Just Sayin’

​Just Sayin’

The smartphone business is a tough one.  With hundreds of brands looking to catch a consumer’s eye and feature sets that grow longer with each new model, brands struggle to find something new and exciting each new model cycle.  Cameras were big a few years back, with phones having up to 6 cameras, but multiple cameras began to take up room needed for other components, so the fad moved from camera numbers to camera resolution, with current high-end phones in the 200MP resolution class.  To put that into perspective a 200MP camera has 16,384 x 12,288 pixels in a 1” x 1.2” package (18,369 Pixels per Inch).  But the challenge continues, as AI throws another variable into the smartphone mix.
It would seem that brands could be a bit wary about how AI will play out on mobile devices as it is quite difficult to tell whether the Ai flavor-of-the-month is pushing consumers to buy a new phone, so Samsung (005930.KS) has taken another track, and thin is in.  The just announced Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge is a mere 5.8mm thick, a 29.3% reduction from this year’s Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra flagship smartphone. Here are just a few of the gushingly positive comments the tech press has made about the just announced Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge, their newly designed ‘super thin’ smartphone.

• "Thinner than a credit card..." - The Economic Times
• "Samsung's Galaxy S25 Edge is already turning heads in the tech world...for its sheer thinness." - The Economic Times
• "The S25 Edge is one of Samsung's thinnest flagships to date." - Techloy
• "The Shockingly Thin Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge Feels Great to Hold..." - PCMag

But while ‘thin’ might be the new rallying cry for smartphone designs, thin has been around for a long time, and the 5.8mm thick Galaxy S25 Edge is barely a contender for thinnest.  The earliest ‘thin’ phone we could find was the Samsung U100 that was released in February of 2007, 18 years ago, while this baby was a fat 5.9mm thick, it was certainly the first that met our criteria of being under 6mm.  That said, the real winners are the pack of contenders at the Wegovy-like 5.1mm, a staggering 12% thinner than the new Samsung S25 Edge!  In fact all of the smartphones that were 5.1mm (the smallest we can find) were released 10 years ago in 2015, a period in time when there was less smartphone hardware, less heat generation, and smaller batteries to take up space inside the case.  5.1mm is 0.2” or a bit less than ¼ of an inch.
We are sure that the ‘thin’ trend will have some sustainability, at least until something else comes along, as Apple (AAPL) (see below) is expected to be releasing the iPhone 17 Air, a substitute for the iPhone Plus model, with the iPhone 17 Air rumored to be only 5.5mm thick.  If both Samsung and Apple follow the trend, almost all others will join until one of the three largest components, the battery, the display, and the camera modules hits a limit.  Batteries can be made thinner by increasing the length and width, which, in theory, should make it easier for the battery to dissipate heat, but at the same time the thinner phone allows less room for the thermal interface that transfers the battery heat to the frame of the phone, so it’s a tradeoff.  The display itself is quite thin but the connector that attaches the display to the internal circuit board is also a limiting factor, and lastly the camera module needs a certain amount of depth to operate properly, also a gating factor.
All in, while thin is in currently, we expect thin as a smartphone feature to run its course relatively quickly unless primary component producers are able to work dimensional magic without compromising performance.  There is also the feeling of holding the phone in your hand when you use it, which changes with thickness and weight, but in a device that must fit into a pocket, less is more.