Samsung Galaxy S26 review: The smartphone status quo

It’s already smartphone season. Samsung’s annual deluge includes three new phones for 2026: the S26 Ultra ($1,300) which pushes the boundaries with its innovative privacy screen, the S26 ($899) and the S26+ ($999). The smaller flagships, again, are iterative versions of the above, with the major differences centering around bigger batteries and brighter displays.

I’m feeling waves of déjà vu when reviewing the Galaxy S26, because sometimes I was writing exactly what I wrote last year – including the part that it was a little too similar to the above.

Samsung/Engadget

Samsung’s smallest flagship phone is a solid but safe addition to the Galaxy series. However, it looks too much like its predecessors.

Benefits

• Bigger battery
• A flagship phone that isn’t huge
• More AI Assistant Options

Disadvantages

• Too similar to last year’s S25
• Cameras could be improved
• Perplexity integration is limited

Material

Let’s focus on the changes. The Galaxy S26’s screen size is a bit larger than its predecessor; 6.3 inches, compared to 6.2 inches on the S25. However, it still has the same FHD+ resolution (2340 x 1080). Given the slight difference in size, there is no particular loss of sharpness. The screen can also get slightly brighter, reaching 3,000 nits, which is always welcome, especially when Samsung has increased the battery to 4,300 mAh from the S25’s 4,000 mAh. (The S25 has already impressed us with its battery longevity.)

The design, however, remains largely unchanged. The trio of cameras now sit on a unified circular island and that’s all I really have to say. Again, this is high-end Samsung hardware, but otherwise I’ll just reiterate what I said last year…and our review from the year before.

Inside, Samsung has increased the base RAM to 12GB and storage to 256GB on the S26, doubling the space available on the S25. With the S26’s processor, Samsung has split the device into two different versions depending on region. In the US, you’ll get the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, like the S26 Ultra. Elsewhere, including my UK review unit, the S26 and (S26+) feature the internal Exynos 2600.

Samsung’s Exynos 2600 SoC is its first 2nm chip and should offer power efficiency improvements over larger alternatives. This year’s S26 had no difficulty with any of the games I played or with video editing tasks. Samsung claims its new chip delivers around 50% better performance for single-core and multi-core tasks. The Exynos 2600 features a new Xclipse 960 GPU, which can deliver double the graphics performance of the Exynos 2500.

On Geekbench 6, the Exynos S26 scored 3,151 on single-core tests and 10,664 on multi-core tests (not far behind the Snapdragon-powered S26 Ultra). Likewise, the GPU score (24425) isn’t far behind – these are pleasant surprises. There is a but that happens.

Comparing battery drain tests between a Snapdragon S26 and my Exynos version revealed a shortcoming. Watching a looped video at 50% brightness, the Exynos iteration lasted almost 28 hours, while the Snapdragon 8 Elite S26 lasted almost 30 hours. Of course, that’s great longevity no matter which S26 model you buy. But this year’s flagship has a bigger battery, so why does the Exynos-powered version only match last year’s phone?

Cameras

Not much has changed in the makeup (or resolution) of the camera trio: there’s a 50-megapixel main, a 12-megapixel ultra-wide, and a 10-megapixel telephoto lens. This means that any improvement to photos and videos is subtle, to put it nicely.

It’s hard to discern the improvements this year without really peering into the dark photos and zooming right in. The S26 seems a bit faster at capturing bursts and high-resolution video. And while I prefer the pragmatic shooting of the Pixel 10a, the S26 offers a bit more versatility with its zoom and ultra-wide cameras. Crop zoom, for example, lets you get closer to subjects beyond 3X optical zoom, although more detail is lost than with the S26 Ultra and its higher-resolution sensors.

Once the photo is taken, Samsung’s AI toolset can take over. Photo Assist attempts to bring all of these editing features into one place, providing quick ways to reduce glare or remove photobombers. You can now use natural language text prompts to guide your photo editing.

For example, I tried to adjust the lighting more evenly in a photo of myself taken outdoors with a flash. I could do it with my rudimentary photo editing skills, but Samsung’s tools are fast and, more importantly, very easy to use. This is a feature where natural language interfaces really make sense.

Along with the front camera, Samsung has added its Object Aware Engine, promising better and more accurate rendering of skin and hair tones, as well as an improved portrait mode. But again, I noticed marginal differences. The S26 seemed to have better color accuracy than its predecessor, resulting in slightly warmer selfies.

For videos, Samsung Super Steady mode is now more versatile, maintaining consistent horizontal lock no matter your movements. As I mentioned during my hands-on, this is a nice addition, the kind of feature you typically see on action cameras and gimbals. It works well too, although the images pick up a bit of focus as they struggle to stabilize everything.

Rounding out the new additions is an auto-framing mode that crops your tracked subject as it moves. There’s some degree of automatic face and pet detection, but you can tap to apply tracking to whatever it locks onto well. This works particularly well with tripods, but there is a slight fluttering effect when the S26 tries to follow the movement of the phone. I also noticed distortion at the edge of the lens when the camera app kept my subject centered in the frame.

Software

Samsung’s S26 launch event suggested this was the era of agentic AI, with assistants now positioned to connect the dots between tasks themselves. But we are not there yet.

The company has slightly expanded many of the features introduced last year. Now Brief is able to pull data from more apps to generate more comprehensive daily summaries, but I mostly saw the usual suspects: weather, calendar reminders, and not much else.

On the S26, a new Now Nudge feature will suggest actions with a discreet icon, based on what’s happening on the screen, like sharing contact numbers with someone or suggesting calendar times when handling work emails.

Perplexity is an interesting addition. The S26 series finds itself in a curious place where it’s connected to no fewer than three AI assistants: Gemini, Bixby (bless its heart), and now Perplexity.

You need to install the Perplexity app (and log in to use it), but then you can choose to make it your primary AI assistant. There are some weird things missing: Samsung said the Perplexity integration would work across the entire phone, including its own browser app – something I was eager to test. Perplexity’s own browser, Comet, has a nifty feature that allows it to cycle through and summarize multiple tabs. I was deciding where to eat during my recent trip to Barcelona, ​​so I thought this was a great use case. However, this feature is not available in Samsung’s browser at the moment. According to Perplexity, Samsung will “integrate Perplexity APIs into Samsung Browser, with agent browser capabilities.”

Voice commands for “Hey Plex” also went unanswered. I discovered that I had to manually grant permissions to the Perplexity app for it to work like Google’s Gemini. This could just be an initial issue with a pre-release device and software, but Perplexity, as of now, doesn’t offer enough utility beyond what I was already accustomed to with Gemini.

Conclude

The Galaxy S26 is a solid phone, with improved battery capacity and more basic storage. Whether you get the Exynos or the Snapdragon S26, there is thankfully no performance gap like there has been in the past. However, the shorter battery life is a disappointing discovery from Samsung’s first 2nm chip.

For Samsung’s smaller flagships over the past three years, everything has been very much the same. Is the company now focusing on its true flagship Ultra phone and foldables to generate buzz and keep things exciting? That’s what it feels like. There’s nothing wrong with this safe and solid Android phone, but you can buy last year’s S25 and get a 99% identical experience for $99 less.