Samsung Galaxy S25 FE Review – Iterative Improvement

Unboxing

After Galaxy S25, Galaxy S25+, Galaxy S25 Ultra, and the debut of Galaxy S25 Edge, here we have the fifth model of the flagship Galaxy S family – the Galaxy S25 FE. As usual, the box is a thin one housing the phone itself along with minimal amount of accessories.

The items you get include:
– Quick start guide (in two languages)
– Regional lock guide
– Warranty card
– SIM ejector pin
– USB-C charging cable
– Samsung Galaxy S25 FE main unit

Walkaround

Design-wise, the Galaxy S25 FE saw virtually no change over its predecessor, though the back material is now featuring matte finish instead of glossy in the S24 FE. Samsung says the body is constructed with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+ in both sides, along with the so-called Armor Aluminum frame to complete the whole build. No changes has been made in the cameras this time around, with the same 50MP+8MP+12MP combination.

In terms of layout on the sides, there are two changes on the Galaxy S25 FE compared to Galaxy S24 FE: the microphone placements shifted slightly, while the SIM card slot is now relocated to the bottom of the phone, next to the USB-C port. The rest are identical as its predecessor.

Specifications

Samsung Galaxy S25 FE (SM-S731B/DS, 8GB+256GB)

Official specifications available in product page.

Performance

System

The first two benchmarks – focusing on system-wide performance – sees two very different results. In AnTuTu v10, the Galaxy S25 FE performs very well among the flagship models we’re comparing against; it also gets a big lead over the Galaxy S24, which share the same Exynos 2400 chipset as the new FE model. On the contrary, PCMark Work 3.0 test puts the S25 FE on the lower side of the chart, even behind the Galaxy S24 and the Galaxy S24 FE (which uses the slightly weaker Exynos 2400e) too.

CPU

Unsurprisingly, the CPU performance of the Galaxy S25 FE is virtually identical to that of the Galaxy S24, and the budget representative in the form of iQOO 10 Neo is also in the same ballpark, using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8s Gen 4 chipset (which features two less CPU cores than Exynos 2400’s unusual 10-core layout). Granted, the performance is a fair bit behind Samsung’s current-best, the Galaxy S25 Ultra with the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset (in this case, overclocked as well).

GPU

GPU-wise, the Samsung Xclipse 940, which is based on AMD’s RDNA3 architecture that powers Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs, sits in the middle among the smartphones in this list; the ray tracing performance in particular (represented by Solar Bay benchmark) keeps up with the previous-generation Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 as well. It also performs decently in stability tests, scoring 67.2% rating among most flagships, which often have lower scores due to their tendency to boost performance beyond the rate of sustained heat dissipation.

Battery

The endurance of the Galaxy S25 FE’s 4900mAh battery is on par with most smartphones in this chart, short for the vivo X200 Pro and iQOO 10 Neo with extra-large silicon-carbon batteries. Notably though, the S25 FE scored a big improvement over the Galaxy S24 with the same chipset, and it stays even with Samsung’s 2025 flagship, the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

User Experience

Software

Samsung is perhaps the smartphone brand that commits the hardest when it comes to AI features, and this is apparent from the moment you setup the device. Galaxy AI is the umbrella term for all of its AI features, and you can see several of them in many corners of the OneUI interface; in particular, the “Now Brief” feature is among the headlining features of all of its new models, which uses AI to brief what’s ahead of you. This compilation usually includes weather reports, and it’s contextual as well – for example, during night time, it’ll give you a quick guide on ways to get a good sleep.

Evidently, the sheer amount of settings available in this page can be rather intimidating; each category that has some form of AI assistance will get a page of settings, with just a single global setting: onboard processing. If you turn this on, some of the features (i.e. Photo Assist) simply won’t work, as they rely on servers to function properly. Note that you need to have two things to enable all these features: a Samsung account, and agreement to “Personal Data Intelligence” option during setup.

Personally though, I think the Good Lock app is the more important must-have than the AI features Samsung tries to offer here – while they are nice-to-haves, the improvements in user experience Good Lock can unlock (pun not intended) is more pronounced, both visually and functionally. I highly recommend Samsung users to install this app and start exploring the features, and you can find some of the suggestions in our Galaxy Z Flip7 review.

Camera

While the Galaxy S25 FE shares its name with the company’s flagship model, the camera setup is far from the same. Unlike the powerful 200MP+50MP+50MP+10MP setup of the Galaxy S25 Ultra, the 50MP+12MP+8MP setup of the S25 FE is more typical of a smartphone in the upper mid-range, and the price bracket of this smartphone aligns with that.

Still, the software aspect are the same – while I’m not a fan of the vacant space on the lower left corner, where you can place more buttons or just simply space them out, I certainly appreciate having a second shutter button that you can freely move around, which can be super useful if you’re holding your phone in less-than-usual ways. The advanced controls are hidden in the top left button right above the zoom controls, and through its settings you can enable more advanced features like composition assist (which guides you to align the crosshairs).

One of the common theme I’ve seen with photos under indoor lighting is the way this phone’s cameras deal with white balance. More often than not, the white balance is overcompensated when the lighting source is warm white, so the photos do not fully replicate what a human eye can see. For plain white light sources (like the TERRACE sign), the camera ended up skewing towards much cooler color temperature – although this is something that a lot of smartphone cameras will struggle against.

Under some conditions, the UI will suggest you to activate Night Mode, which is useful when dealing with high dynamic range conditions. Take the interior lighting taken from outside the building – the left is what a standard Photo mode will see, while the right is the result with Night Mode.

Above are the images taken with varying zoom levels – starting with Ultrawide, Wide, and two additional zoom levels for its telephoto lens. As mentioned, white balance and HDR tone mapping does struggle to deal with small but brightly-lit objects, and in the 2x sample the camera also managed to turn the night sky brighter than it should be.

That said, daytime photos and focus effects are pretty great, and here are the sample photos we’ve taken, for your reference.

Gaming

The gaming features in today’s Samsung smartphones are admittedly bare-bones. Besides the suboptimal Gaming Hub app that barely cares about the games you actually play, much of the telemetry like FPS and resource usage monitoring are simply not present, aside from the RAM usage which isn’t very useful at evaluating performance. (Some may argue that using GPUWatch via Developer Options is an alternative to monitor metrics, but it’s far from being user-friendly.)

The more frustrating part of this is that advanced gaming features used to exist in the form of “Game Plugins”, which my personal Galaxy A52s circa 2021 can attest to. It has optional features like Perf Z that can be used to monitor these metrics, another one being a static crosshair like you’ll find in gaming monitors, and there’s even game time reminders that helps user maintaining good gaming habits.

Instead, in the Galaxy S25 FE, all you can do is the 8 buttons as shown on the first screenshot, and not much else. Bypass charging is supported, although you have to go into Game Booster’s settings, which is heavily obscured under the Gaming Hub app or the Settings app under ‘Advanced Features’ section (somehow this is not placed under battery settings which would be way more logical). For what it’s worth though, at least the GPU performance is plenty powerful, and we found no performa