Every year, tech YouTube icon Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) announces his highly anticipated Smartphone Awards, recognizing the year’s best devices across multiple categories. With over 19 million subscribers watching his verdict, these awards have become one of the most influential voices in consumer tech. And in 2025, MKBHD’s picks delivered some truly shocking results.
Even in a world buzzing with new AI devices, smart glasses, and XR headsets, the smartphone remains the undisputed center of our personal computing lives. The industry waits eagerly each year to see which devices will take home top honors in MKBHD’s awards—a tradition that typically reinforces the status quo.
But the 2025 Smartphone Awards were different. This was the year that long-held assumptions were shattered and conventional wisdom was turned on its head. From the very definition of a “small” phone to the undisputed king of cameras, the results delivered a series of truly unexpected verdicts. Here are the four biggest takeaways that show how the smartphone world is changing.
The Best “Small” Phone Is Now a Giant Foldable
For years, users have lamented the decline of the true small flagship phone. The category has shrunk so dramatically that after the sub-six-inch screen went extinct last year, even the 6.1-inch standard has become rare. With traditional “slab” phone manufacturers failing to serve this market, MKBHD made a bold statement: if you can’t make a small phone, at least try to make a phone feel smaller. That’s what made this year’s winner so surprising: the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 7.
This verdict is counter-intuitive. When unfolded, the Flip 7 is a massive 6.9-inch phone. However, its innovation as a “small phone” lies in its groundbreaking usability when closed. The highly functional 4.1-inch cover screen allows users to manage notifications, reply to texts, and handle essential tasks without ever needing to open the device. This design encourages focused interaction, preventing the mindless “doom scrolling” that full-screen phones enable, and in doing so, effectively redefines what it means to be a useful, compact device in 2025.
As MKBHD put it, it’s the perfect amount of usefulness as a small phone, with a full-size smartphone always available underneath when you need it.
A New Battery Tech Just Changed the Game
After years of incremental gains, 2025 was the year that smartphone batteries finally took a meaningful leap forward, all thanks to the arrival of new silicon carbon technology. This advancement has created a stark divide in the market, resulting in what can only be described as a bimodal distribution of battery life.
On one side, you have phones like the OnePlus 15, which has adopted the new tech to pack in massive 7,000-8,000mAh batteries. On the other, you have major players like Apple and Samsung, whose devices remain capped around 5,500mAh. The winner of MKBHD’s Best Battery award, the OnePlus 15, perfectly illustrates this new gap. With its 7,300mAh silicon carbon battery, it delivered a staggering three full days of real-world use. This isn’t just about endurance—it’s a total package win, complete with ultra-fast 120-watt wired and 50-watt wireless charging that makes the entire battery experience feel years ahead of the competition. This performance gap sets an entirely new bar and puts immense pressure on the rest of the industry to catch up in 2026.
The iPhone Is No Longer the Undisputed Camera Champion
In any given year, the conversation around the best smartphone camera almost inevitably gravitates toward one brand. The expectation is that, when all is said and done, the latest iPhone will come out on top. This year, that expectation was dramatically upended.
MKBHD’s 2025 camera winner? The Oppo Find X9 Pro.
The Oppo Find X9 Pro secured the photography crown through a powerful and well-rounded approach. It combined excellent fundamentals—delivering consistently great sharpness, dynamic range, and color—with a class-leading 200MP telephoto camera for incredible zoom shots. Oppo then layered on genuinely useful features, including a true color sensor for accuracy in difficult lighting, the ability to capture full 50-megapixel shots in good lighting (a rarity in a world of pixel-binning), and a unique Hasselblad telephoto attachment lens that mounts to a special case. While the iPhone 17 Pro remains the undisputed king of video, the fact that another brand has so decisively claimed the overall still photography title is a landmark shift in the mobile camera landscape.
The Year’s Most Valuable Player Isn’t a “Pro” Model
The final award of the year, the MVP, isn’t necessarily for the phone with the most impressive spec sheet. Instead, it recognizes the device with the most important “story” of the year—the one that best represents a significant market shift. In 2025, MKBHD gave that honor to the base model iPhone 17.
For years, the standard iPhone felt like a compromised placeholder, designed to push customers toward more expensive “Pro” models. This year, Apple changed the narrative by finally giving its entry-level flagship the upgrades it deserved. It added a high refresh rate 120Hz display—the first time this “Pro”-labeled feature has ever come to a non-Pro iPhone. On top of that, Apple doubled the base storage and included a massively upgraded selfie camera. Crucially, it did all this while keeping the price the same. This move transformed the iPhone 17 from a phone that was merely “fine” into a complete phone and, for the first time in a long time, the easiest one to recommend in Apple’s entire lineup. That’s the biggest story of the year.
Conclusion: A New Era of Expectations
The theme of MKBHD’s 2025 Smartphone Awards was clear: the old rules no longer apply. Assumptions about form factors, battery life, and the camera hierarchy were systematically broken down. We saw the definition of a “small phone” evolve, a new technology create a clear divide in performance, and a new champion crowned in mobile photography. This year proved that innovation can still come from unexpected places, resetting expectations for what a smartphone can and should be.
As new technologies create clear divides in performance and design prioritizes feeling over features, what long-held belief about smartphones do you think will be the next to fall?
What do you think of MKBHD’s 2025 picks? Share your thoughts in the comments below or connect with us on social media @techarizma.
