Summary
- Yesterday, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S26 and Galaxy Buds4 lineups.
- The Galaxy S26 feels stagnant — prices are up, with few meaningful upgrades to justify them, although the Ultra’s Privacy Display is a rare, genuinely useful feature.
- The Galaxy Buds4 Pro stole the show, thanks to better sound, better fit, and a redesigned case.
Another Galaxy Unpacked has come and gone. Yesterday, Samsung announced the Galaxy S26 series of phones and the Galaxy Buds4 and Buds4 Pro. Reception to the announcements has been mixed, to say the least, thanks to a rough combination of rising prices and stagnant features.
Galaxy S26 series
The S26 series — particularly the S26 Ultra — was meant to be the star of the show. Unfortunately, the phones fell victim to the same sort of trap other manufacturers have fallen into: rising prices with little to justify them.
Galaxy S26 Ultra
Credit: Samsung
The flagship S26 Ultra definitely has the most going for it. The standout feature is the new Privacy Display. This acts as a built-in privacy screen for your phone, making it difficult to see off-axis (and preventing prying eyes from seeing private messages). It can be toggled on or off at will, or even on a per-app basis.
We love privacy screen protectors, and having it built in is even better. This display is the first of its kind and a genuinely useful feature, which is refreshing in an era of stale updates.
Unfortunately, the rest of the phone mostly falls into that “stale” bucket:
- The phone is slightly thinner — personally, I’d rather have a larger battery than a thinner phone.
- It’s made of aluminum, rather than titanium like last year. Normally, I don’t care much what a phone is made of, but for a phone that costs $1,300, this feels like a step back.
- It charges at 60W. This is a small upgrade, but nothing groundbreaking.
The saving grace for the Ultra is that the price of the base model remains the same as last year (only the base model, though — the higher storage tiers all saw price hikes).
Galaxy S26 and S26+
These releases are… not great. Prices are up across the board, and the phones themselves have very little to show for it. The base S26 did see a storage increase from 128GB to 256GB, but the price is still higher than the S25’s 256 GB model. Sure, chips are faster, but we’re well beyond the point where faster chips make any real difference in day-to-day usage.
Ultimately, there’s almost no reason to buy these phones over a previous year’s model. Granted, this has been true for a while — upgrades are rarely exciting these days. But I think the price increases are really highlighting just how much smartphones have stagnated.
Opinions on the internet largely agree. Redditors lamented the lack of innovation and the fact that we’re being charged more for what feels like the same phone:
The reception also wasn’t helped by the fact that AI talk dominated the event:
Unfortunately, it’s been the same for several years at this point. We’ve previously noted that Samsung likes to play it safe these days, and I wouldn’t expect this to change anytime soon.
Galaxy Buds4 and Buds4 Pro
The standout of the day
Credit: Samsung
While everyone’s eyes were on the flashy flagship phones, these earbuds were the true star of the show. The Buds4 Pro, in particular, stand out for fixing many of the issues of the previous generation. The case is improved, with a transparent clamshell design that makes it easy to see if the buds are in the case and easier to get them out.
Sound quality is also up, with larger drivers (the woofer is a whopping 20% larger) and a better in-ear fit that Samsung says was developed using data from “hundreds of millions of global ear data points.” Finally, the design of the earbuds themselves is much better — that weird triangular stem is gone, and the controls are much easier to use.
The Galaxy S26 and Galaxy Buds4 series are available for preorder now, with general availability on March 11. Will you pick one up? Drop us a comment and let us know!
