Samsung's Galaxy S26 Series Proves That AI Is Now the Product, Not the Phone

Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked is reliably one of the year's most-watched smartphone events, and the February 25 show in San Francisco followed the familiar formula: a stage full of superlatives, a roster of performance benchmarks, and a lot of emphasis on artificial intelligence. The Galaxy S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra are now official, available for pre-order, and landing in customers' hands on March 11. But what actually changed, and how much of it matters beyond the marketing?

The honest answer is nuanced. This is a generation defined less by hardware leaps and more by a deliberate software maturation strategy. Samsung isn't pretending otherwise — TM Roh opened Unpacked by framing Galaxy AI not as a feature set but as the lens through which the entire phone should be understood. Whether that framing holds up under scrutiny depends on what you're comparing it to and what you were hoping for.

The Hardware Story: Evolution, Not Revolution

Before getting into what the numbers mean, here's how the full S26 lineup stacks up on paper:

The base S26 gets the most noticeable single upgrade of the three models relative to its predecessor: the display grows from 6.2 to 6.3 inches and the battery climbs from 4,000 to 4,300 mAh, a meaningful bump for a form factor that historically trailed the Plus on endurance. The design also introduces something Samsung hasn't done in years — a unified camera island on the back rather than the individual floating lenses on the S25. It's a cleaner look, closer to what Apple landed on with the iPhone 17 Pro, though Samsung's implementation groups all three lenses inside a raised pill-shaped housing.

The S26+ maintains its QHD display advantage over the base model and now carries a 4,900 mAh battery. It remains the practical sweet spot of the lineup — more screen and stamina than the standard S26 without the Ultra's price premium or physical footprint.

The Ultra is where the most consequential hardware decisions landed. At 7.9mm thick and 214 grams, it's Samsung's slimmest and lightest Ultra ever — 0.3mm thinner and 4 grams lighter than the S25 Ultra. Part of that came from switching the chassis material from titanium back to aluminum, a trade-off that will register differently depending on how much you weighted the S25 Ultra's premium feel. The S Pen remains, though it continues to ship without Bluetooth functionality, a limitation that has persisted since the S25 Ultra and is worth noting for power users who relied on its remote capabilities.

The chipset story has a regional wrinkle worth flagging. In the US, all three models run Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy — a customized variant Samsung claims delivers 19% better CPU performance, 24% GPU gains, and a 39% NPU improvement over the previous generation. In Europe and parts of Asia, the S26 and S26+ will ship with Samsung's own Exynos 2600, the first consumer-ready 2nm chip. It's a silicon milestone in its own right, though the real-world performance delta between the two won't be clear until independent testing is complete.

RAM holds at 12GB across all standard configurations, with 16GB available only on the 1TB Ultra. With competitors like OnePlus shipping 16GB as a baseline this year, Samsung's decision to hold the line will invite scrutiny — though 12GB remains more than adequate for current workloads.

Charging has been upgraded most meaningfully on the Ultra. Super Fast Charging 3.0 brings 60W wired speeds, hitting roughly 75% in 30 minutes — a significant step up from the S25 Ultra's 45W. Wireless charging improves to 25W on the Ultra, 15W on the base and Plus. Notably absent across the lineup is Qi2 magnetic wireless charging, which Google added to the Pixel 10 series this year. For users who've invested in a Qi2 accessory ecosystem, that gap remains.

One longer-term hardware question surfaced before launch and hasn't been answered yet. EU regulatory filings indicated the S26 series is rated for 1,200 charge cycles before dropping below 80% battery capacity, compared to 2,000 cycles on the S25 series. Samsung hasn't addressed the discrepancy publicly, and it's the kind of detail that deserves scrutiny in long-term testing rather than being buried in spec footnotes.

Camera: Incremental Refinement with One Genuine Advance

The camera system on the S26 Ultra retains its 200-megapixel main sensor and 50-megapixel ultrawide, but the optics received an upgrade. Both the primary wide and telephoto cameras now feature wider apertures — the main sensor moves to f/1.4 — which Samsung says lets in roughly 47% more light. In practice, that aperture improvement should translate to better low-light photography and video without the computational overhead of aggressive noise reduction.

The 3x telephoto lens sees an upgrade from 10MP to 12MP. It's incremental, but combined with the wider aperture, it's the kind of refinement that produces measurably better zoom shots in challenging lighting rather than a spec-sheet checkbox.

More substantively, the AI ISP — the image signal processor that handles color and detail on the rear cameras — has been extended to the front camera for the first time on an Ultra model. The selfie camera now benefits from the same tone-mapping and detail processing that made the S25 Ultra's rear shots stand out, particularly in mixed lighting.

The S26 Ultra also adds APV codec support, a professional-grade video format designed for lossless-quality production workflows. Most users won't ever encounter APV, but for videographers using their phone as a B-camera or run-and-gun production tool, it's a meaningful addition that opens up cleaner post-production workflows.

Enhanced Nightography Video, upgraded Super Steady with a new horizontal lock option, and improved stabilization round out the camera story. None of these are headline-grabbing reinventions, but the cumulative effect is a camera system that's more reliable and precise than last year's — which was already excellent.

Privacy Display: The Standout Feature

The single hardware innovation that genuinely distinguishes the S26 Ultra from its predecessor is the built-in Privacy Display. This is a first for a consumer smartphone: the Ultra's 6.9-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel can dynamically narrow its viewing angle on demand, making the screen difficult to read from the side while remaining fully visible straight-on.

Privacy screen protectors have existed for years, but they carry a persistent penalty — reduced brightness, a yellowed tint, and a fixed level of obscuring that can't be turned off. Samsung's implementation is software-toggleable and, based on demos at Unpacked, delivers the same peak 2,600 nits brightness when Privacy Display is inactive. Testing under real-world conditions will determine whether the active privacy mode introduces any perceptible quality tradeoffs, but the concept is sound and the execution looks promising.

For frequent travelers, public transit commuters, or anyone who handles sensitive information on their phone, this is the kind of feature that addresses a genuine problem rather than a manufactured one.

One UI 8.5 and Galaxy AI: The Real Pitch

Samsung launched the S26 series running Android 16 with One UI 8.5 on top, backed by its seven-year OS and security update commitment. The software side is arguably where Samsung wants the upgrade conversation to focus.

Galaxy AI in its third generation leans heavily into what Samsung calls "agentic AI" — the idea that the phone anticipates and acts on your behalf rather than waiting for explicit commands. Now Brief has been updated to pull from a deeper integration with the personal data engine, surfacing relevant information from your notifications, messages, and calendar without manual input. Now Bar gains adaptive recommendations. And Now Nudge is a new addition that handles contextual suggestions — if someone asks to see photos from a recent trip, the phone can interpret that intent and surface the relevant images automatically.

Bixby received its most substantial upgrade in years, gaining natural language command support and real-time web search capability. Perhaps more importantly, Samsung has opened up the assistant layer to Gemini and Perplexity as first-class alternatives, letting users choose their preferred AI assistant without needing to dig through settings. Perplexity's Sonar API is powering parts of the on-device AI experience, which brings a different flavor of web-connected intelligence than Google's ecosystem alone.

Photo Assist now accepts natural language editing requests — users can describe what they want changed and the system handles it, whether that's altering the time of day in a scene, removing a spill from clothing, or reconstructing a partially obscured object. Edits are stackable and reversible. Creative Studio consolidates image creation and editing into a single interface. AI Screenshot Categorization automatically organizes screenshots so they're findable later.

Call Screening and spam filter protection are expanding to additional countries. These AI-powered call features have been available in the US for a few generations and represent the kind of genuinely useful, low-friction AI application that earns trust quietly over time.

One important note for S25 owners considering the upgrade: Samsung has confirmed that all Galaxy AI features coming to the S26 series will also be available on the S25. The AI experience isn't exclusive to new hardware, which is good for existing users but makes the software pitch a weaker upgrade justification than it might otherwise be.

Pricing and the Upgrade Math

The Galaxy S26 starts at $899, an increase of $100 over the S25's launch price. The S26+ opens at $1,099, also up $100. The S26 Ultra holds at $1,299 for the 256GB model — consistent with last year's pricing.

The price increases on the base and Plus models are the most friction-inducing element of this launch. Samsung's pre-order trade-in deals, which offer up to $700 off with eligible devices, help cushion the impact, but the sticker prices represent a real shift.

For S25 Ultra owners, the calculus is straightforward: Privacy Display and faster charging are the substantive hardware differences, and neither alone is likely to justify a full-price upgrade for most users. For S24 and older device owners, the picture changes significantly — two chipset generations, a meaningfully better camera system, and One UI 8.5's AI improvements represent a legitimate generational leap.

What the S26 Series Says About Samsung's Direction

Samsung is threading a needle with this series. The hardware is refined and competent without being dramatically different from last year. The software is genuinely improving and increasingly cohesive. And Privacy Display is an innovation that solves a real problem in a way no competitor has managed on device.

The more interesting question is whether Samsung's AI-first positioning will hold up as Apple's on-device intelligence matures and Google's Pixel AI features continue to get sharper. Samsung has built an AI platform that spans Bixby, Gemini, and Perplexity — a multi-assistant strategy that no other Android manufacturer is attempting at this scale. That flexibility is genuinely differentiated. Whether it feels cohesive in daily use, or whether it reads as three competing systems awkwardly coexisting, will be the real test.

The Galaxy S26 series isn't designed to make headlines with a single breathtaking leap. It's designed to make Galaxy ownership feel reliably excellent — and to quietly expand what the phone can do on your behalf without asking you to change how you use it. For Samsung's installed base of hundreds of millions of users, that steady cadence of meaningful-if-incremental progress may be exactly what the next three to four years of ownership looks like.