New Samsung Galaxy S26 Line Leans Into More Useful, Hands-On AI
The latest flagship phones offer modest upgrades, like a new privacy display and chipset, and AI features that can help simplify your life
Samsung has just unveiled the new Galaxy S26 smartphone line, touting a handful of modest improvements to its flagship phones—like new chipsets, a slightly larger screen on the S26, and a neat privacy display for the S26 Ultra. But the buzziest announcements again center on AI.
With the S26, S26 Plus, and high-end S26 Ultra, Samsung promises a Galaxy phone that’s integrated with AI top to bottom, proving more capable of tackling complex tasks for you. One day soon, Galaxy users can count on AI to do everything, including ordering dinner, merging photos, and calling a car on command, Samsung says.
New Colors, Chips, and Rounded Ultra Edges
There are no major design shake-ups in the S26 line. Still, Samsung managed to squeeze in a handful of modest upgrades.
The S26 now sports a slightly larger display—moving from 6.2 to 6.3 inches (measured diagonally)—and a slight boost in battery capacity. The model also starts with 256 gigabytes of storage, not 128, bringing it in line with the S26 Plus.
With the S26 Ultra, Samsung managed to shave off a little weight, perhaps aided by shifting back from titanium to an aluminum frame. It also rounded the corners, finally ditching the boxy, Galaxy Note-esque design from previous years. The S26 Ultra can charge even faster, Samsung says, thanks to the added 60-watt “Super Fast” charging capability.
All three S26 models now come with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset, which will improve performance and enable more demanding on-device AI tasks, according to the manufacturer.
The suite of color options is relatively muted: cobalt violet, sky blue, black, and white, as well as the online-exclusive options of silver and pink gold. (No bright orange for Galaxy fans, à la the iPhone 17 Pro.)
In my week of use, the S26 phones offered everything we’ve come to expect from a flagship smartphone. The models are nice to look at and hold, plenty smooth when scrolling, and perfectly capable of tackling day-to-day tasks. CR’s testers will weigh in soon on how the upgrades affect performance, battery life, and display quality, but I can venture to say they’re unlikely to strike most casual scrollers and surfers as a significant shift.
A Great Camera—and More AI Photo Editing Tools
The camera systems stay largely the same, aside from a couple of nice additions to the Ultra—wider apertures that, Samsung says, improve low-light shots, and a new “horizontal lock” mode for video that evens out shaky action shots. The basic camera specs held steady: S26 and S26 Plus kept their 50-megapixel main rear camera, while the S26 Ultra held on to its 200-megapixel main shooter. More of the same is perfectly fine, though, given that the S25’s cameras already rank near the top among CR’s tested models.
When I went for a post-blizzard photoshoot around my neighborhood, I was able to reliably capture bright, vibrantly colored photos of the snowy streets. The images appeared plenty sharp, even when zooming in on a building’s facade from across the street. I also managed to take clear, low-light photos in the evening. Ultimately, if you’re a fan of the Galaxy camera, I expect you’ll once again like what you see.
Photo: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports Photo: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports
It was the new photo editing features that got the most airtime in Samsung’s product launch event. Galaxy phones already offer AI photo editing tools, like the ability to circle and remove unwanted elements from images. Now you can combine multiple pictures into a single, improved shot—say, a portrait where you and a friend both look your best—and add new elements or transform your photos using natural-language text prompts, similar to how image generation works in ChatGPT.
To try these out, I gave the S26 Ultra a few increasingly difficult assignments. The phone could easily remove snow from an otherwise buried bench, for example, and turn components of photos different colors, shifting a garage door from green to red. But as the requests became more complex, the results became more unpredictable.
I asked the AI editor to make my photo of a snowy streetscape look like springtime. After a few rounds of edits, it did indeed cover the sparse wintry trees in blooms and remove nearly all the roadside snow, but the end result looked unmistakably AI-generated. (Although I’d argue that it’s a good thing AI photos can still be readily identified as such.)
Photos: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports Photos: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports
Next, I told the editor to combine a pair of photos of snowmen at the park into one image with the frosty figures side by side. But rather than adding the snowman I’d circled, the phone plopped an entirely AI-generated snowman into my photo instead. Huh?
Photo: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports Photo: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports
The bottom line? As with all generative AI tools, strange and unpredictable results abound. That’s why Samsung’s latest AI photo tricks still feel mostly gimmicky to me, even though I can imagine a few legitimately handy use cases. The good news is that the S26 cameras appear to be reliably excellent, as usual, which is what most of us care about anyway. CR’s in-lab experts will give them a more thorough evaluation shortly.
A Pretty Neat Privacy Display on the S26 Ultra
The S26 Ultra offers an innovative new display feature that acts much like those stick-on privacy screen protectors you may have seen. Even better, this one can be turned on and off easily in your phone’s settings. With the feature enabled, the viewing angle narrows so that only the person holding the device can see the display clearly. For nosy neighbors, the screen appears dark and unreadable. It works by turning on pixels that emit light at a narrower angle, Samsung says. And because it works at the pixel level, you can choose to hide certain parts of the screen, like the notifications bar, while keeping other parts visible.
Photos: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports Photos: Courtney Lindwall/Consumer Reports
While sitting on the couch, I asked my partner to scroll on the privacy-enabled S26 Ultra while I unsuccessfully snooped over his shoulder. I couldn’t see a thing. This feature feels genuinely useful, especially for someone like me who takes the train and regularly catches commuters glancing at strangers’ phones. The trade-off: The display isn’t as bright overall with this feature enabled, even when viewed straight on. It also prevents you from easily reading notifications when your phone is, say, sitting off to the side on a table.
’Agentic‘ AI Offers Call Screening, Uber Ordering, and More
Samsung wants its expanding portfolio of AI features to truly make your life easier. And some just might: A new call-screening feature, for example, lets the phone’s AI assistant screen unrecognized calls for you. As it vets the caller with questions, you can read a summary of the interaction and choose whether to answer. The new Audio Eraser may be helpful for those with hearing difficulties or auditory processing issues. That AI-enabled feature can reduce background noise in videos, including those featured on third-party apps like Netflix or YouTube, making voices easier to hear.
Galaxy AI is becoming more like a true “AI assistant,” Samsung says, capable of performing complex, multistep actions across your phone’s apps. As demonstrated in the Galaxy Unpacked event, your phone can now request an Uber or place a GrubHub order via voice command after plucking requests from your friends from a group chat while you continue to use your phone. (I couldn’t use Galaxy AI with Uber or GrubHub in my trial run, but I was able to successfully ask the phone’s AI assistant to make changes to my Google calendar.)
The “agentic AI” era is still in its early stages and will only be useful across a handful of third-party apps to start, Samsung says. That means we’re still a long way from the day when our phones truly take over the grunt work of the constant tapping, swiping, and scrolling we do—though I suspect that most of us aren’t quite ready to hand over the reins just yet. For now, the phones seem plenty smart to me.
