Leaps in consumer tech from 2025
These innovations of 2025 solved real user pain points like screen size limitations, performance vs, portability trade-offs, and ease of access.
2025 delivered transformative leaps in consumer tech, with foldable smartphones achieving mainstream adoption and AI integration becoming ubiquitous across devices. Gaming handhelds have exploded in popularity, and virtual reality headsets like Meta's Quest series dominated the market due to affordable pricing.
These innovations solved real user pain points like screen size limitations, performance vs, portability trade-offs, and ease of access. These advancements ended up driving category-defining sales growth for numerous devices across the board.
Fold it once and fold it again
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The introduction of Samsung's Galaxy Z Tri-Fold was certainly a head turner for many. Although it is not the first trifold to be commercially produced, the credit goes to Huawei with their Huawei Mate XT, but it shows that a tech giant like Samsung is confident enough to push the foldable smartphone market to the very edge.
Besides the trifold, this year finally saw foldables take a proper hold in the consumer market with the introduction of Samsung's Z Fold 7. With a robust battery life, a good set of cameras, and a cover screen that doesn't force you to use the inner wide screen for tasks other than entertainment, Samsung has finally found a way to place their foldables into the consumer's hands without them asking the question, "Which screen should I use again?". Solving the portability vs. productivity trade-off was the main reason why the market finally leaned towards buying Samsung's foldables, as this was the main boost that allowed Samsung to sell 250,000 units in Europe alone within the first 4 weeks of launch.
Portable Gaming Part 2: Electric Boogaloo
Growing up in the PSP era had been a memorable experience for everyone, whether or not you owned one, everything about the PSP attracted gamers and non-gamers alike. The small form-factor, the portability, and the vast library of available games made it one of the most popular gaming consoles to ever hit the consumer market. But the era of the PSP is long gone, and even Sony's own successor, the PS Vita, couldn't replicate the success in the portable gaming market. Although numerous third party manufacturers and Nintendo tried to implement their own, it wasn't until the launch of the Steamdeck that caught the eye of the wider consumer market.
If 2022 was the year the steamdeck brought back attention to the portable gaming market, then 2025 is the year that finally saw healthy competition among industry giants. This year we witnessed the release of the steam deck OLED, Lenovo legion Go S, Nintendo Switch 2, ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X, and Retroid Pocket 5 among many others, bringing a breath of fresh year in this segment for interested consumers. Although the Steamdeck was released the earliest, it has still managed to capture more than half of the portable PC gaming market owing to the fact that almost all games available on steam can be run on the device with little to no hassle.
Tough reality? Go for an affordable virtual one.
The Virtual Reality market has been a niche market to begin with. From Google to Apple, many industry giants have dabbled in the VR market often finding mixed results. The unsurprising huge price tag of Apple's own VR headset drew more people away than it attracted, cementing the idea that the VR experience is only for those with deep pockets and generational wealth.
But this all changed with the insane price drop of Meta's Meta Quest 3S, which brought the price of experiencing VR to $299, and you can get one in Bangladesh for a little under Tk. 40,000. This aggressive pricing allowed for Meta to capture more than half of the VR market bringing in healthy competition in an otherwise considered expensive market.
Every man's Macbook Air: Light in weight and light on the pocket (depends)
The launch of Asus's Zenbook A14, their first ARM-based laptop has certainly created a disruption in the laptop market. The laptop has definitely turned several heads with its weight of under 900 grams, a big and smooth trackpad, and running the Snapdragon X SoC. All of this is available with a price tag of around $900. The main attraction of the laptop is its battery life, with many testers reporting getting around 15-20 hours of battery life with actual workload.
The light ceraluminum body (which is basically putting the magnesium and aluminum alloy under a ceramisation process which makes the material scratch resistant and tougher) of the laptop coupled with the easylift hinge allowing for one-handed opening and closing, makes the user experience something to praise about. Even the base-level Snapdragon CPU feels snappy with no visible lag or stuttering when doing day to day tasks. The laptop definitely puts an emphasis on portability providing no significant downgrades when it comes to delivering performance.
How much AI is too much AI? Nvidia says, yes
This year saw the announcement and release of Nvidia's 50 series GPUs with more advancements in performance compared to that of previous years. The main advancements come with the integration of the all new DLSS 4 engine, where AI transformers can now generate 3 more frames in between each frame compared to the traditionally generated single frame.
This alongside Nvidia's ray construction results in generating 8x more frames compared to running on native settings. The introduction of neural shaders and mega-geometry allows the newer graphics cards to handle complex materials allowing for what Nvidia calls "film-quality" realism in real-time. The new technology allows the GPUs to handle up to 100 times more ray-traced triangles which means an unprecedented amount of physical details compared to previous iterations. The 50-series GPUs are also the first ones to ship with GDDR7 memory which have significantly more bandwidth than the 40 series, delivering nearly 1.8 Terabits per second.
A year of advancements that paves the way for more
This year saw a mixed bag of advancements, more AI-integration, adopting new hardware, setting affordable pricing and a healthy market competition. The leaps made this year will provide more opportunity for the tech industry to experiment more with their products allowing for more choices for the ordinary consumer. Whatever we have seen this year can certainly assure us that greater leaps are to follow in the coming year.
