This was a surprisingly fun year for smartphones. I wasn’t expecting it to be; the category is often described as stale or “plateaued.” But as WIRED’s resident phone reviewer, I’ve tested nearly all of this year’s handsets—devices as cheap as $130 all the way to an eye-watering $2,000—and I don’t think there’s been a year filled with as many varied styles in quite some time.
It all started with the Nothing Phone (3a) series, which the UK company launched at Mobile World Congress early in the year. While I wasn’t a fan of the Pro model’s top-heavy camera module, the electric blue Phone (3a) is a standout. It looks like no other smartphone on the market, with a transparent backplate, a pop of color from a small red square, and the company’s signature Glyph lights, which blink when you receive notifications. Those LEDs may not be the most useful, but they’re fun and wacky.
That whimsical design has been sorely lacking for several years. Remember 2020’s LG Wing? The five-camera Nokia 9 PureView from 2019? The weird Moto Mods of a decade ago, which added things like cameras and speakers to the Moto Z from Motorola? These phones may not have topped the charts, but they tried something different.
Smartphones are a necessity in today’s world, and like all commodities, that means good and playful designs are often sacrificed for the sake of manufacturing efficiency. When companies chase the bottom line, we end up with plain, simple-looking phones designed for the broadest possible audience. This is why the recent shift to devices with a little more character feels significant.
Nothing had another win on its hands this year with the CMF Phone 2 Pro, a sub-$300 phone that didn’t look or feel anything like its budget price. Uniquely, you can unscrew the back of the phone and replace the backplate with one that’s a different color, or take off the Accessory Point module and attach things like a lanyard. Sustainability-focused Fairphone had a similar idea with The Fairphone (Gen. 6), except this smartphone did all of that while also achieving a 10/10 repairability score from iFixit.
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Next came Motorola, which has seen a lot of success in recent years with its Razr folding flip phones. With the 2025 Razr models, the company leaned heavily into different materials and textures. You could buy a Razr with a back coated in the microfiber textile Alcantara, vegan leather, or polished black Gorilla Glass. There’s even a version with Forest Stewardship Council-certified wood. It helps that Motorola remains one of the only manufacturers offering a folding flip phone under $700. (It even gets as low as $600 during sale events.)
You may still be hesitant to invest in one of these hinge-reliant handsets, given their spotty history with durability, but they are tougher than ever. I’ve dropped multiple Razrs, the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, and even the Galaxy Z Flip7 this year, and outside of minor scuffs on the frame, none of them have cracked. Motorola introduced a titanium-reinforced hinge plate this year. Google promises 10-plus years of folding for its latest Fold and has finally earned an IP68 rating for its folding design. Samsung says its Galaxy Z Fold7 can withstand 500,000 folds, which pencils out to more than a decade of typical use.
We should expect more out of how the gadgets in our lives look and feel. As with a good watch, I find that I genuinely enjoy using devices that put a little more care or effort into design and build quality. This year, I was delighted by the sharp-looking Light Phone III—the anti-smartphone that doesn’t run traditional apps—whereas the Minimal Phone, which is built with the same goal of helping reduce time spent staring at a screen, had a plasticky build that felt off-putting. Even with all of this experimentation in form, you don’t have to spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars on a good-looking phone. Motorola’s Moto G Stylus 5G has a striking design with a lovely leather-like texture, and it’s frequently on sale for $300.
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Thin, as always, was also very much in. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge and the iPhone Air may not be original ideas, but I kid you not, holding an ultrathin and lightweight phone is actually pretty dang awesome. Unfortunately—and unsurprisingly—Samsung’s design suffered from lackluster battery life, and while the iPhone Air delivered better-than-expected run times, its single camera system and high price didn’t exactly scream good value in an economically tumultuous year. (These flaws likely explain the rumors that suggest Samsung has canceled plans for a successor to its thinnest handset and that Apple has been weathering lackluster sales of the Air.)
But we’ve already seen the benefits of thinner phones. Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold7 is one of the best folding phones of the year, in large part due to the massive reduction in size and weight over its predecessors. Apple is also rumored to be working on a folding iPhone, and the learnings from the iPhone Air would go a long way in making a device that’s not cumbersome to hold.
