Fast Charge: Chinese brands are jumping the gun on the 2025 smartphone race

OPINION: There’s usually a bit of a lull in the smartphone market at this time of year, with few big smartphones announced this close to Christmas and the end of the year.?

Instead, the consensus among most smartphone manufacturers seems to be to wait until the new year to introduce their new offerings packing the latest processors from MediaTek and Qualcomm, this year in the form of the MediaTek Dimensity 9400 and Snapdragon 8 Elite.?

Someone must’ve forgotten to pass the memo on to Chinese manufacturers like Xiaomi, Honor, Oppo and OnePlus, however; the four manufacturers have broken the mould by launching next-gen flagship smartphones in the past week.

2025 phones…arriving now

That includes the much-anticipated Xiaomi 15 and Honor Magic 7 series’ teased at this year’s Snapdragon Summit, along with the Oppo Find X8 collection teased at the Dimensity 9400 reveal and even the latest OnePlus flagship, the OnePlus 13.

Now, try not to get too excited here; the releases in question are all China-only, meaning we likely won’t be seeing the latest Honor or Xiaomi flagships in the UK or European markets before the end of the year, but they do provide us with our first official look at some of the flagship tech we’ll be enjoying in 2025 – and they look pretty damn impressive.?

In fact, there are a few trends among the first few 2025 flagships.?

The most immediately notable is parity in megapixel count across the rear lenses, with the Xiaomi 15 range, Oppo Find X8 range and OnePlus 13 all offering a trio of 50MP rear lenses across their primary, ultrawide and telephoto lenses. This should hopefully reduce the difference in quality between the differing lenses, making it less obvious when switching between them.?

There’s also what looks to be a massive push in the display department to close the gap between the best Android phones and the premium screen experience on offer from Apple’s top-end iPhone 16 Pro Max.?

In fact, both the Xiaomi 13 Pro and Oppo Find X8 claim to have slimmer bezels than Apple’s top-end iPhone at 1.38mm and 1.45mm respectively.?

2025 may also be the year that we break the 5000mAh battery barrier; while we’ve seen a few in 2024 go over that mark, including the 5600mAh Honor Magic 6 Pro and the 6500mAh RedMagic 9S Pro, it’s still pretty rare.?

However, with the Xiaomi 15 Pro offering a 6100mAh cell, the Magic 7 Pro clocking in at 5750mAh and the OnePlus 13 offering a whopping 6000mAh, it looks like we’ll be seeing a big boost to battery life on smartphones across the board in the coming months.?

That should be especially true when paired with either the Dimensity 9400 or Snapdragon 8 Elite, with both chipset manufacturers claiming a massive boost to power efficiency compared to previous flagship chipsets.?

All about the performance

It’s not just about efficiency either; 2025 flagship smartphones should be way more powerful.?

MediaTek claims that the Dimensity 9400 can hit scores of 9600 in Geekbench 6’s multi-core test, while I saw results of 10,601 from the Snapdragon 8 Elite when I benchmarked a reference device recently. These are both impressive scores that leave the A18 Pro within the iPhone 16 Pro Max in the dust with scores of 8167.?

For reference, the Xiaomi 15 collection, Honor Magic 7 collection and OnePlus 13 all sport the Snapdragon 8 Elite, while the Oppo Find X8 series packs MediaTek’s Dimensity 9400, and all come with at least 12GB of RAM to play with, so expect rapid speeds across the board once these devices start appearing in the Western market.?

The real question is, when will that be? Well, where Oppo is concerned, we might not be waiting all that long. The brand confirmed recently that the Oppo Find X8 collection is indeed headed to the UK, Europe and other regions following its China reveal – it’s just a question of when.

The other three manufacturers – OnePlus, Xiaomi and Honor –? have all stayed relatively quiet on when we’ll be seeing their latest flagship devices overseas, but we can look back at their 2024 release schedules to get some idea.

The year started with the release of the OnePlus 12 and OnePlus 12R at an event that took place on 23 January 2024, while both the Xiaomi 14 and Honor Magic 6 Pro launched at MWC on 25 February 2024.?

Unless the manufacturers want to deviate from those dates this year, it suggests we’ll be seeing the OnePlus 13 in January 2025, followed by the Xiaomi 15 and Honor Magic 6 Pro at MWC 2025, scheduled to kick off on 3 March.?

Given the impressive tech we’ve seen from these first few 2025 flagships, it’s gearing up to be an exciting year in the smartphone market.