Readers’ Choice Awards 2025: Your Favorite Phones, Laptops, Gaming Gear, and More

You guys have spoken and the best iPhone this year is the one that maxes out every feature. The iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max have the longest battery life, best cameras, brightest screens, and the most powerful performance that Apple offers. It might even be overkill for most people.

It didn’t get thinner, but Samsung did stretch the cover screen on the Galaxy Z Flip 7 to wrap around the dual cameras. The result is flip-style foldable that lets you see more at a glance without having to open it up.

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7 rightfully took the top spot for the best foldable of the year for good reason: It’s a massive leap from the Z Fold 6 in terms of slimming down its footprint and feeling like a regular phone when folded up.

Google’s Pixel 10 Pro (and 10 Pro XL) offers the cleanest, most stock version of Android available. Not to mention, Google’s pushed forward by adding Gemini in more places with “agentic†features like Magic Cue to help surface information from your apps at the right time and place, and generative actions like enhancing 100x zoom photos.

It’s rarely a contest when it comes to tablets and Apple didn’t miss with the iPad Pro (M5). With a jawdropping tandem OLED display and desktop-class performance, the iPad Pro (M5) was the undisputed tablet king.

With its late-year launch, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft just barely qualified. And yet, Amazon’s first color e-reader with pen support pulled ahead of the rest. That’s the power of the Kindle platform—it’s hard to leave once you’ve gone all-in.

Apple’s 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 chip was a no-brainer. A tried-and-true design with plenty of ports, a great mini LED display, and a more powerful performance from the M5 silicon, the refreshed MacBook Pro is a reliable laptop that “just works†for most situations, so long as it’s not hardcore gaming.

If you do want to game on your laptop, the Alienware 16 Area-51 is the way to go. This 16-inch beast has top specs, including an Intel Core i9 CPU, Nvidia RTX 5070 or 5080 GPU, a 240Hz refresh rate, and a plethora of ports ensuring you won’t need any dongles. And yes, it runs games very well.

The Asus ROG Xbox Ally X may not be officially made by Microsoft, but it’s proven to be quite the powerful handheld for playing most PC games and supported Xbox titles. It could be a preview of what’s to come if Microsoft does launch its own handheld in the future.

Apple’s iconic wireless earbuds destroyed the competition. With even better active noise cancellation, a built-in heart sensor for workouts, and real-time translation, AirPods Pro 3 skated to an easy win.

The king of over-ear headphones with active noise cancellation didn’t rest on its laurels. Proving once again that Sony does ANC wireless headphones best, the WH-1000XM6 improved with even better sound, stronger ANC, and greater comfort.

There are many portable wireless speakers released every year, but the Bose SoundLink Plus stood out for its full and bass-heavy sound and great volume. The sleek colorways only added to its appeal.

The EOS R6 Mark III leveled-up over its predecessor with a few notable upgrades: a higher-resolution 32-megapixel sensor, 7K-resolution and 4K-resolution 120 fps video recording, and a CFexpress card slot for faster data transfer speeds. It’s the perfect camera for creators looking to ramp up their production quality.

It’s no surprise that the most popular smartwatch is the Apple Watch Ultra 3—the biggest, longest-lasting, and most durable smartwatch for iPhones. The Ultra 3 adds built-in 5G and satellite connectivity for when you really have to go touch grass.

With twice the battery life and improved video recording compared to the previous model, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 AI Glasses didn’t have to do much to impress. Smart glasses with screens like the Meta Ray-Ban Display may be the future, but as it stands, maybe we don’t need notifications in our eyes just yet.

Our reviewer was not impressed with Gemini’s hallucinating notification summaries or the fact that you have to pay a subscription fee for the better AI features. However, it’s clear that AI—specifically computer vision— is something that’ll become standard in home security cameras. The summaries just need to become more accurate.

The Roborock Saros Z70 was not bug-free when it launched and its robotic limb for grabbing objects was hit or miss. That being said, you guys saw this robotic dust buster as innovative, even if the execution wasn’t perfect.

Wi-Fi 7 may not be commonplace just yet, but if you’re an early adopter and want one of the fastest and most reliable routers to connect all your devices to the internet, the TP-Link Tri-Band BE9700 does the job without issues, while offering tons of settings to tweak.