is a news editor with over a decade’s experience in journalism. He previously worked at Android Police and Tech Advisor.
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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.
The S26 cameras are now mounted on an oval island, which is the biggest change to the phones’ designs.
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.
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