C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
Slim is in, or so smartphone makers would like you to believe this year. Two of the biggest phone players, Samsung and Apple, are rumored to be working on ‘Slim’ variants of their flagships, the Galaxy S25 Slim and the iPhone 17 Slim. Even beyond the ‘Slim’ moniker, we’re seeing many smartphones routinely chase thinness as an aesthetic design choice. But the elusive question remains: Do you, as a consumer, really care about your phone’s thickness?
Do you care about smartphone thinness?
5 votes
Let’s be clear: smartphone makers have chased thinness on smartphones for decades, so it’s not a new phenomenon. The OPPO R5 from 2015 was razor-thin at just 4.85mm, making it the thinnest smartphone of modern times. As you’d expect, the thinness came at a cost, and the cost here was the battery that was just 2,000mAh on this phone that barely lasted for half a day before giving up.
Thankfully, smartphone makers settled on a middle ground, with most phones resting somewhere between 7 and 10 mm thick. We’d occasionally get outliers on either side, but phones largely prioritized a healthy balance between battery life and user experience rather than racing to the bottom of the thickness charts.
Then came along foldables, challenging the median thickness with their folded states. The first Galaxy Fold was Thick, measuring a bulky 15.5mm in its folded state. A side effect of the bulk was that it was also heavy at 276g. As a result, handling the phone as a daily driver was rather cumbersome once the novelty of the folding form factor faded away.
More recently, we’ve seen foldables approach thinner form factors, but it makes much more sense for them. The holy grail of folding smartphones will be just about the same thickness in its folded state as a normal smartphone, and we’re certainly getting there.
Phones like the HONOR Magic V3, which goes down to 9.3mm thickness in its folded state and just 4.4mm in its unfolded state, make it thinner than even the razor-thin OPPO R5. We’re also hearing rumors about the upcoming OPPO Find N5/OnePlus Open 2, which could be just as thick in its unfolded state as the USB-C port.
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
Galaxy S24 Ultra (left) vs HONOR Magic V3 (right)
With the Galaxy S25 Slim and the iPhone 17 Slim, we expect the industry to move forward on the path to thinness, for better or worse. The Galaxy S25 Slim is said to be 6mm thin, compared to the Galaxy S24’s 7.6mm thickness, whereas the iPhone 17 Slim is said to be 5.5mm/6.25mm thin (depending on which rumor you believe), compared to the iPhone 16’s 7.8mm thickness.
Such thin form factor devices will obviously sacrifice many specifications, including, but not limited to, battery capacity and camera tech. The result could be a thin glass slab of mediocrity and disappointment, and you can expect almost every Android smartphone maker to follow the same path. There’s a glimmer of hope with silicon-carbon battery tech for denser battery capacity, but we’d still be staring at a compromised camera experience.
So, we ask you, do you care about smartphone thinness? Are you okay with spec trade-offs for a thinner smartphone? Or do you want a thicker smartphone with even more battery? Or do you prefer the current thickness on smartphones, potentially coupled with newer, denser battery tech for better battery life? Are you willing to buy a ‘Slim’ smartphone with thinness as its highlight and gimped specifications? Let us know in the comments below!
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