Samsung Galaxy S26 review: Incremental upgrades fail to excite

Samsung's annual smartphone refresh has arrived, and the feeling is familiar—not in a good way. The company is selling three new phones this year: the S26 Ultra at $1,300, the S26 at $899, and the S26+ at $999. The Ultra gets the headline feature, a Privacy Screen that Samsung positions as genuinely innovative. The two smaller flagships, though, are exercises in incremental improvement. Bigger batteries. Brighter screens. A camera island that's now circular instead of rectangular. The specs have moved forward just enough to justify a new model number, but not enough to make anyone feel like they're holding something fundamentally different from last year's phone.

The screen is 6.3 inches, up from 6.2 on the S25, though the resolution stays at FHD+ (2,340 x 1,080). The brightness tops out at 3,000 nits, an improvement worth noting. The battery grew from 4,000mAh to 4,300mAh—a meaningful bump for a phone that already impressed with its longevity. Base RAM doubled to 12GB, and storage doubled to 256GB. These are real upgrades, the kind that matter in daily use. But the design language is nearly identical to what came before, and after spending time with the phone, it's hard to shake the sense that Samsung is asking customers to pay for evolution when they're delivering iteration.

The processor situation reveals a split in Samsung's strategy. In the US, the S26 gets the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, the same chip powering the Ultra. Everywhere else, including the review unit tested in the UK, the S26 runs Samsung's in-house Exynos 2600—the company's first 2nm processor. On paper, the Exynos 2600 promises around 50 percent better performance than its predecessor, with a new Xclipse 960 GPU delivering double the graphical performance. In Geekbench 6 testing, the Exynos S26 scored 3,151 on single-core tests and 10,664 on multicore, staying competitive with the Snapdragon-powered Ultra. The GPU score of 24,425 was similarly respectable. Gaming and video editing ran without struggle. But then the battery tests revealed something troubling: the Exynos version lasted nearly 28 hours in looped video playback at 50 percent brightness, while the Snapdragon S26 managed nearly 30 hours. That's a gap Samsung can't easily explain away, especially when the Exynos phone has the larger battery. The efficiency gains the company promised from the 2nm process didn't materialize in real-world use.

The camera system remains unchanged in composition: 50-megapixel main, 12-megapixel ultrawide, 10-megapixel telephoto. Improvements are subtle enough that they require close scrutiny to spot. The S26 captures bursts and high-resolution video slightly faster than before. The zoom capabilities offer more versatility than the base Pixel 10a, though the S26 Ultra's larger sensors capture noticeably more detail when cropping in beyond the 3X optical zoom. Samsung's AI editing suite, called Photo Assist, now accepts natural language prompts to guide adjustments—reducing reflections, removing photobombers, evening out lighting. It works smoothly and intuitively, the kind of feature where AI interfaces actually make sense rather than feeling bolted on. The front camera gained an Object Aware Engine for better skin tone and hair rendering, along with an improved portrait mode, but the differences are marginal. Selfies came out slightly warmer and more color-accurate than the S25's, nothing more.

Video features saw more meaningful additions. Super Steady mode now maintains horizontal lock regardless of movement, a capability borrowed from action cameras and gimbals. It works well, though the footage shows some focus-pumping as the phone fights to stabilize everything. A new Autoframing mode crops and tracks subjects as they move, with decent auto-detection for faces and pets and the ability to manually select any object. The feature pairs well with tripods, though there's a slight floating effect as the phone tries to keep pace, and warping appears at the lens edges when the camera keeps the subject centered.

Software is where Samsung positioned the S26 as the flagship of an "agentic AI" era, with assistants supposedly connecting tasks across apps. The reality is more modest. Brief, Samsung's daily summary tool, now pulls from more apps, though in testing it mostly surfaced weather, calendar reminders, and little else. A new Now Nudge feature offers unobtrusive suggestions based on screen context—sharing contact numbers, proposing calendar times during email threads. The company also integrated Perplexity as a third AI assistant alongside Gemini and Bixby. The integration requires installing the Perplexity app and logging in separately, and it doesn't work as seamlessly as promised. Samsung said Perplexity would function across the phone, including in Samsung's browser, but that integration isn't live yet. Perplexity's own browser, Comet, has a slick feature for browsing and summarizing multiple tabs simultaneously—useful when deciding where to eat in Barcelona, for instance—but that capability doesn't exist in Samsung's browser. Voice commands using "Hey Plex" went unanswered. For now, Perplexity offers little beyond what Gemini already provides.

The S26 is a competent phone. The battery is bigger, the storage is doubled, and performance is solid across both processor variants. But it's also a phone that feels designed to satisfy upgrade cycles rather than inspire them. The Exynos 2600 disappoints with battery life that doesn't match its efficiency promises. The cameras improve in ways that matter only if you're comparing side-by-side crops. The software additions are incremental. Samsung has built a phone that works well, that will serve its owners faithfully, but that fails to answer the question many people are asking: why should I upgrade at all?