The year 2025 took smartphones to another level of sheer, raw power. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset not only managed to compete with the long-standing performance king in the face of Apple's A-series silicon but even overthrew it in some cases.
What's even more surprising and impressive is that the heavyweight champions in the performance category are not your usual suspects. The top 3 most powerful phones of 2025, according to our own lab tests, all come from China.
The top 3 most powerful phones of 2025. | Image by PhoneArena
The top spot is occupied by the RedMagic 11 Pro. It's a beast of a phone, scoring 11,638 points in the Geekbench 6 multicore test, the highest result any phone has managed so far. The secret behind this result is the alien-looking liquid-cooling system on the phone that allows the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 Elite to run cooler and faster.
The second place belongs to the Nubia Z80 Ultra, the Geekbench single score of this phone ties with the iPhone 17 Pro Max, but the multicore result blows Apple's flagship out of the water. Third place goes to the much more popular and even available in the States OnePlus 15.
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The latest OnePlus flagship comes with a sophisticated vapor chamber cooling system, which shows in the raw synthetic benchmarks, again beating all the latest Apple flagship phones when it comes to multicore CPU performance.
The most impactful phones of 2025 aren't the most powerful. | Image by PhoneArena"
Raw power is not always the most important thing, however, and we have two popular models from the big duo which made ripples in the smartphone world in 2025. Those two are the iPhone 17 Pro Max and the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7. The former shapeshifted into a new design and brought the Liquid Glass interface, while the latter showed that Samsung can catch up with foldables from the Far East.
Mariyan, a tech enthusiast with a background in Nuclear Physics and Journalism, brings a unique perspective to PhoneArena. His childhood curiosity for gadgets evolved into a professional passion for technology, leading him to the role of Editor-in-Chief at PCWorld Bulgaria before joining PhoneArena. Mariyan's interests range from mainstream Android and iPhone debates to fringe technologies like graphene batteries and nanotechnology. Off-duty, he enjoys playing his electric guitar, practicing Japanese, and revisiting his love for video games and Haruki Murakami's works.
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