MKBHD Reveals 2025 Smartphone Winners: From Best Camera to Best Battery Life

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Ahmad Ali Karim, https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

iPhone 17 Pro

Marques Brownlee, a popular tech blogger has listed the best smartphones of 2025 in a video published on his YouTube channel. The well-known creator, whose channel has 20.6 million subscribers, named the iPhone 17 as the best phone of the year. He explained his choice by noting that Apple finally produced a strong entry-level model featuring a 120-hertz display, 256 gigabytes of base storage, and a front-facing camera with a larger sensor.

Best Smartphones Across Categories

The best large smartphone, according to the blogger, is the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max, while the best compact device is the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7. Brownlee ranked the Oppo Find X9 Pro as the phone with the best camera, the CMF Phone 2 Pro as the top value pick, and the OnePlus 15 as the leader in battery life.

He also named the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 as the best foldable smartphone of 2025. A special design award went to the ultra-thin iPhone Air. Brownlee called the iPhone 16e the biggest failure of the year, describing it as a compromised device sold at a high price of 599 dollars, or roughly 46,000 rubles. He added that the device he personally used most over the past 12 months was the OnePlus Open.

Innovation, Bold Designs, and New Battery Technology

The blogger concluded that smartphone manufacturers in 2025 were unafraid to experiment and successfully introduced devices with significantly improved battery life thanks to silicon-carbon battery technology.

Looking Back at Last Year’s Winner

A year earlier, Marques Brownlee named the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra the best smartphone of 2024. It also won in the category of best large smartphone.