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

There’s a cool new hardware feature debuting at Samsung’s annual Unpacked event — but you won’t find it on the Galaxy S26 or S26 Plus. While the Ultra model gets a new Privacy Display and avoids a price hike, Samsung’s base models are largely software updates that cost more than the outgoing models.

Don’t get me wrong, some of those software updates are pretty neat. You can apply Audio Eraser to third-party apps to make voices easier to hear and filter out background noise. Google’s Gemini AI will start doing agentic things — like booking an Uber for you — which is a step toward fulfilling the promise of an assistant that actually assists. A few Pixel features are rubbing off on the S26 series, too, like scam detection for phone calls and contextual information that surfaces in the keyboard. But many of these features are likely to make their way to previous years’ models.

There’s a chip upgrade, of course. In the US, the S26 and S26 Plus will come with a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chipset, as does the S26 Ultra, but in other regions, only the Ultra comes with the Qualcomm chipset. The S26 Plus gets slightly faster wireless charging — up to 20W versus 15W — and the S26 gets a small battery capacity boost from 4,000mAh to 4,300mAh. Progress is progress, but that’s not exactly stuff to write home about.

The S26 and S26 Plus look and feel a lot like their predecessors, too. I’ve been using folding phones for the past couple of months, and the regular S26 feels downright petite, even though it has a 6.3-inch display. Both models come with 12GB of RAM, though storage options have shifted a little.

The S26 now starts at 256GB of storage. But even factoring that in, this year’s model is $899 — still $40 more expensive than the S25’s 256GB option. The S26 Plus continues to offer 256GB of storage in its base configuration and now costs $1,099, up from $999 for the S25 Plus. If we were wondering when the RAM situation might start impacting phone prices, well, I think we have our answer.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge