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 foremost variations centering on greater batteries and brighter screens.
I am getting waves of deja vu as I evaluation the Galaxy S26, as a result of at occasions I used to be writing precisely what I wrote final yr — together with the half about it being a bit of too just like what got here earlier than.
Samsung/Engadget
Samsung’s smallest flagship cellphone is a strong if protected addition to the Galaxy collection. Nevertheless, it’s far too just like its predecessors.
Execs
- Larger battery
- A flagship cellphone that isn’t big
- Extra AI assistant choices
Cons
- Too just like final yr’s S25
- Cameras might be improved
- Perplexity integration is restricted
{Hardware}
Picture by Mat Smith for Engadget
Let’s concentrate on the modifications. The Galaxy S26’s display screen measurement is a bit of greater 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 measurement distinction, there is no specific drop in sharpness. The display screen can even go barely brighter, topping out at 3,000 nits, which is at all times 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, nonetheless, is essentially unchanged. The digital camera trio now sits on a unified round island and, nicely, that is all I actually need to say. As soon as once more, it is premium Samsung {hardware}, however in any other case I would just be reiterating what I stated final yr… and our evaluation from the yr earlier than 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 break 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 evaluation 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 may supply power-efficiency enhancements over bigger options. This yr’s S26 did not wrestle with any of the video games I performed or video-editing duties. Samsung says its new chip delivers round 50 % 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 exams and 10,664 on multicore exams (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 exams between a Snapdragon S26 and my Exynos model revealed a niche. Watching a looped video at 50 % brightness, the Exynos iteration lasted nearly 28 hours, whereas the Snapdragon 8 Elite S26 lasted almost 30 hours. Positive, that is nice longevity no matter which S26 mannequin you get. However this yr’s flagship does have a much bigger battery, so why is the Exynos-powered model solely matching final yr’s cellphone?
Cameras
Picture by Mat Smith for Engadget
Not a lot has modified within the composition (or decision) of the digital camera trio: there is a 50-megapixel most important, a 12MP ultrawide and a 10MP telephoto. That implies that any enhancements in images and video are delicate, to place it kindly.
It is laborious to discern the enhancements this yr with out actually scrutinizing darkish photographs and zooming proper in. The S26 does appear a bit of sooner at capturing bursts and high-res video. And whereas I favor the no-nonsense taking pictures of the Pixel 10a, the S26 gives a bit of extra versatility with its zoom and ultrawide cameras. Cropped zoom, for instance, permits 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.
Picture by Mat Smith for Engadget
As soon as you have taken the shot, Samsung’s bundle of AI instruments can take over. Picture Help makes an attempt to corral all of those enhancing options into one place, providing fast methods to scale back reflections or edit out photobombers. Now you can use pure language textual content prompts to information your picture enhancing.
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 simple to make use of. It is a function the place pure language interfaces actually make sense.
With the front-facing digital camera, 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 coloration 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 type of function you usually see on motion cams and gimbals. It really works nicely, too, though the footage does choose up a little bit of focus-pumping because it fights to stabilize every part.
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 possibly can faucet to use monitoring to something, to which it locks on nicely. It really works notably nicely 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 digital camera app stored my topic centered within the body.
Software program
Picture by Mat Smith for Engadget
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 most of the options launched final yr. Now Transient is able to pulling information from extra apps to generate extra complete every 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 counsel actions with an unobtrusive icon, based mostly on what’s taking place on display screen, resembling sharing contact numbers with somebody or suggesting calendar occasions 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 possibly can then select to make it your major 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 course of deciding the place to eat throughout my latest journey to Barcelona, so I believed this was an awesome 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
Picture by Mat Smith for Engadget
The Galaxy S26 is a strong cellphone, with upgraded battery capability and extra base storage. Whether or not you get the Exynos or the Snapdragon S26, there’s fortuitously no efficiency gulf as has occurred previously. 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 looks like. There’s nothing flawed with this protected, strong Android cellphone, however you would choose up final yr’s S25 and get an expertise that is 99 % the identical for $99 much less.
