Samsung Galaxy A25 review

Design

As mentioned, Samsung didn't introduce radical changes to the phone's overall design. The middle frame does have a distinctive sculpted shape in this generation, which is by far the easiest way to tell the Galaxy A25 apart from, say, the Galaxy A24.

We find the new frame nicer to touch and better in in-hand feel and handling than the previous design. The difference isn't huge, though.

Other than that, you still get the familiar triple vertical camera cluster on the back, without any discernable camera island or "area" of any sort. The back panel itself is perfectly flat.

The same goes for the front side with a flat glass piece covering it. The display bezels are still on the larger end and give away the budget nature of the device. The round teardrop notch for the selfie camera is also something we tend to associate with Samsung's lower-end offerings.

The Galaxy A25 is available in a total of four colors. There is the eye-catching Personality Yellow variant, which we have for review, but there are also more subdued options: Brave Black, Fantasy Blue, and an Optimistic Blue.

The back panel has a very fine pattern to it. Something akin to very fine checkers. You can't actually feel the pattern, though, since it is not on the top surface and it is hardly visible from a distance. It is very subtle.

Build quality

The Galaxy A25 is mostly made of plastic. This includes both the back panel and the middle frame. Both look great and also feel great to the touch.

We have sung praises to plastic as a phone-building material in the past and will continue to do so. It doesn't quite scratch or dent like metal and doesn't shatter quite like glass, either.

While the Galaxy A25 is definitely closer than ever to the Galaxy A3X line, proper ingress protection rating is still not a thing on the Galaxy A25.

There is no apparent gasket on the SIM tray, which you sometimes see on devices, even without a formal IP rating. We recommend against submerging the A25. By the way, the SIM tray is a hybrid affair. It holds two Nano-SIM cards, or one can be swapped out for a microSD memory card.

Handling and controls

We found the Galaxy A25 fits snugly in the palm. It is not particularly slippery and offers a good grip. Neither the back nor the frame shows fingerprints. The 6.5-inch display is fairly large but still manageable in one-hand operation. This reviewer does have fairly large hands, though.

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about the control set and layout of the Galaxy A25. Well, perhaps aside from the fact that the fingerprint reader is side-mounted instead of in-display. That is another small bit that Samsung still reserves for the Galaxy A3X line.

On the plus side, the capacitive side-mounted reader works very well - it is perfectly accurate and pretty snappy.

Speaking of the Galaxy A3X line and the A34 in particular, it does lack a 3.5mm audio jack. The Galaxy A25 does still get one.

It sits right beside the Type-C port and the bottom-firing speaker on the bottom side of the device.

Speaking of speakers, the A25 does get a stereo speaker setup. More on that later.