all the reports agree that Apple is going for something measuring between 5.5 and 6.25 mm, putting it on par with Apple’s thinnest iPads. For comparison, the iPhone 16 is 7.8 mm, the iPhone 16 Pro is 8.5 mm, and most of Apple’s iPads have come in under 6.1 mm since 2015, with the 13-inch M4 iPad Pro slimming things down to an astonishing 5.1 mm.

Stealing Apple’s Thunder?

Samsung Unpacked Galaxy S25 Edge teaser 1

It’s unclear if Samsung has inside information or listens to the rumor mill like the rest of us, but it’s not the first time it’s come out with something that Apple is also working on. Last summer, the Galaxy Watch 7 and Ultra models added sleep apnea detection as their marquee new health feature, which was only one month before Apple brought it to the Apple Watch Series 10.

The pre-announcement of the Galaxy S25 Edge seems like another play to get the thinnest smartphone ever out before Apple can launch its iPhone 17 lineup. Still, Samsung has told us almost nothing about it — not even a launch date.

So, it’s nice that Samsung has formally confirmed its existence, but we still have to mostly rely on rumors to know what the company is up to. Those suggest that it could launch in May, and most agree that it will measure around 6.4 mm, compared to 7.2 mm for the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy S25 Plus or 8.2 mm for the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

Samsung Unpacked Galaxy S25 Edge teaser 2

While Apple’s iPhone 17 Air will reportedly be reduced to a single camera, it appears the Galaxy S25 Edge will get dual rear cameras. That’s still a downgrade by Samsung’s standards, considering that even the base S25 has a triple-camera setup. However, we know little else, not even the specs of those cameras, much less things like battery life, charging speeds, and processor.

This year, the entire Galaxy S25 lineup packs in the bespoke “For Galaxy” versions of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chip for the first time. This chip can give Apple’s A18 a run for its money in raw performance, although Apple’s chips get an edge thanks to better optimizations in iOS and the AAA games on the App Store that aren’t available to Android gamers.

The iPhone 17 Air is expected to feature the same A19 chip as the standard iPhone 17, and Samsung could likely do the same for its S25 Edge. However, that’s far from a sure thing since Samsung has long dabbled in its own Exynos chips. There were rumors some S25 models would use an upgraded version of the Exynos 2400 used in some of last year’s S24 models, so it’s possible it could be saving this for the S25 Edge.

The only official word on when the Galaxy S25 Edge will launch comes from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who says it’s coming in “the first half of this year” based on an interview by Bloomberg News with TM Roh, Samsung’s mobile device president. In the interview, Roh added, “We’ve been trying to combine all the advantages of the S25 Ultra in a slimmer form factor,” and suggested it would be priced somewhere between the S25 Plus and the S25 Ultra, although the company hasn’t yet settled on what to sell it for.



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