After finishing the review of the Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus, I started testing the Samsung Galaxy A25, which costs a third as much, and the most striking thing is how similar the user experience is in most respects. So not what I measure in performance tests or what the specifications say, but in actual user experience.
It's not really because the gap between mid-price and top model has shrunk in specifications, or at least not only. For example, the gap in performance between top-end and mid-range chipsets has grown rather than shrunk in recent years. But the cheaper chipsets have reached a “good enough” level at the same time that the difference between super fast and even faster is becoming increasingly difficult to perceive. The Galaxy A25 itself actually feels a bit tough, as it has a two-year-old chipset, but there are plenty of options in this price range with newer processors where you rarely notice that there is not a top chipset in the mobile phone.
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We have had the biggest improvement in the screens for mid-priced mobile phones. When you get an OLED screen with nice color reproduction, 120 Hz refresh and high maximum brightness, you have to study the resolution in detail or take the phone out into blinding sunlight to notice the difference between the top model and the mid-range.
After finishing the review of the Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus, I started testing the Samsung Galaxy A25, which costs a third as much, and the most striking thing is how similar the user experience is in most respects. So not what I measure in performance tests or what the specifications say, but in actual user experience.
It's not really because the gap between mid-price and top model has shrunk in specifications, or at least not only. For example, the gap in performance between top-end and mid-range chipsets has grown rather than shrunk in recent years. But the cheaper chipsets have reached a “good enough” level at the same time that the difference between super fast and even faster is becoming increasingly difficult to perceive. The Galaxy A25 itself actually feels a bit tough, as it has a two-year-old chipset, but there are plenty of options in this price range with newer processors where you rarely notice that there is not a top chipset in the mobile phone.
We have had the biggest improvement in the screens for mid-priced mobile phones. When you get an OLED screen with nice color reproduction, 120 Hz refresh and high maximum brightness, you have to study the resolution in detail or take the phone out into blinding sunlight to notice the difference between the top model and the mid-range.
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Most of the benefits the top models have are increasingly looking like expensive luxuries, if you just literally have to have a titanium frame and glass back, or a screen that's fully legible in the Sahara desert, or zero lag when opening apps.
I can really only think of two reasons for actually needing a top model, as opposed to wanting one. Partly for the camera, or really specifically telephoto photography and extreme darkness photography, because in most cases the main camera performs equally in daylight for top models and mid-priced models. But the zoom camera is almost always selected in the cheaper mobiles, and if it is, it is rarely as good as in the more expensive ones.
The second reason is that you want a compact mobile phone. There it is the iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S or perhaps the Asus Zenfone that applies. It is unclear why this is so. You might think that building a compact model is simply technically demanding, but on the other hand, the most demanding thing should be the cooling of the new top-of-the-line chipset, which requires graphene sheets and vapor cooling chambers, while the chipset of mid-range phones generates significantly less heat.
Even if you need a top model for any of the reasons above, does it have to be the latest? When we compared an iPhone 15 with a four-year-old iPhone 11, we could state that yes, indeed, the difference in performance and camera was measurable, but they were still on the margin, and again more character of luxury or something really needed.
The increasingly higher computing capacity in the processors seems to be something that manufacturers have a hard time figuring out what to use it for, and in recent years it has mainly gone to image enhancement. This year, Samsung is betting that generative AI in the form of, among other things, real-time translation of text and speech will be the reason why you really need a phone of the new generation.
I'm not entirely convinced.