One UI 8.5 Review after 4 weeks
Context: I've been using the phone since May 2025, and I started with One UI 6.1 out of the box. I am a light user with usage largely limited to social media, browsing, youtube, shopping apps.
I always keep all of my apps updated and also, I install security and OS updates as soon as I get them.
Tweaks I did: Unnecessary wifi, bluetooth scanning, Google background services which I don't use, put apps to deep sleep and disabled app which I don't use. That's it, no other tinkering.
Here is what I think about One UI 8.5
---
Performance: I think the phone is performing at its best so far! Apps open, close quickly, content loads fast without much hiccups.
General UI & Animations: UI looks polished and overall consistent to me. They did take down quick panel blur, and there is a slight lag or perhaps frame drop when you pull down quick panel - it's minor but noticeable. Hopefully they fix it soon.
Other than that, the overall animations are fast and smooth, I don't notice any frame drops and lags in general UI, I noticed better smoothness in recents panel than before. Overall UI is consistently fast with smooth transitions.
One UI 7 was smooth; One UI 8 was fast - and now 8.5 has got a nice combination of both!
Battery: Finally, the battery backup is back where it needs to be. Since I updated to One UI 8 - the overall backup was dropped by 1:30 hrs SOT, I was hardly getting 7 to 7:30 hrs SOT. With One UI 8.5 it's back to normal. Phone stays cool too, hardly gets warm.
Bugs: Did not face anything major, only once an app closed itself when I turned off the screen. Probably the app crashed itself since it did not occur again.
Issue with swipe gestures - I feel the sensitivity is higher now, when you swipe back sometimes the opened app would register tap and go to the content instead of going back or close app.
I switched back to navigation buttons so it's good for me.
Issues I had with One UI 8 - battery backup, inferior performance, phone used to get warm even on basic usage. Performance was worse when navigation buttons were in use than gestures. Wifi was consuming more battery than mobile data!
Did One UI 8.5 fixed these? YES!
I had doubt's recently that this phone might not age well, but Samsung finally did well to get it together.