2025’s Best Phones Were Also Its Wackiest

This was a amazingly amusive twelvemonth for smartphones. I wasn’t expecting it to be; the class is often described arsenic stale oregon “plateaued.” But arsenic WIRED’s nonmigratory telephone reviewer, I’ve tested astir each of this year’s handsets—devices arsenic inexpensive arsenic $130 each the mode to an eye-watering $2,000—and I don’t deliberation there’s been a twelvemonth filled with arsenic galore varied styles successful rather immoderate time.

It each started with the Nothing Phone (3a) series, which the UK institution launched astatine Mobile World Congress aboriginal successful the year. While I wasn’t a instrumentality of the Pro model’s top-heavy camera module, the electrical bluish Phone (3a) is simply a standout. It looks similar nary different smartphone connected the market, with a transparent backplate, a popular of colour from a tiny reddish square, and the company’s signature Glyph lights, which blink erstwhile you person notifications. Those LEDs whitethorn not beryllium the astir useful, but they’re amusive and wacky.

That whimsical plan has been sorely lacking for respective years. Remember 2020’s LG Wing? The five-camera Nokia 9 PureView from 2019? The weird Moto Mods of a decennary ago, which added things similar cameras and speakers to the Moto Z from Motorola? These phones whitethorn not person topped the charts, but they tried thing different.

Smartphones are a necessity successful today’s world, and similar each commodities, that means bully and playful designs are often sacrificed for the involvement of manufacturing efficiency. When companies pursuit the bottommost line, we extremity up with plain, simple-looking phones designed for the broadest imaginable audience. This is wherefore the caller displacement to devices with a small much quality feels significant.

Nothing had different triumph connected its hands this twelvemonth with the CMF Phone 2 Pro, a sub-$300 telephone that didn’t look oregon consciousness thing similar its fund price. Uniquely, you tin unscrew the backmost of the telephone and regenerate the backplate with 1 that’s a antithetic color, oregon instrumentality disconnected the Accessory Point module and connect things similar a lanyard. Sustainability-focused Fairphone had a akin thought with The Fairphone (Gen. 6), but this smartphone did each of that portion besides achieving a 10/10 repairability people from iFixit.

Next came Motorola, which has seen a batch of occurrence successful caller years with its Razr folding flip phones. With the 2025 Razr models, the institution leaned heavy into antithetic materials and textures. You could bargain a Razr with a backmost coated successful the microfiber textile Alcantara, vegan leather, oregon polished achromatic Gorilla Glass. There’s adjacent a mentation with Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood. It helps that Motorola remains 1 of the lone manufacturers offering a folding flip telephone nether $700. (It adjacent gets arsenic debased arsenic $600 during merchantability events.)

You whitethorn inactive beryllium hesitant to put successful 1 of these hinge-reliant handsets, fixed their spotty past with durability, but they are tougher than ever. I’ve dropped aggregate Razrs, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and adjacent the Galaxy Z Flip7 this year, and extracurricular of insignificant scuffs connected the frame, nary of them person cracked. Motorola introduced a titanium-reinforced hinge sheet this year. Google promises 10-plus years of folding for its latest Fold and has yet earned an IP68 standing for its folding design. Samsung says its Galaxy Z Fold7 tin withstand 500,000 folds, which pencils retired to much than a decennary of emblematic use.

We should expect much retired of however the gadgets successful our lives look and feel. As with a bully watch, I find that I genuinely bask utilizing devices that enactment a small much attraction oregon effort into plan and physique quality. This year, I was delighted by the sharp-looking Light Phone III—the anti-smartphone that doesn’t tally accepted apps—whereas the Minimal Phone, which is built with the aforesaid extremity of helping trim clip spent staring astatine a screen, had a plasticky physique that felt off-putting. Even with each of this experimentation successful form, you don’t person to walk hundreds and hundreds of dollars connected a good-looking phone. Motorola’s Moto G Stylus 5G has a striking plan with a beauteous leather-like texture, and it’s often connected merchantability for $300.

Thin, arsenic always, was besides precise overmuch in. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge and the iPhone Air whitethorn not beryllium archetypal ideas, but I kid you not, holding an ultrathin and lightweight telephone is really beauteous dang awesome. Unfortunately—and unsurprisingly—Samsung’s plan suffered from lackluster artillery life, and portion the iPhone Air delivered better-than-expected tally times, its azygous camera strategy and precocious terms didn’t precisely shriek bully worth successful an economically tumultuous year. (These flaws apt explicate the rumors that suggest Samsung has canceled plans for a successor to its thinnest handset and that Apple has been weathering lackluster income of the Air.)

But we’ve already seen the benefits of thinner phones. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold7 is 1 of the champion folding phones of the year, successful ample portion owed to the monolithic simplification successful size and value implicit its predecessors. Apple is besides rumored to beryllium moving connected a folding iPhone, and the learnings from the iPhone Air would spell a agelong mode successful making a instrumentality that’s not cumbersome to hold.