Samsung Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus review: Here it is again

While Samsung handled it fluctuation and Folds Given few major hardware upgrades over recent years, Galaxy S flagships have often felt like a long, continuous line of minor spec updates. The S26 and S26 Plus do nothing to change this trend.

At least the Galaxy S26 Ultra benefits from the company New privacy viewbut my smaller S26 lacks the killer hardware feature. They both have new chipsets, and the S26 gets a larger battery while the Plus has faster wireless charging, but these are small tweaks, not wholesale upgrades. Perhaps most disappointing is that Samsung hasn’t followed Google in adding Qi2 magnetic charging to the phones themselves.

That makes this year’s phones barely better than the models they replace. Oh, and did I mention it costs more too?

The 6.3-inch S26 costs $899 with 256GB of storage, while the 6.7-inch S26 Plus costs $200 with the same storage. Both are $100 more expensive than last year’s phones, though in the case of the S26 that’s partly because Samsung canceled the initial 128GB model — though it’s still $40 more than the 256GB S25. It’s another $200 to upgrade to the Ultra, which is bigger again but also includes upgraded cameras, that new privacy screen, and Samsung’s S Pen.

The S26 and S26 Plus look much the same as they did last year, with straight sides and triple cameras in one corner. These cameras are the only real visual change: they are now mounted on a raised oval camera island, identical to the Galaxy Z Fold 7. I prefer last year’s design, which looks cleaner, but it’s such a small change that it’s hard to think about.

You may also notice that the S26 has grown. Its 6.3-inch screen is partially larger than the screen S256.2-inch panel, making it longer, wider and heavier than before. It’s still as close to a small phone as you can get – at 167g and 7.2mm, it’s lighter and thinner than a phone iPhone 17 -But I miss when he was younger.

What you get for that extra size is a larger battery: 4,300 mAh, 300 mAh more than the S25, and closer to the 4,900 mAh cell in the S26 Plus. I took the S26 with me Mobile World Congressanticipating demanding usage, long days, and intermittent Wi-Fi to charge the battery. Instead, I was surprised to find it held together, lasting until sleep every day except one day, when I broke down and reached for my power bank in the middle of the evening. Neither phone is a powerhouse, and outside the US Samsung risks falling behind its rivals, which are busy offering wide-range devices. Silicon and carbon batteriesbut even the regular S26 should be an all-day machine.

It would have been easy for Samsung to win by introducing Qi2 magnetic wireless charging, e.g Google did this in its Pixel 10 phonesbut The company told us It prefers to keep its phones thinner, assuming buyers will opt for a case with magnets anyway. Instead, Samsung gave the S26 Plus a modest 20W wireless charging boost, leaving the S26 at 15W. Besides the Plus’s faster wired charging — 45W compared to 25W on the S26 — that’s the only real upgrade you get from the larger phone (it also has a newer Bluetooth version and mmWave 5G support that the S26 lacks).

Aside from the size, the displays are the same as last year, lacking the privacy screen found in the Ultra. The chipset has been updated for 2026, but while the S26 Ultra uses Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets worldwide, the S26 and S26 Plus use Snapdragon 8 Elite Generation 5 in the US, but Samsung’s Exynos 2600 is present in most other markets. I’m in the UK, and my Exynos-based phones have performed well, from frame rates to battery life, so buyers outside the US shouldn’t have much to worry about.

Samsung has stuck with the same camera hardware it used in last year’s S25 phones. And S24 phones. Not to mention the S23 phones, which in turn feature very slight tweaks from the S22 line, giving Samsung five straight years of nearly identical cameras. They’ve gotten good at extracting the most from these sensors, but the software has its limitations. Daytime photos come out well, but sometimes the highlights have too much brightness. Low-light performance is average, with overbrightness and smudged halos around direct light. Although the close-up is well detailed, stills appear flat, without the extra depth you’d hope for from a focal length. I could make similar criticisms against US competitors like the iPhone 17 and Pixel 10, but the competition internationally is much fiercer – Xiaomi 17 It outperforms the S26 viewfinder for the lens.

What the camera does get is landscape lock: an enhanced video stabilization measure that keeps your shots almost perfectly oriented even if you move, shake, or turn the phone upside down. Like regular stabilization, it’s limited to QHD resolution, and is supported on both rear lenses, but not on the selfie camera. There’s definitely an artificial element to the final shots, with some distortion and flickering as they try to maintain stability, but the results are still somewhat unusual. I won’t use this in every video I shoot, but for action shots, it’s the clear winner.

So what’s really new? Well, AI stuff, okay. A bunch of this is already coming from Google: a smarter search circuit that can search for entire outfits at once rather than individual pieces of clothing, and a more agented version of Gemini, able to order Ubers and groceries for you, which is expected to arrive soon but hasn’t arrived yet. Samsung itself has added automatic call screening and fraud protection, natural language photo editing using AI, and an updated Bixby for controlling chat devices.

The latter works…mostly. It’s good at interpreting questions about phone settings (the question “How do I get the buttons back at the bottom?” took me right to the navigation controls), but Bixby is hit and miss about which settings it can change itself — it would be happy to switch to Do Not Disturb or Dark Mode, but it refused to actually switch between gesture controls and navigation buttons, only taking me to the settings page. The controls outside the Settings app completely confuse it: it’s unable to rearrange the app drawer, add or remove certain controls from the Quick Settings, or add app shortcuts to the home screen. In short, it is as reliable as most AI programs.

The S26 and S26 Plus aren’t bad phones, but they’re undeniably familiar, and there’s no reason to upgrade whether you own an S25, S24, or even an S23. You won’t get a new camera, magnetic charging, or a completely different design. The battery is a little bigger, the screen is brighter, the chipset is definitely faster — and of course there’s more AI, but a lot of these features are still making their way to older phones. It’s been three years since the S23 was launched, and other than high prices, Samsung doesn’t have much to offer.

Photography by Dominic Preston/The Verge