I reviewed the most insane phones of 2025 — These features still shock me
2025 was a great year for smartphones! Crazy liquid-cooled phones, waffle thin devices, tri-folds, phones with a built-in subwoofer, huge batteries, we’ve had it all!
This article may contain personal views and opinion from the author.
2025 was a great year for smartphones! Crazy liquid-cooled phones, waffle thin devices, tri-folds, phones with a built-in subwoofer, huge batteries, we’ve had it all!
While some people were complaining about the lack of innovation in the smartphone industry, I got to review some of the craziest smartphones I've seen for quite a while.
This is my personal list of the most innovative and interesting features I tested in 2025. Some cool phones went to my colleagues, so if you find glaring omissions, don't start throwing stones right away. I would've liked to lay my hand on Huawei's tri-fold, but still, I can't complain—there were cool gadgets on my desk too. Let's get to it.
The first phone with liquid cooling
If I have to give awards here, the first place would go to the RedMagic 11 Pro. Not only does this phone come with a dedicated liquid cooling system, but it's designed in such a way that it looks super cool.
The transparent back exposes the blue, server-grade liquid coolant, and the first time I saw it circulating, I thought I was looking at an animation on a display! Making the phone completely flat and sticking a transparent glass wasn't enough for RedMagic—there had to be an alien-looking cooling system as well.
Now, I still have my doubts about the actual cooling effect this system provides, as the volume of the liquid is tiny, as well as the contact surface it passes on. Speaking of which, it actually touches a heat conductive plate that's cooled by the 24,000 RPM active fan.
The design is absolutely legit in principle, and the RedMagic 11 Pro recorded the highest synthetic benchmark scores of all Android phones we've tested so far, so the system must be helping in some way.
The RedMagic 11 Pro also features a unique design with an under-display front camera and one of the biggest batteries in a smartphone. It's the coolest-looking phone of 2025, at least for me. Good job, RedMagic!
Thin, thinner, thinnest
Ah, the new technological arms race—who can make the thinnest phone ever? I'm not a fan of the idea, to say the least, but the iPhone Air review was commissioned to me thanks to the random generator gods.
And on paper, it's a terrible device—a small battery, just a single camera, too expensive for what it is, minus one GPU core and some performance limitations due to the thin design.
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Yeah, all the aforementioned drawbacks are legit, but holding the iPhone Air in your hand, the feeling is quite exhilarating. Not that it's the lightest phone out there, but at 6.5 inches and 5.6 mm thickness, that weight is distributed in a way that the phone feels paperweight-like in your hand.
The iPhone Air may be a flawed product, and its future may be in peril, but if I were to give a design award to one phone in 2025, it would've gotten it easily.
The subwoofer phone sounds awesome, not only on paper
There's a dedicated bass speaker on the back of the Poco F8 Ultra | Image by PhoneArena
The top three is completed by the Poco F8 Ultra and its BOSE subwoofer system. Poco started its life as a budget brand, but now it's morphing into the skunkworks department of Xiaomi.
A quick sidenote here. Nubia showed a phone with a big loudspeaker back in February during MWC in Barcelona. The Nubia Music was a quirky-looking phone and very loud, but the quality of the speaker wasn't very good, and I never got to review a unit; I just did a quick hands-on.
The Poco F8 Ultra did this right; the 16 by 20 mm speaker next to the camera system on the back sounds amazing. Splitting the frequencies between the main 11 by 15 mm stereo speakers and the big tablet speaker on the back effectively creates a 2.1 stereo system with a dedicated subwoofer to tackle the bass.
Putting the bass speaker on the back also makes sense, as low frequencies connect with the surface the phone's placed on, and the bass sounds even bigger.
There are drawbacks, of course. This dedicated bass speaker draws a lot of power and can halve the battery life of the phone, especially on max volume. But in terms of innovation and execution, the Poco F8 Ultra wins my imaginary "best audio" award.
The craziest smartphones are yet to come!
Expect more crazy phones in 2026!
So there you have it. This short list reflects my experience with the craziest phones of 2025. You might've gotten your hand on an even crazier device or just saw one out in the wild.
I’m pretty optimistic about the smartphone future! Expect more quirky-looking, even crazier devices in 2026. I think tri-folds will bloom next year, thanks to Samsung’s latest entry in that category, and also we will probably start getting 10 000 mAh battery phones! What a time to be alive!
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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