Hands on: the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus are more of the same for more money

There’s a cool caller hardware characteristic debuting astatine Samsung’s yearly Unpacked arena — but you won’t find it connected the Galaxy S26 aliases S26 Plus. While the Ultra exemplary gets a caller Privacy Display and avoids a value hike, Samsung’s guidelines models are mostly package updates that costs much than the outgoing models.

Don’t get maine wrong, immoderate of those package updates are beautiful neat. You tin use Audio Eraser to third-party apps to make voices easier to perceive and select retired inheritance noise. Google’s Gemini AI will commencement doing agentic things — for illustration booking an Uber for you — which is simply a measurement toward fulfilling the committedness of an adjunct that really assists. A fewer Pixel features are rubbing disconnected connected the S26 series, too, for illustration scam discovery for telephone calls and contextual accusation that surfaces successful the keyboard. But galore of these features are apt to make their measurement to erstwhile years’ models.

There’s a spot upgrade, of course. In the US, the S26 and S26 Plus will travel pinch a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset, arsenic does the S26 Ultra, but successful different regions, only the Ultra comes pinch the Qualcomm chipset. The S26 Plus gets somewhat faster wireless charging — up to 20W versus 15W — and the S26 gets a mini artillery capacity boost from 4,000mAh to 4,300mAh. Progress is progress, but that’s not precisely worldly to constitute location about.

The S26 and S26 Plus look and consciousness a batch for illustration their predecessors, too. I’ve been utilizing folding phones for the past mates of months, and the regular S26 feels downright petite, moreover though it has a 6.3-inch display. Both models travel pinch 12GB of RAM, though retention options person shifted a little.

The S26 now starts astatine 256GB of storage. But moreover factoring that in, this year’s exemplary is $899 — still $40 much costly than the S25’s 256GB option. The S26 Plus continues to connection 256GB of retention successful its guidelines configuration and now costs $1,099, up from $999 for the S25 Plus. If we were wondering erstwhile the RAM situation mightiness commencement impacting telephone prices, well, I deliberation we person our answer.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge