Samsung Galaxy S26 assessment: The smartphone establishment

It is already smartphone season. Samsung’s annual deluge encompasses three new telephones for 2026: the frontier-pushing S26 Extremely ($1,300) with its progressive Privateness Display screen, the S26 ($899) and the S26+ ($999). The smaller flagships, but once more, are iterative variations of what got here earlier than, with the main variations centering on larger batteries and brighter screens.

I am getting waves of deja vu as I assessment the Galaxy S26, as a result of at instances I used to be writing precisely what I wrote last year — together with the half about it being slightly too just like what got here earlier than.

{Hardware}

Let’s give attention to the adjustments. The Galaxy S26’s display dimension is slightly larger than its predecessor’s; 6.3 inches, up from 6.2 inches on the S25. Nevertheless, it nonetheless has the identical FHD+ (2,340 x 1,080) decision. Given the slight dimension distinction, there is not any specific drop in sharpness. The display also can go barely brighter, topping out at 3,000 nits, which is all the time welcome — particularly when Samsung has elevated the battery to 4,300mAh from the S25’s 4,000mAh. (The S25 already impressed us with its battery longevity.)

The design, nevertheless, is essentially unchanged. The digicam trio now sits on a unified round island and, properly, that is all I actually should say. As soon as once more, it is premium Samsung {hardware}, however in any other case I would just be reiterating what I said last year… and our assessment from the 12 months before that.

Inside, Samsung elevated the bottom RAM to 12GB and the storage to 256GB on the S26, doubling the house discovered on the S25. With the S26’s processor, Samsung cut up the system into two totally different builds relying on area. Within the US, you will get the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, just like the S26 Extremely. Elsewhere, together with my assessment system within the UK, the S26 and (S26+) have the in-house Exynos 2600.

Samsung’s Exynos 2600 SoC is its first 2nm chip and will supply power-efficiency enhancements over bigger alternate options. This 12 months’s S26 did not battle with any of the video games I performed or video-editing duties. Samsung says its new chip delivers round 50 p.c higher efficiency throughout single- and multicore duties. The Exynos 2600 features a new Xclipse 960 GPU, which casubtlenuan ship double the graphical efficiency of the Exynos 2500.

On Geekbench 6, the Exynos S26 scored 3151 on single-core checks and 10,664 on multicore checks (not far behind the Snapdragon-powered S26 Extremely). Equally, the GPU rating (24425) did not lag far behind — all nice surprises. There’s a however coming.

Evaluating battery rundown checks between a Snapdragon S26 and my Exynos model revealed a spot. Watching a looped video at 50 p.c brightness, the Exynos iteration lasted virtually 28 hours, whereas the Snapdragon 8 Elite S26 lasted practically 30 hours. Certain, that is nice longevity no matter which S26 mannequin you get. However this 12 months’s flagship does have an even bigger battery, so why is the Exynos-powered model solely matching final 12 months’s cellphone?

Cameras

Not a lot has modified within the composition (or decision) of the digicam trio: there is a 50-megapixel primary, a 12MP ultrawide and a 10MP telephoto. That signifies that any enhancements in pictures and video are delicate, to place it kindly.

It is arduous to discern the enhancements this 12 months with out actually scrutinizing darkish photographs and zooming proper in. The S26 does appear slightly sooner at capturing bursts and high-res video. And whereas I desire the no-nonsense capturing of the Pixel 10a, the S26 provides slightly extra versatility with its zoom and ultrawide cameras. Cropped zoom, for instance, enables you to get nearer to topics past the 3X optical zoom, although extra element is misplaced than with the S26 Extremely and its bigger decision sensors.

As soon as you’ve got taken the shot, Samsung’s bundle of AI instruments can take over. Picture Help makes an attempt to corral all of those modifying options into one place, providing fast methods to cut back reflections or edit out photobombers. Now you can use pure language textual content prompts to information your picture modifying.

For instance, I tried to regulate the lighting extra evenly on a photograph of me taken outside with a flash. I may do it with my rudimentary photo-editing abilities, however Samsung’s instruments are quick and, crucially, very straightforward to make use of. It is a function the place pure language interfaces actually make sense.

With the front-facing digicam, Samsung has added its Object Conscious Engine, promising higher, extra correct rendering of pores and skin tones and hair, in addition to an improved portrait mode. However once more, I seen marginal variations. The S26 appeared to have higher colour accuracy than its predecessor, leading to barely hotter selfies.

For movies, Samsung Tremendous Regular mode is now extra versatile, sustaining a constant horizontal lock regardless of how a lot you progress round. As I discussed throughout my hands-on, it is an attention-grabbing addition, the sort of function you sometimes see on motion cams and gimbals. It really works properly, too, though the footage does decide up a little bit of focus-pumping because it fights to stabilize all the pieces.

Rounding out the brand new additions is an Autoframing mode that crops in in your tracked topic as they transfer round. There is a diploma of auto-detection for faces and pets, however you’ll be able to faucet to use monitoring to something, to which it locks on properly. It really works significantly properly with tripods, however there’s a slight floating impact because the S26 tries to maintain up with the cellphone’s motion. I additionally seen warping on the fringe of the lens when the digicam app stored my topic centered within the body.

Software program

Samsung’s S26 launch occasion advised this was the period of agentic AI, with assistants now positioned to attach the dots between duties themselves. We’re not fairly there, although.

The corporate has barely expanded lots of the options launched final 12 months. Now Transient is able to pulling knowledge from extra apps to generate extra complete day by day summaries, however I largely noticed the same old suspects: climate, calendar reminders and never a lot else.

Throughout the S26, a brand new Now Nudge function will recommend actions with an unobtrusive icon, based mostly on what’s taking place on display, equivalent to sharing contact numbers with somebody or suggesting calendar instances whereas coping with work emails.

Perplexity is an attention-grabbing addition. The S26 collection is in a curious spot the place it has hooks into no fewer than three AI assistants: Gemini, Bixby (bless its coronary heart) and now Perplexity.

You do have to put in the Perplexity app (and log in to make use of it), however you’ll be able to then select to make it your main AI assistant. Odd issues are lacking: Samsung stated Perplexity integration would work throughout the cellphone, together with its personal Browser app — one thing I used to be excited to check. Perplexity’s personal browser, Comet, has a slick function that lets it browse and summarize a number of tabs. I used to be in the midst of deciding the place to eat throughout my latest journey to Barcelona, so I assumed this was a terrific use case. Nevertheless, that function is not accessible in Samsung’s browser for now. In response to Perplexity, Samsung will “combine Perplexity’s APIs into the Samsung Browser, with agentic browser capabilities.”

Voice instructions of “Hey Plex” additionally went unanswered. I discovered I needed to manually grant permissions to the Perplexity app for it to work like Google’s Gemini. This might simply be teething points with a pre-release system and software program, however Perplexity, for now, would not supply sufficient utility past what I used to be already used to with Gemini.

Wrap-up

The Galaxy S26 is a stable cellphone, with upgraded battery capability and extra base storage. Whether or not you get the Exynos or the Snapdragon S26, there’s luckily no efficiency gulf as has occurred up to now. Nevertheless, the shorter battery life is a disappointing discovery from Samsung’s first 2nm chip.

For Samsung’s smallest flagships over the past three years, it is all been very samey. Is the corporate now targeted on its true flagship Extremely cellphone and foldables to generate buzz and make issues thrilling? That is what it appears like. There’s nothing fallacious with this protected, stable Android cellphone, however you can decide up final 12 months’s S25 and get an expertise that is 99 p.c the identical for $99 less.