Best flagship phones 2025 - buyer’s guide

You do not get the most premium iPhone for a single feature. The iPhone 16 Pro Max is worth getting for its well-rounded user experience, luxurious design, its premium services and warranty, for its clockwork iOS, and for its versatile camera experience with great photos and exceptional videos. And a thousand other little things we cannot fit in here.

The iPhone 16 Pro Max offers excellent battery life, speakers experience, gaming performance and more. It is also a powerful video camera with class-leading quality and stabilization plus options to capture ProRes videos on external drives.

Apple iOS may not be everyone's cup of tea, regardless of whether it's due to its odd file management or various restrictions in all sorts of places. But it is also quite a secure system, easy to work with, and, this year, with iOS 18, Apple finally brought flexibility in how your app icons look and how they are arranged across the homescreens. We'll also finally get a taste of the AI features Apple has envisioned for the OS.

So, should you get the new iPhone? Of course! It is the best iPhone ever made, you know. It has a stunning design, an outstanding display, great performance, impressive speakers, pro-grade cameras with consistently good photos and class-leading video quality, long battery life and likable if weird iOS.

The Galaxy S25 Ultra is not the perfect smartphone, this year we have a long cons section, and for that, unfortunately, we no longer consider it as the ultimate smartphone. This title is now reserved for the iPhone 16 Pro Max, until the Xiaomi 15 Ultra comes out, that is.

The ultimate (non-bendy) Galaxy traditionally has some big shoes to fill, and the S25 Ultra feels kind of loose in its pair. It's certainly anything but a bad phone - quite the competent one, in fact. It manages to extract pretty great endurance (out of a small-ish battery), has a very good display (in most ways), charges reasonably fast (in the right context), has an improved build (but missing some extra sealing), and remains the only truly viable option on the market if you want a stylus (even though the stylus itself is a downgrade this year).

While we're okay with all those notes above, the fact that we have to make excuses for the Galaxy Ultra isn't good for optics. It's supposed to be the no-compromise have-it-all best option on the market - and Samsung goes out and takes away the S Pen's connectivity, puts off fitting a newer and bigger battery, and is staying behind the curve in ingress protection and what not. Also, it's not the greatest cameraphone you can get.

Ultimately, the Galaxy S25 Ultra remains the go-to choice for a feature-packed Android handset that delivers stylus support and all-around goodness. But what happened to all-around greatness?

The Honor Magic V3 is easy to like, particularly for those who have been continually annoyed by the Samsung Z Folds' brick-like form factor (thick and narrow). Indeed, one of the Magic's major selling points is that you can forget it's a foldable and treat it like a regular bar phone, but still have the convenience of the large screen always in your pocket.

The Magic has a class-leading cover display to help make the above case. The internal one, while not the brightest, has little to be ashamed of either. It doesn't hurt that Honor has gone to great lengths to ensure that everything is well protected, too.

What we can think of as a weak point is the battery life when using the internal display, though if you spend most of your time on the cover, the V3 is as good as the rest, making it somewhat of a moot weak point.

The missteps in the camera department that we observed are the other thing that's giving us pause but they may be somewhat little niche and/or a firmware away from a fix.

With all things considered, the Magic V3 is a great all-around option if you're out there looking for a tablet that fits in phone-sized pockets.

The Oppo Find N5 more or less represents the pinnacle of current foldable tech. It uses the most modern Snapdragon 8 Elite generation of chipset, and more importantly, it is exquisitely crafted to be exceptionally thin while still packing in a big Si/C battery and an impressive hinge that makes for an almost invisible display crease. Oppo even found space for a versatile camera system.

The Find N5 is well-equipped through and through. It supports all of the latest connectivity standards, including some little extras like tri-band Wi-Fi 7 and video output via its Type-C port. The technological density on display here is really impressive. Oppo even found the space to fit in proper stereo speakers and even an IR blaster. Even Oppo's signature alert slider is present.

Having said all this, is the Find N5 a perfect device? Well, no, we definitely can't say that. It might be at the pinnacle of foldable design, but that comes with some omissions. Nothing too obvious, mind you, but little things, like the fact that the Snapdragon 8 Elite inside the phone is one CPU core short and doesn't retain its performance particularly well over time. Or the fact that the ultrawide camera is a bit sub-par.

Overall, if you appreciate the foldable form factor, there is probably no better option than the Oppo Find N5 on the market right now. If it is available in your country, that is. If not, maybe check the Honor offer.

The Honor Magic7 Pro does a lot of things right - to the high standard you'd expect from a top-shelf model - and it also manages to stand out in a couple of ways worth mentioning. At least two of them can be found in the pill-shaped cutout in the display - the selfie camera and the 3D face scanning bits that you can't get on all that many Androids. The unusually loud speakers are also possibly a selling point.

The Magic7 Pro impresses with a large 6.8-inch LTPO OLED screen of high resolution, high dynamic refresh rate, 10-bit color depth, and support for HDR and Dolby Vision streaming. It is also powered by the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip for top-notch performance. All these goodies coupled with the awesome speakers make for one excellent multimedia device.

Honor's approach to zoomed in photos starts off promisingly with a sizable sensor, but is a bit of letdown in practice because of the added digital magnification. The smaller battery capacity for Europe-bound units is also a questionable development and one that is preventing the Magic7 Pro from achieving its full potential.

In the end, the Honor Magic7 Pro brings few updates over the Magic6 Pro and there is no point of upgrading. But if you are looking for a proper flagship with all-round feature set, the Magic7 Pro must be an instant addition to your shortlist. And if you liked if, you may want to consider its RSR Porsche Design edition, which has an unique design, a larger battery capacity and an improved telephoto optics for better image quality.

We are on the verge of getting the Xiaomi 15 Ultra, but until then – the 14 Ultra remains a truly great option. Its unique design is beautiful, and we do appreciate the ingress protection. Then there is one of the best displays in the industry - a 1440p LTPO OLED with 12-bit color depth, dynamic 120Hz refresh, and Dolby Vision support.

Then there is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset with superb performance. The Xiaomi 14 Ultra also has excellent thermal handling and offers great sustained performance, We certainly cannot praise the battery life (it’s an average one), but we can praise the charging speed. Kudos for including the 120W charger in the box, too, as this has become a rare thing lately. We also liked the speakers' loudness and quality.

The Xiaomi 14 Ultra is one of the best cameraphones in 2024. A favorite cameraphone in the office, the 13 Ultra didn't leave a lot to ask for, yet Xiaomi did find a few areas to touch up for the 14. Close-focusing telephotos have become the latest trend, and the two ones here are possibly the finest at that, but also excel at a distance. The variable aperture on the main camera is also welcome if you'd like that much control over DoF, though we don't see that as quite the transformational development.

An unrivaled selling point of the 14 Ultra is the Photography kit. Realizing its appeal and its potential to drive Ultra sales, Xiaomi has continued to develop the contraption and add features to it. Indeed, it adds further cost to an already expensive phone, but the two combined will get you as close to a 'real' camera as a smartphone can in ergonomics and experience.

In the end, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra is quite probably the finest camera with a phone attached to it that you can buy today.

The Galaxy Fold6 offers the best foldable and best flagship experience on the market – both hardware and software. The S-Pen Slim Case is an excellent accessory to expand the Fold capabilities, too.

The Fold6 offers improved ingress protection, displays, performance. It also impresses with its speakers.

The lack of real competition isn't helping the Galaxy Z Fold get better faster - Samsung is enjoying a rather trouble-free position in the large foldable space, and it's showing. The Galaxy Z Fold6 has the same cameras as the Fold4 from two years ago, and that's not a good look, alright as they may be. The slow charging is a long-standing issue of the Galaxy roster, and instead of improving on it, the latest model is somehow even slower.

The Galaxy Z Fold6 is the all-around best large foldable that you can buy in most places, and it makes more sense as a tool than it does as a cameraphone. It's just not meaningfully better than the previous generation. Read full review

The Motorola Edge 50 Ultra is a powerful smartphone and one that is incredibly easy to like. Be it wooden or eco-leather, the Edge 50 Ultra's exterior is a showstopper, and it may seal the deal for many.

Then we have a superb 144Hz OLED, a powerful Snapdragon 8s Gen 3, impressive speakers, amazing photo quality, long battery life, and 125W fast charging.

Not everything is peachy, of course. The phone does throttle and heats up fast, and it offers largely unimpressive video recording quality.

But that's about it - everything else is in the class-leading ballpark - design, screen, battery life, charging speed, speakers, performance, photo quality. Once the price drops, it will certainly merit closer consideration.

The Pixel 9 Pro XL brings relatively major stylistic changes plus some hardware upgrades that do make it a better phone than the previous generation. The brighter display is a welcome improvement, of course, and it's possibly the brightest in the business, though it's not like the 8 Pro was lacking in this respect. Battery life has been a blemish for Pixels in head-to-head comparisons, and the new model is a step up in this respect, though it remains in a trailing position among its peers.

The Pixel's biggest selling point lies in its AI capabilities, Google wants us to believe. A bunch of software features are at your disposal for both work and play and image editing tools can help save a photo that circumstances tried to ruin. Having a phone that's made by the OS maker has its benefits even if they're hard to quantify.

We're not quite as thrilled with the camera system as we would have hoped to be, though. The Pixel is lagging behind some of the trends and just because AI can enhance photos and even make up stuff that wasn't there, doesn't mean it can be used as a replacement for state of the art camera hardware. The brand new selfie camera is pretty great, the others fail to excite.

Of course, the Pixel 9 Pro XL is a well rounded and fully capable high-end smartphone - that's beyond debate. This generation prioritizes the phone's development as a vehicle for Google's AI pursuits - if you're into that and want to ride the AI wave, by all means go for it. There are also meaningful improvements on some of the fundamentals to appeal to the AI skeptics. The camera enthusiasts, on the other hand, will probably not be overly... enthused.

The Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold brings a solid experience without any major issues and holds its own in a market with limited competition. While it may not lead the pack in every area, it’s certainly a step forward compared to its predecessor. The camera performance, though competent, doesn't quite reach the heights of some competitors. Charging speeds could be faster, and the chipset, while reliable, isn't quite on par with the other top-tier devices. The design is a bit polarizing as well with the contrast strip stretching the hinge and the cover display.

However, the Pixel 9 Pro Fold has several standout features. It offers an impressive 7 years of Android OS updates, one of the largest displays on the market, and both the main and cover screens are brilliantly bright. Google's AI smarts, particularly with its Gemini AI, are a highlight, often outshining even Samsung's Galaxy AI, provided your language is supported.

In conclusion, while the Pixel 9 Pro Fold faces stiff competition at its premium price point, it offers a strong overall package. It may not introduce groundbreaking innovations, but for those looking for a reliable foldable with long-term software support and excellent AI capabilities, it’s a solid flagship option to consider.

OnePlus chose not to do a lot of camera upgrades this time around, so we're not really raving about it as a cameraphone. Don't get us wrong though - it remains a solid picture-taking device, with somewhat of a standout ultrawide. We'd have liked to see a closer-focusing telephoto - you'll need to look elsewhere for one of those. OP is also staying away from the display brightness race - but that's more of a blemish in the tests page than a real issue with the 13.

The 13 is, in fact, quite great on the fundamentals, offering some of the longest battery life in the class, together with speedy top-ups. No longer trailing in dust and water resistance, it's now as well-sealed as the rest, and it's even a step ahead in the build department thanks to its magnetic accessories capability.

Overall, the OnePlus 13 offers greatness all around, it’s just not as unmatched as we would have like for, especially in the camera department.

Some 11 years later, the OnePlus appeal is no longer in its bargain price. But that doesn't mean the 13 isn't a competitive package - quite the opposite. You should definitely have it on your short list.

The Find X series have returned with a properly impressive flagship smartphone – the Find X8 Pro. It offers a refreshed design with improved ingress protection, a top-notch Dolby Vision display, superb performance, an impressive camera system, and a large battery with nicely fast charging.

The Find X8 Pro's flaws are few, smallish, and of somewhat lesser importance than the things it's actually great at. Just because Oppo is choosing to stay away from a brightness competition, doesn't mean you'll be strapped for nits, and unless you absolutely must game above 60fps, you'll be perfectly fine with a Find. The camera system has a few imperfections in our experience, but you can expect that from the Pro when there's an Ultra on the way.

Those relatively minor things aside, the Find X8 Pro is a thoroughly competent all-round flagship smartphone. The super powerful chipset is about as good as they come, the battery life is towards the top of the class, the newly-standard next-level water sealing brings extra peace of mind, the camera key can't hurt. And there's the top-tier camera system that struck us as better than most at low-light video, while also being great in general.

The Find X8 Pro is available now and even if it is not available on every shelf, it is worth going through the hassle of getting it.