Samsung Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus review: This again

While Samsung has treated its Flips and Folds to a few major hardware upgrades over recent years, the Galaxy S flagships have often felt like a long, unbroken line of minor spec refreshes. The S26 and S26 Plus do nothing to change that trend.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra at least benefits from the company’s new privacy display, but the two smaller S26 phones lack a killer hardware feature. They both have new chipsets, and the S26 gets a bigger battery while the Plus has faster wireless charging, but these are tiny tweaks, not wholesale upgrades. Perhaps most disappointingly, Samsung hasn’t followed Google in adding magnetic Qi2 charging to the phones themselves.

That makes this year’s phones barely better than the models they’re replacing. Oh, and did I mention they cost more too?

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

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

You might also notice that the S26 has grown. Its 6.3-inch display is fractionally larger than the S25’s 6.2-inch panel, which makes it taller, wider, and heavier than before. It’s still as close as you’ll get to a small phone — at 167g and 7.2mm, it’s lighter and thinner than the iPhone 17 — but I miss when it was smaller still.

What you get for that extra size is a bigger battery: 4,300mAh, up 300mAh from the S25, and closer to the 4,900mAh cell in the S26 Plus. I took the S26 with me around Mobile World Congress, expecting the demanding use, long days, and intermittent Wi-Fi to tank the battery. Instead, I was surprised to find it held its own, lasting until bed every day but one, when my nerve broke and I reached for my power bank mid-evening. Neither phone is a powerhouse, and outside of the US Samsung risks falling behind its rivals, who are busy introducing capacious silicon-carbon batteries, but even the regular S26 should be an all-day device.

It would have been an easy win for Samsung to introduce Qi2 magnetic wireless charging, as Google did in its Pixel 10 phones, but the company told us it prefers to keep its phones thinner, assuming buyers will pick up a case with magnets in it anyway. Instead, Samsung gave the S26 Plus a modest boost to 20W Qi wireless charging, leaving the S26 at 15W. Along with the Plus’s faster wired charging — 45W compared to the S26’s 25W — this is the only real upgrade you get from the bigger phone (it also has a more recent Bluetooth version and support for mmWave 5G that’s lacking in the S26).

Size aside, the displays are the same as last year, and lack the privacy display found in the Ultra. The chipsets have been refreshed for 2026, but while the S26 Ultra uses Qualcomm Snapdragon chips worldwide, the S26 and S26 Plus use a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the US, but Samsung’s own Exynos 2600 in most other markets. I’m in the UK, and my Exynos-based phones have performed just fine, 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 the S24 handsets. Not to mention the S23 phones, which in turn featured very slight tweaks from the S22 line, giving Samsung five straight years of almost identical cameras. It’s gotten good at wringing the most out of these sensors, but software has its limits. Daytime photos come out well, but highlights occasionally have an overprocessed sheen to them. Low light performance is average, with excessive brightening and smudgy halos around direct light. And while the telephoto is decently detailed, shots feel flat, without the extra depth you’d hope for from the focal length. I could levy similar criticisms against US rivals like the iPhone 17 and Pixel 10, but internationally the competition is fiercer — the Xiaomi 17 outclasses the S26’s camera lens for lens.

What the camera does get is horizontal lock: an amped up take on video stabilization that keeps footage almost perfectly oriented even if you move the phone, shake it, or turn it upside down. Like the regular stabilization it’s capped at QHD resolution, and it’s supported on both rear lenses, though not the selfie camera. There’s certainly an element of artificiality to the final footage, with occasional distortions and shimmering as it tries to maintain stability, but the results still feel pretty extraordinary. I wouldn’t use this for every video I shoot, but for action footage it’s an obvious winner.

So what else is actually new? Well, AI stuff, duh. A bunch of this really comes from Google: a smarter Circle to Search that can look up whole outfits at a time rather than single items of clothing, and a more agentic version of Gemini, capable of ordering Ubers and groceries for you, which is expected to arrive soon but isn’t here yet. Samsung itself has added automatic call screening and scam protection, natural language AI photo edits, and an upgraded Bixby for conversational device controls.

The latter works… mostly. It’s good at interpreting questions related to the phone’s settings (asking “how do I get back the buttons at the bottom?” correctly took me to navigation controls), but Bixby is hit and miss about which settings it can change itself — it would happily toggle on do not disturb or dark mode, but refused to actually switch between gesture controls and navigation buttons, only taking me to the settings page. Controls located outside the settings app confuse it entirely: it’s incapable of reordering the App Drawer, adding or removing specific controls from Quick Settings, or adding app shortcuts to the homescreen. It is, in short, about as reliable as most AI software.

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, an S24, or even an S23. You’re not getting a new camera, magnetic charging, or a substantially different design. The battery is a little bigger, the display a bit brighter, the chipset certainly faster — and of course there’s much more AI, but plenty of those features are still working their way back to older phones. It’s been three years since the S23, and other than higher prices, Samsung doesn’t have much to show for it.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge