I have long believed that one of the greatest strengths Samsung brings to its smartphone lineup is its engineering breadth — its ability to manufacture some of the world’s most advanced displays, memory, and storage. Samsung’s latest innovation — Privacy Display — comes from its display division, enabling a unique experience in hardware that can’t simply be copied by its smartphone competitors.

Besides the genuinely innovative Privacy Display, the new Galaxy S26 smartphone series mostly embodies incremental improvements, albeit with an even heavier dose of AI than the last generation. I want to share my impression of the S26 lineup after attending the launch event in San Francisco and spending some time with the Galaxy S26 Ultra, S26+, and S26.

The New Galaxy S26 Series Specs

Samsung focused heavily on the Galaxy S26 Ultra at the launch, which makes sense considering that most of the improvements to the S26 lineup are found in this high-end model. During the launch, Samsung emphasized the phone’s AI capabilities, including partnerships with Google and Perplexity on Galaxy AI. Samsung also talked about Bixby as an AI agent, which is a bit confusing because before this event it seemed that Samsung was moving on from Bixby in favor of Google’s Gemini. To support its moves in AI, Samsung is shipping S26 phones with a minimum of 12GB across all models, most likely to enable Gemini and Bixby. (It also offers a 16GB Ultra model with 1TB of storage.)

The Galaxy S26 line marks a return to Samsung’s practice of splitting its different models and geographies across Snapdragon and Exynos processors. The Galaxy S26 Ultra will sport the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite globally, while the Galaxy S26 and S26+ will use either the Exynos 2600 or a Snapdragon chip depending on the region. Early benchmarks show performance across these chips being fairly close, but it will take some time before we understand the differences between the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and the Exynos 2600. While there will be lots of comparisons between these two SoCs available very soon, what ultimately matters for consumers is having a congruent experience across the different S26 models. That includes some of the Snapdragon for Galaxy customizations that Samsung has implemented with Qualcomm, including new ProScaler upscalers borrowed from Samsung’s TV business, along with MDNIe image-processing technology.

Architecturally, the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 includes eight of Qualcomm’s Oryon CPU cores with SME while the Exynos 2600 uses Arm’s latest 10-core configuration with SME2 cores. The Exynos 2600 CPU configuration is based on the Lumex CSS platform that I wrote about late last year. Samsung and Arm have recently touted the importance of SME2 for AI performance on the CPU. It has become apparent that while much of the AI performance conversation has been focused on the NPU and GPU, the CPU is still an important component of the AI inference equation, especially for smaller models and more latency-intensive applications.

Samsung Privacy Display Comes into Focus

The Galaxy S26 Ultra is the only phone with a 6.9-inch display, albeit with a lower PPI (500) than the S26+, which has the same resolution but in a 6.7-inch display. The major feature that is exclusive to the S26 Ultra is the new Privacy Display that has been teased and promoted ahead of the launch. This feature is a hardware capability that Samsung has built into the display at a pixel level, specifically for the purpose of enabling greater privacy when and where the user wants it. This feature can even be enabled for just part the screen or for specific applications, giving the user full granularity. Maximum privacy protection is also an option that changes how the display appears and provides a completely opaque display. These capabilities should help protect people’s passwords, sensitive messages, and other information from snooping eyes.

There’s clearly a lot of interest in this feature, and while it is available only on the Ultra today, I expect that Samsung could end up using it for laptops, tablets, and other smartphones that are less expensive. Meanwhile limiting its initial rollout to the S26 Ultra limits the scale of the deployment and allows Samsung to figure out whether consumers and businesses really want this feature and how broadly it might be deployed.

Even More Upgrades for the Galaxy Smartphone Lineup

Compared to the Galaxy S25+, the S26+ gets almost no upgrades other than a new SoC and 5W faster wireless charging. Meanwhile, the S26 Ultra has been upgraded with new Super Fast Charging 3.0, which adds 60W wired charging and 25W wireless charging. While Samsung didn’t include the magnets for Qi2 wireless charging in the phone itself, it has announced that cases with the magnets are already available. This should deliver effectively the same experience without adding thickness to the phone, which already comes in at a thinner 7.9mm, compared to the S25 Ultra’s 8.3mm.

The S26 Ultra’s camera configuration remains a four-camera array, including the same 200MP main camera, 50MP Ultrawide, 50MP 5x optical, and 10mp 3x optical telephoto cameras. What Samsung did upgrade, however, is the aperture of the main 200MP to f/1.4 from f/1.7, and the 5x telephoto to f/2.9 from f/3.4. These upgrades allow for faster shutter speeds during the day and better low-light performance with less noise at night.

Expanding the Role of Galaxy AI

Samsung has expanded the role of Galaxy AI with enhanced agentic experiences powered by a mixture of Gemini, Bixby, and Perplexity. While I understand why Samsung continues to keep Bixby around, I don’t think that the company should be hiding its more compelling AI features behind using the Samsung keyboard and browser, which might be among one of the least relevant apps on the phone. Whenever I get a new Samsung phone — and I’ve had plenty of them — I personally switch from the default keyboard to Gboard almost immediately.

In terms of AI upsides, it was nice to see Samsung lean into AI-enhanced photo editing, adding new capabilities and features that make it more fun and easier to use. Those include features like generative object removal and the ability to swap faces like Google has in the Pixel series of phones, which is one of the best features I’ve used on Android besides Samsung’s generative object removal.

The Galaxy S26 Still Has Plenty of Room for Improvement

While the Galaxy S26 Ultra addresses many of my complaints about the S25 Ultra, especially the slow rate of charging compared to the rest of the Android market, there are still plenty of other places for improvement. The battery on the S26 Ultra is not only the same as its predecessor, but it almost the same as for the S26+, which is a much smaller phone. The tech press has repeatedly asked Samsung (along with Apple) why they won’t adopt silicon-carbon batteries, which are now achieving as much as 7500 mAh in effectively the same space as a traditional 5000 mAh battery. As someone who has used devices equipped with Si-C batteries, I can tell you it totally changes the charging paradigm by requiring fewer charges and delivering more effective fast charging. For consumers’ sake, I hope that we will see Si-C technology gain adoption outside of China.

Besides improving the battery, I believe that Samsung can and should get even more aggressive about camera functionality on the Ultra. Yes, the Ultra camera setup is already nice, but it’s unclear what Samsung has done in this generation to compete with the likes of Oppo, Vivo, and Xiaomi in those companies’ markets — but also in the U.S. For example, Samsung owned the advantage in telephoto cameras for the longest time against Apple, but once Apple got a 4x optical zoom, it became much more competitive and eroded Samsung’s competitive moat.

Galaxy S26 family pre-orders began on February 25 and reached the shelves on March 11 for all models in all geographies. One thing to note is that Samsung has killed the 128GB model of the S26, which raises the base price to $899. The S26+ also gets a price bump to $1,099, while the S26 Ultra price remains the same at $1,299 (This might be due in part to the S26 Ultra being a high-end, relatively low-volume item, and price isn’t as much of a factor at that tier.)

All in all, I regard the Galaxy S26 Ultra as a unique device that has made some incremental improvements over the preceding generation, and that has a very impressive new display technology that seemingly everyone I’ve talked to wants in their next phone.