Samsung Galaxy S26 review: The smartphone status quo

It's already smartphone season. Samsung's annual deluge encompasses three new phones for 2026: the frontier-pushing S26 Ultra ($1,300) with its innovative Privacy Screen, the S26 ($899) and the S26+ ($999). The smaller flagships, yet again, are iterative versions of what came before, with the major differences centering on bigger batteries and brighter screens.

I'm getting waves of deja vu as I review the Galaxy S26, because at times I was writing exactly what I wrote last year — including the part about it being a little too similar to what came before.

• Bigger battery
• A flagship phone that isn’t huge
• More AI assistant options

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

Hardware

Let's focus on the changes. The Galaxy S26's screen size ...