It's easy to think that the best phones in 2025 are growing stale. The product category has matured over the past two decades, and many updates are incremental. For instance, the newest Samsung Galaxy S25 series looks like the Galaxy S24 lineup with a few tweaks. Similar things can be said about the latest iPhones and newest Pixels, to a lesser degree.
In fact, Android Central's resident phone expert, Nicholas Sutrich, previewed the market for smartphones in 2025 at the end of last year with an outlook that could be described as depressing. He's right. For most phone buyers in North America, this year will be just like the last one — filled with incremental updates, rising prices, and little variety.
