Samsung Galaxy S25 FE review

Familiar 6.7-inch AMOLED

The display on the Galaxy S25 FE remains unchanged size-wise. Even though Samsung doesn't explicitly say it's an LTPO panel, it behaves like one, supporting refresh rates outside the standard 60-120Hz range. We go into more detail in the Refresh rate section..

It's a 6.7-inch AMOLED panel with 1080 x 2340px resolution, supporting 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+. Yes, that means the phone plays well with streaming services like Netflix and can serve HDR10 content. There is no Dolby Vision certification, which comes as no surprise as no Galaxy phone has ever had one.

Android Ultra HDR is supported, so photos with the appropriate metadata for Google's universal HDR standard will look punchier in the default gallery app.

In our brightness tests, the display performed as expected, deviating slightly from its peers like the Galaxy S25+ and the S24 FE. In Manual mode, the screen reached 435 nits, while in Auto mode, we measured up to 1,247 nits - enough for comfortable outdoor use even on a bright sunny day.

Refresh rate

As before, the Display settings give you two refresh rate modes - Adaptive and Standard. Despite their distinguishable names, however, both modes are indeed adaptive. It's just that the Standard mode caps the refresh rate at 60Hz, but some videos will bring down the refresh rate to 30Hz.

The Adaptive mode is the default one and offers a wide range of refresh rates.

The screen drops to 1Hz for static content, no matter the mode, and will boost up to 120Hz when browsing, working with most apps and HRR-compatible games.

Battery life

The Galaxy S25 FE draws power from a 4,900 mAh battery, a slight increase over the 4,700 mAh cell in the Galaxy S24 FE.

In our battery tests, the S25 FE achieved a 11:57 Active Use Score, which is about the same as last year's Fan Edition.

Compared to the competition, the S25 FE has shorter battery life in general, but the video streaming runtime and gaming are generally okay. The web browsing score is what keeps the S25 FE from achieving a higher score.

Update, 22 Sept: With a bit more digging, we have been able to pinpoint the reason for lower-than-expected call test runtimes on the new Galaxy S25 FE. It was due to excessive location polling by our test automation software, which only affected the call test under Android 16. We retested the S25 FE with the fix applied, and the Call runtime increased from 24:08h to 30:02h. The location polling did not affect any of the other test scores, so they remain unchanged.

Charging speed

The new Galaxy S25 FE offers a modest upgrade in fast charging and is now rated at 45W, up from 25W last year. However, in our charging test, the Galaxy S25 FE did not charge any faster. If there was any difference, it was marginal at best. We were unable even to reach the charging speeds advertised by Samsung (they claim it should charge as fast as the S25+).

Even though we performed multiple tests with a genuine 45W Samsung adapter and 5A cable, which have served us quite well so far, the S25 FE never charged with a power higher than 28W.

So, for all intents and purposes, the Galaxy S25 FE's charging appears to be as slow as the Galaxy S24 FE's, which was rated at 25W. It's a puzzling situation for sure, and we'll definitely conduct more tests with possibly other adapters as well. We'll update this section accordingly.

In case you want to take extra measures to mitigate the battery aging to some extent, One UI has a few handy tools like disabling fast charging or limiting charging to 80, 85 or 90% but nothing smarter than that.

Speakers

The S25 FE carries a set of hybrid stereo speakers, meaning it has one full-fledged speaker at the bottom and another one that doubles as an earpiece at the top. Naturally, the one at the top sounds a tad quieter than the bottom one.

In our tests, the speakers achieved a "Very Good" loudness score of -25.6 LUFS, which is a tad quieter than last year's S24 FE, but better tuned in our opinion. It looks like Samsung tuned or replaced the new Fan Edition's speakers, which now sound fuller, with more pronounced bass and cleaner vocals, too. The S25 FE is now more competitive in this regard, compared to its direct rivals.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.