Samsung Galaxy S26 Review: Fun AI Tricks for a Steeper Price

Samsung’s baseline flagship is still a potent phone, but the extra $100 isn’t going toward the right upgrades.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 is a mix of fantastic innovations and idleness, with clear evidence of Samsung's odd approach to deciding which components to upgrade and which to let tread water. It's understandable that Samsung might hold back some of its fancier features for higher-tier phones, but it leaves its baseline model with awkward shortfalls that persist year over year. This has kept the Galaxy S26 in a state of arrested development for years, which would be weird if it weren't so expected.

The base model's charging rate hasn't sped up in six years, since the Galaxy S20. Upgrades are piecemeal compared to its predecessor, unless you count AI features that come to every S26 phone and some earlier ones via software updates.  While there are plenty of new AI tricks to try out, the overt emphasis on software over hardware upgrades makes me wonder what exactly makes the S26 worth buying over its predecessor.

That answer is compounded by another update — this time to the price, as the myriad challenges besetting the phone industry have finally pushed Samsung to bump up the Galaxy S26 to $900, up from $800 for its predecessor, last year's Galaxy S25. It's hard to hold it against Samsung, as the RAM shortage and other ongoing issues have led analysts to predict that many phones in 2026 will cost more.  This year's Galaxy is pricier but also more feature-packed than the baseline phones have ever been.

There are fewer exclusive perks in the $1,100 Galaxy S26 Plus and fewer reasons to pick the more expensive phone beyond faster charging and a larger display. This also makes the Galaxy S26 Ultra a better deal by comparison, as it's stayed at $1,300 for all its extensive bells and whistles, including sharper cameras, the S Pen stylus and the fancy new Privacy Display feature. The Galaxy S26 remains a good-looking handset, though its design hasn't changed much over the years.

The phone's dimensions have barely shifted from its predecessor, yet the display has increased to 6.3 inches, ever so slightly over its predecessor's 6.2-inch screen, suggesting the bezels have gotten smaller — to be almost invisible.  With flat sides and a glass back, the Galaxy S26 feels every inch the premium smartphone. This display size has seemingly become the standard across major flagship phones, with the iPhone 17 and Pixel 10 also using 6.3-inch displays.

Its AMOLED HDR10 Plus display (1,080×2,340 pixels) is sharp and bright, with 2,600-nit peak brightness that's not quite the highest in the industry (the iPhone 17 Pro phones top out at 3,000 nits), but it ensures plenty of visibility in broad daylight.  The Galaxy S26 has an IP68 rating for dust and water resistance, keeping out beach sand and surviving dunks in knee-high water for up to half an hour.

The phone comes in cobalt violet, white, sky blue and black hues. There's not much else to say about the Galaxy S26's looks, which is prime recognition that so much more is changing inside the phone than outside. The Galaxy S26's three cameras include a 50-megapixel wide-angle, a 13-megapixel ultrawide and a 10-megapixel 3x optical zoom telephoto. Cameras have always been a strong suit in Samsung's phones, and the Galaxy S26 still shoots great photos.

All of its upgrades this year are software-based, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as color correction and focus can lead to great images. There are several new AI features that won't be useful to everyone but range from helpful to playfully fun — and I'm saying this as a grumpy skeptic. The Galaxy S26 has the same cameras as its predecessor, packing a 50-megapixel wide-angle, a 13-megapixel ultrawide and a 10-megapixel 3x optical zoom telephoto.

For no apparent hardware improvements, the shots I took were still pretty stellar. There is one new thing that stands out above the rest: Horizontal Lock, a kind of auto-stabilization on steroids. Ever worry about introducing shaky cam to your videos? Worry no more.  I wiggled, shook and even turned the Galaxy S26 upside down when I used the feature to record expensive cars in Barcelona's fancy shopping district, but it didn't matter: The resulting footage stayed upright and steady.

It was pretty remarkable, and a surprise to find Samsung's claims born out. Asus included a similar feature in its now-dormant Zenfone and ROG Phone lines for video, using a gimbal-like system, which could make it much easier to capture smooth footage in hectic environments.  You'll need to manually turn on Horizontal Lock when you want to use it: while in the Camera app's video tab, tap the four dots on the right side, then the running man (third from left), then the outlined running man on the right to activate the feature.

And yes, you'll need to switch it back on every time you switch back to video.  Here are a few standard landscape shots, though I shot them in Barcelona during MWC 2026, and the city itself tends to elevate anything within it above "standard." Note the difference between a cloudy gray day in front of the Recinte Modernista Sant Pau's administration building and the vibrantly blue skies above the Ciutadella Park by the water.

The Galaxy S26 takes good, balanced shots of food. There's a range of colors, but I didn't love that the phone pulled focus toward the main dish and blurred the rest — I'm not exactly taking a portrait photo of my shakshuka here. The telephoto capabilities are pretty solid, with clarity from its 3x optical zoom up to 30x digital zoom. Outside the massive Sagrada Familia cathedral, a staggering modern edifice that will finally finish major construction in July 2026 after a century of labor, the Galaxy S26 captures what it can.

Zooming in reveals a litany of detail, including bricks and the building's wear, with each section of the exterior revealing a new, carefully crafted vignette.  Admittedly, I started with the ultra-wide camera to even get the whole building in the shot (note the stretched people on the bottom), but the Galaxy S26's telephoto is up to the challenge of peering closer at the middle-left side of the structure.

The Sagrada Familia shot at 10x zoom with the Galaxy S26's telephoto camera and digital zoom. The phone sometimes fumbled subtle lighting shifts in a blanket of gray clouds, or when the sky poked through between buildings above city streets, but it captured other color and details well. In Barcelona's historic Gothic Quarter, the streets felt alive; the sky, not so much.  The phone performed better with colorful subjects, such as the plants in this botanical garden in Ciutadella Park.

And selfies were surprisingly good for the 12-megapixel front-facing camera, another shooter inherited from the Galaxy S26's predecessor. Here I am in a room coming straight from a wedding. While hanging out in the room, I had time to play with the phone's new AI photo features. Note that these are all post-production edits, as none of the S26's AI tools are usable while the camera app is open and before the shutter has been clicked.

Head to the Gallery app, open up a photo and tap that cluster of stars in the center of the menu at the bottom of the screen.  Midway through the Samsung Galaxy S26 using AI to generate a new background for a photo. This opens the AI editing screen with four options, several of which should be familiar to the Midjourney, Claude and other AI artists out there. AI eraser does what you'd expect, and works decently well (I trimmed out my tie above, just to see if it could, and it did — helpful if you catch a stain too late).

Move is also self-explanatory. (I cut out my tie and moved it over my shoulder; the AI helpfully rounded the bottom of the tie so it wasn't oddly flat.) Style lets you convert photos to be re-envisioned in another style, like anime or comic or pop art. (I tried for sci-fi, and it turned my pink suit beige — no fun in the future.) The fourth AI feature is the one that people will likely use most, and was the most enjoyable: requesting AI (presumably Gemini) to make edits based on a written request.

I asked to be put in a beach background, naturally, to reasonable success. Then I turned the camera outward to take in the view from the room. As an aviation fan, I asked the AI to add zeppelins to the skyscape — and yes, while they were just a bunch of similarly generic silvery dirigibles, matching the lighting to get a sunset sheen on their metallic skins (with roughly correct angles of the sun) was a great touch.

These are fun features, and the app does notify you that saving an image that's been altered by AI will attach a digital watermark to identify it as AI-edited — a great and responsible feature. Note that you'll need to be online to use this feature, so it's not all on-device, and every cute photo tweak will, however slightly, negatively impact the environment.  Samsung hasn't announced which of these features will be coming to older phones, but it could be coming in the OneUI 8.5 update that's next for older Galaxy phones, though Samsung hasn't said when it's coming or which handsets it'll come to — but the beta for the update, which launched in December, arrived with compatibility for the Galaxy S25.  The Galaxy S26 is the fast, powerful phone I expected it to be.

Though it's not quite the top tier of phones, as evidenced by its benchmark scores and not hitting the highest graphics settings in games, I didn't notice any other shortcomings in its performance. The Galaxy S26 is one of the first phones to pack Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (technically a "for Galaxy" version optimized for Galaxy AI), after phones like the OnePlus 15 landed with the chip late last year.

Both phones scored pretty similarly in Geekbench 6, with Samsung getting a single-core score of 3698 and a multi-core score of 10809.  The Galaxy S26 scored slightly better in 3DMark's Wild Life Extreme test (7,664 and 45.9fps) than OnePlus' flagship. In all our tests, the only other phones that met or exceeded those were the iPhone 17 Pro Max and RedMagic 11 Pro.  The Galaxy S26's scores were higher than those of the Galaxy S25, despite both packing 12GB of RAM, suggesting Qualcomm's newest chip is the deciding factor.

Among other hardware differences are storage and battery. Samsung's newest phone starts at 256GB (with a new $1,100 option for 512GB on the base model), partially justifying the $100 price bump by eliminating the 128GB configuration. Admittedly, it's now hard to justify buying an expensive phone with just 128GB of storage, as high-resolution photos and videos, along with the increasing file sizes of games and apps, will fill it up fast.  The S26 does have a couple of other upgrades over last year's S25.

The new phone's 4,300-mAh battery is larger than its predecessor's 4,000-mAh one and lasts about a day in regular use. While that's acceptable among phones, it left me fondly remembering the two-day battery life I got with the OnePlus 15 and its 7,000-mAh capacity unit. But the charging speed is falling behind that of similarly priced phones. Its 25-watt wired speed managed to juice up the phone from dead to 55% in 30 minutes (taking over an hour to reach full), while its 15-watt wireless speed recharged 22% in half an hour.

It's a paltry number that can only be upgraded by paying more for the Galaxy S26 Plus (itself price-bumped to $1,100), though even that phone's 45-watt maximum wired charging speed pales in comparison to the OnePlus 15's 80- to 100-watt charging rate. Even the $499 Google Pixel 10A and the $550 Motorola Edge include faster charging, at 30 watts and 68 watts respectively, making it stand out that the base S26 hasn't found a way to pick it up.

Despite not substantially increasing the battery size or the charging rate, the Galaxy S26 still doesn't include magnets for attaching accessories or wireless chargers, unlike the iPhone 17 and Google Pixel 10. Samsung does sell cases with a magnetic ring, which I used just fine, but it does require an additional purchase for functionality that other phones include in their design. Samsung continues to support reverse wireless charging, letting it juice up other phones, wireless earbud cases, and the Galaxy Watch.

The Galaxy S26 comes with Android 16 out of the box, along with Samsung's One UI 8.5, which includes more AI features and which Samsung says delivers a more personalized experience based on usage patterns, something we've been promised before (and I personally haven't had enough time to see in action). The phone will get seven years of Android and security updates. Now that people have gotten more used to asking ChatGPT and other generative AI questions, Samsung smartly improved its Bixby assistant to respond to conversational language.

When I asked whether I'd need a jacket in the city I was set to visit, Bixby told me it was light jacket weather — unlike where I was currently in Southern California, which was set to experience a heat wave.  Google is debuting its updated Circle to Search on the Galaxy S26, which lets you refine circles to specifics, like tracking down circled clothing items. I didn't get to test this feature much during our review period, but my (much more fashionable) colleague, lead writer Vanessa Hand Orellana, said it "nailed [her] outfit" when she tried it out at Samsung Unpacked.  Other AI features are more situational.

Audio Eraser aims to eliminate background noise while watching videos on streaming services like Netflix and platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Document Scanner automatically removes creases and shadows to improve readability. A pair of calling features are helpful additions — Call Screening lets Galaxy AI start a phone conversation for you to ask who's calling, and Scam Detection will alert you if it sounds like a caller is trying to scam you (which means Galaxy AI is listening in to your calls, but what's the worse of those evils?).  Rounding out the new Galaxy AI features are Creative Studio, which lets you turn photos into stickers and generate event invitations, and Now Nudge, which "surfaces relevant info, images and documents" across apps.

The latter is a tougher feature to test and aligns with claims we've heard for years that AI is tailoring apps and experiences to our behavior. Google's Magic Cue — which provides shortcuts based on what's on your screen — has a similar promise. But at this early stage, I didn't find the Now Nudge to activate enough to be noticeable, but I would expect that with longer-term use, it might activate more often.

The Galaxy S26 follows Samsung's strategy of annoyingly withholding improvements other flagship phones got years ago to differentiate its lineup. Yet if you can stomach the slower charging speed and smaller battery capacity, the phone's software and AI tricks make it a standout flagship for 2026. The big question is price, and for better or worse, Samsung is the guinea pig of rising prices this year.

The $900 price tag for a baseline flagship is steep, but that will likely only age better throughout 2026 as more phones are expected to get more expensive due to the RAM shortage. And let's be honest: Samsung and US carriers love tons of trade-in and discount deals, which will mitigate the price hike to some degree. Aside from the improved processor, additional storage space and Horizontal Lock for videos, you might be able to save some money by looking into last year's Galaxy S25, especially since the phone's cameras are otherwise the same and Samsung is still selling it.

As of this writing, its 256GB model is $860, which is only a little cheaper than the Galaxy S26, though. I have quibbles with Samsung's strategy, but the compromises don't keep the Galaxy S26 from being a phone that's easy to recommend — and will be a better value at a lower price.  Every phone tested by CNET's reviews team was actually used in the real world. We test a phone's features, play games and take photos.

We examine the display to see if it's bright, sharp and vibrant. We analyze the design and build to see how it holds and whether it has an IP rating for water resistance. We push the processor's performance to the extremes using standardized benchmark tools like GeekBench and 3DMark, along with our own anecdotal observations navigating the interface, recording high-resolution videos and playing graphically intense games at high refresh rates.

All the cameras are tested in a variety of conditions, from bright sunlight to dark indoor scenes. We try out special features like night mode and portrait mode, and compare our findings against similarly priced competing phones. We also check battery life by using it daily and running a series of battery-drain tests. We take into account additional features like support for 5G, satellite connectivity, fingerprint and face sensors, stylus support, fast charging speeds and foldable displays, among others, that can be useful.

We balance all of this against the price to give you the verdict on whether that phone, at whatever price, actually represents good value. While these tests may not always be reflected in CNET's initial review, we conduct follow-up and long-term testing in most circumstances.

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