Samsung Galaxy S26: Innovative AI but Rising Prices, a Dilemma

A Modern Design but Rising Prices

The Samsung Galaxy S26 presents itself as a blend of fascinating innovations and stagnation, illustrating Samsung's delicate balance in choosing which components to upgrade. While Samsung reserves some of its most sophisticated innovations for its high-end models, this leaves its base model with persistent shortcomings year after year. The Galaxy S26 has thus remained in a state of halted development for several years, a situation that, while surprising, has become almost expected. The charging rate of the base model has not evolved in six years, since the Galaxy S20. Improvements are primarily software-based compared to its predecessor, with the exception of AI features that are integrated into every S26 phone and some earlier models via software updates. Although there is a notable amount of new AI tricks to try, the emphasis on software rather than hardware upgrades raises questions about the added value of the S26 compared to its predecessor.

This question is complicated by another update: the price. The numerous challenges facing the phone industry have ultimately led Samsung to increase the price of the Galaxy S26 to $900, up from $800 for its predecessor, the Galaxy S25 from last year. It's hard to blame Samsung for this, as the RAM shortage and other ongoing issues have led analysts to predict that many phones in 2026 will become more expensive. The S25 line is still on sale but has not seen a price drop.

This year's Galaxy is more expensive but also richer in features than base phones have ever been, which means there are fewer exclusive advantages in the $1,100 Galaxy S26 Plus and not as many reasons to choose the pricier model beyond faster charging and a larger screen. This also makes the Galaxy S26 Ultra a better choice in comparison, as it remains at $1,300 for all its many features, including sharper cameras, the S Pen stylus, and the new Privacy Display feature.

Design and Display of the Samsung Galaxy S26

The Galaxy S26 remains an attractive device, although its appearance hasn't changed much over the years. The phone's dimensions have barely evolved compared to its predecessor, but the screen has slightly increased to 6.3 inches, compared to the 6.2-inch display of its predecessor, suggesting that the bezels have become smaller, almost invisible. With flat sides and a glass back, the Galaxy S26 gives the impression of a premium smartphone. This screen size seems to have become the norm among all major flagship phones, with the iPhone 17 and Pixel 10 also using 6.3-inch displays.

Its AMOLED HDR10+ display (1,080 x 2,340 pixels) is sharp and bright, with a maximum brightness of 2,600 nits, which is not quite the highest in the industry (the iPhone 17 Pro reaches 3,000 nits), but ensures good visibility in daylight. The Galaxy S26 has an IP68 certification to resist dust and water, protecting it from beach sand and allowing it to survive immersions in water up to the knees for 30 minutes. The phone is available in cobalt purple, white, sky blue, and black.

And… there’s not much else to say about the appearance of the Galaxy S26, which is an obvious acknowledgment that much more is changing inside the phone than outside.

Cameras of the Samsung Galaxy S26

Cameras have always been a strong point of Samsung phones, and the Galaxy S26 continues to take great photos. All its improvements this year are software-based, which is not necessarily a bad thing, as color correction and focusing lead to excellent images. There are several new AI features, which may not be useful to everyone, but range from helpful to playful fun — and I say this as a grumpy skeptic.

The Galaxy S26 has the same cameras as its predecessor, with a 50-megapixel wide angle, a 13-megapixel ultra-wide angle, and a 10-megapixel telephoto with 3x optical zoom. Without apparent hardware improvements, the photos I took were still quite impressive.

There is one standout novelty: Horizontal Lock, a kind of enhanced automatic stabilization. Worried about introducing a shaky camera effect into your videos? Worry no more. I moved, shook, and even flipped the Galaxy S26 while using this feature to record luxury cars in Barcelona's upscale shopping district, but it didn’t matter: the resulting images remained straight and stable. It was quite remarkable, and I was surprised to see Samsung's claims validated. Asus had included a similar feature in its Zenfone and ROG Phone lines for video using a gimbal-type system, which could make capturing smooth footage in moving environments easier.

You will need to manually activate Horizontal Lock when you want to use it: in the video tab of the camera app, tap the square of four dots on the right side, then tap the moving person (third from the left), and then tap the moving person surrounded on the right to activate the function. And yes, you will need to reactivate it each time you return to video.

Here are some standard landscape photos, although I took them in Barcelona during MWC 2026, and the city itself tends to elevate everything found within it above "standard." Note the difference between a cloudy, gray day in front of the administrative building of the Recinte Modernista Sant Pau and the vibrant blue sky above the Parc de la Ciutadella near the water.

The Galaxy S26 takes good, balanced food photos. There is a range of colors, but I didn’t like that the phone focused on the main dish and blurred the rest — I’m not exactly taking a portrait photo of my shakshuka here.

The telephoto capabilities are quite solid, with clarity ranging from 3x optical zoom to 30x digital zoom. In front of the massive Sagrada Familia cathedral, an impressive modern structure that will finally complete its major construction in July 2026 after a century of work, the Galaxy S26 captures what it can. Zooming in reveals a multitude of details, including bricks and wear on some elements of the exterior, each section revealing a new carefully crafted vignette.

Let’s admit that I started with the ultra-wide camera to get the entire building in frame (note the stretched people at the bottom), but the Galaxy S26's telephoto is up to the challenge of getting close to the left side of the building.

The phone sometimes struggled with subtle variations in light under a gray sky, or when the sky peeked between buildings above the city streets, but it captured other colors and details well. In the historic Gothic quarter of Barcelona, the streets seemed alive; the sky, not so much.

The phone performed better with colorful subjects, like the plants in this botanical garden at the Parc de la Ciutadella.

And selfies were surprisingly good from the 12-megapixel front camera, another sensor inherited from the Galaxy S26's predecessor. While I was hanging out in the room, I had time to play with the phone's new AI photo features. Note that all these modifications are post-production touch-ups, as none of the S26's AI tools are usable when the camera app is open and before the shutter is pressed. Go to the Gallery app, open a photo, and tap the star group in the center of the menu at the bottom of the screen.

This opens the AI editing screen with four options, several of which should be familiar to AI artists like Midjourney and Claude. The AI eraser does what you expect and works quite well (I cropped my tie above, just to see if it could be done, and it worked — useful if you catch a stain too late). Move is also explicit. (I cropped my tie and moved it onto my shoulder; the AI skillfully rounded the bottom of the tie so it wasn’t oddly flat.) Style allows you to convert photos to be reimagined in another style, like anime or pop art. (I tried for sci-fi, and it turned my pink suit into beige — no fun in the future.)

The fourth AI feature is likely the one people will use the most, and it was the most enjoyable: asking the AI (probably Gemini) to make touch-ups based on a written request. I asked to be placed in a beach background, naturally, with reasonable success.

Then, I turned the camera outward to capture the view from the room. As an aviation enthusiast, I asked the AI to add blimps to the landscape — and yes, although they were just a bunch of generic silver blimps, matching the lighting to get a sunset reflection on their metallic skins (with roughly correct sun angles) was a great detail.

These are fun features, and the app warns you that saving an AI-modified image will add a digital watermark to identify it as AI-modified — an excellent and responsible feature. Note that you will need to be online to use this feature, so it’s not entirely on-device, and every little photo touch-up will have, even slightly, a negative impact on the environment. Samsung has not announced which of these features will be available on older phones, but that could change.