Samsung Galaxy S26 & S26+ Quick Review: Budget Price, Exynos 2600, 120Hz Display With Galaxy AI features

Along with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus & S26 were launched this year. Interestingly, they didn't launch the Edge this year. The S25 Edge was launched last year. It's not launched this year, I'm not too sure but there won't be a lot of demand for it. But yes, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus is launched. So that's what it is. We're going to do its unboxing & first impressions & tell you everything about these phones. It's an interesting thing, the Exynos chipset on these 2 phones seems to be very interesting & powerful. We'll talk about it. 

This is the Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus & this is the Samsung Galaxy S26. The fun of a light phone is something else. In the box, along with the phone, you get a sim card tool, documentation, USB Type C to Type C charging cable. And that's about it. Let's keep it aside & look at the phones. The in-hand feel of the Samsung Galaxy S26 is amazing. Even now, these small phones invoke a different feeling. It's really like this & it's lightweight too. In fact, I think it's thinner & lighter than last year. Which was expected from Samsung. The brand is here with our most asked device features.

Looks and Design of Samsung Galaxy S26:

The Samsung Galaxy S26 is only 7.2mm thin & according to me, it shouldn't be more than 170g. So 168g. 168.7g, perfect! And this is 176g. 178g. No, it must be more. 183g. 191.8g, I went wrong here. So this is nearly 192g & this is 168g. So, both the devices are very light weight as compared to other phones. One can easily carry this device for a long time without facing any issue. There's a difference of nearly 22-25g in both. I'll talk more about the Samsung Galaxy S26 & tell you about the differences in the Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus. As I said, the in-hand feel is amazing. You get Gorilla Glass Victus 2 protection in both the phones. And there's glass on the back too. There's an aluminium frame. The frame makes the device secure and good looking.

Let's drop the devices together. It's Victus 2, what's there to worry about? Yes, we can do the drop test too. But, I need to create an article about the device first. The device should be marked from every aspect. If I talk about the camera module, it's a camera housing. And it looks uniform. If you talk about the Ultra, Plus & Base, all 3 are very similar. You can tell that they're twin brothers. You have to drop it from the back. If I talk about the ports & buttons, there's a speaker grill, a USB Type C port & a microphone. There's a SIM card tray on the left & a noise cancelling microphone on the top.

Screens and Display:

There's a speaker grill & a noise cancelling microphone on the top. On the right side of the device, there's a volume up and down, a power on-off button we can see. Let's start with the phones. If I start talking about the display now, the Samsung Galaxy S26 comes with a 6.3'' display. Remember, the S25 had a 6.2'' display & now it's 6.3'. You get a QHD display in the FHD display plus. So that's good. You get a 120Hz AMOLED display in both. You get a 2600 nits peak brightness in both. Both have an LTPO display. Let's talk about the specifications. The biggest difference here is the chipset.

Processor of Samsung Galaxy S26:

If we start talking about the processor, Samsung did the work here too. It has the world's first 2NM Exynos 2600 chipset. And since it's 2NM, it's power efficient & we'll have to use it. But it's also powerful. In fact, talking about the Exynos 2600, out of all the Exynos chipsets available till now and I've seen so far, the Exynos 2600 is the best out there. If we talk about the performance, it's definitely better than the well known processor 8 Elite Gen 5. If we look at the synthetic benchmark scores, the Geekbench scores are close to the 8 Elite Gen 5. And the GPU scores are also neck to neck. So I'd say it's near close performance to the 8 Elite Gen 5 which is not bad.

Battery and charging capacity:

The Antutu score is 3.2M. There's a slight difference as the 8 Elite Gen 5 has 3.7-3.8M & the Geekbench has 3.2M. The battery has increased. Samsung Galaxy  S26 comes with a massive 4300 mAh battery. The phone Samsung Galaxy S26+ ultra features a 4900 mAh battery; however, Geekbench features a bit different thing which is a 4900 mAh unit. Charge rates are as follows: S25 is capable of 45W charging versus Geekbench capped at 25W. Wireless charge rates for S25 are 20W as opposed to Geekbench being limited to 15W and finally, both devices support 4.5W reverse wireless charging capability. Additionally, there are two versions available for the Geekbench model. The two variations identified below contain a base, 12/256 variant, and an upgraded, high-performance model consisting of two capacity options; 12/256 and 12/512. 

Storage capacity:

There's no 1TB variant like the Ultra. It has LPDDR5X RAM type & UFS 4.0 storage type. All sensors are present. There's an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor which works well. There's face unlock & everything works perfectly fine. Connectivity supports all global leading 5G bands. There's Bluetooth 6.0, Wi-Fi 7, NFC, Bluetooth 5.4, Ultra Wideband & eSIM. So all connectivity options are there. The biggest highlight in the S series is the One UI 8.5 OS which is based on Android 16. You get major updates for 7 years.

Nowadays phones are coming or trying to launch their new products with a high powered battery. Here as we can see Samsung did something different. They already knew how much battery the device could consume with this processor and other features. That is the reason that despite having a 4300 mAh battery, it's compact & has a good battery size. You can use it for the whole day & it has a 2Nm Exynos chipset which makes it power efficient. You get Galaxy A.I. which is good for all smartphones. Samsung S series gives the best A.I experience. You now get a kind of proactive A.I with NowNudge. It will suggest what you're doing on the phone. Till now we used to talk to the A.I. & it used to reply. Now it's not like that. It's proactive. Another thing I like about the S series is that it's not on-device.

It goes to the cloud & gives you the output. It's a hybrid. You can do a lot of things on-device or off-device. You can do it in the cloud. If you want to give a prompt or generate an image, you can go & come back. But if you want to do everything on-device, you can do it in the cloud. There's Bixby Assistant which has become smarter in this version. You can set your routines & do automation. Surprisingly, despite being a compact phone, it gives a good multimedia experience. I'm talking about the Plus & both of them.

Camera all we need to know:

Because there's less space for the speakers. But the quality of the speakers is definitely great. Plus has a big 6.7'' display. So you're going to enjoy it. On both phones, the multimedia is going to be great. Even if I talk about the haptic feedback, they're quite good. The haptic response you experience while playing feels correct and is indeed very apparent. The devices both feature USB 3.2 Gen 1 which means you will have plenty of bandwidth available for transferring data over USB. The cameras both have the same camera specifications as last year's models (a 50 megapixel main sensor; 10 megapixel telephoto camera; 3X telephoto camera; and 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera). 

On both of the phones Samsung Galaxy S26 and the ultra version, we get a 12MP selfie sensor. If I compare the dependable camera system of Samsung S series phones, there's nothing out of the world. But when you click a photo, you expect it to have good colours. This is how a Samsung S series phone should click photos. It's exactly like that. I'd call it a dependable camera. If you click portraits on 3X or 5X, they come out good. In fact, I'd call it a telephoto up to 10X. It clicks very nice pictures. We've clicked a lot of photos under different conditions.

We have seen multiple photos taken with the device. And I have some feedback about those photos and surely I have mentioned my true opinion here. One thing is for sure, whether it's Ultra or these phones, they've improved a lot in terms of low light photos & nitrography. In videography, all the sensors can do 4K 60FPS. Yes, including the front sensor. In fact, the primary sensor can shoot 8K 30FPS. You get log videos, so that's there. There are 2-3 features like horizontal lock, so when you're taking an action shot & your camera moves, you'll get stable footage.

You can shoot log videos along with 4-5 different LUTs. If you want a particular feel of the video, you can set it & shoot. At this time which could be a good feature. Customers are focusing towards online content creations at this time. So, with a good processor it is needed to have a better camera and video features available on the upcoming devices. The videos taken with the device are visible in the preview, so you can do it. Yes, but it doesn't have the APV codec in Ultra which reduces the size. But you get AI features like Creative Studio & Photo Assist. You won't get the privacy display feature in Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus or Samsung Galaxy S26. But you do get Samsung's Knox security by default. There's IP68 certification, Widevine L1 support, HDR10+, you can watch it on Netflix or YouTube. 

Final conclusion:

SAR values are within limits like USB 3.2 Gen 1. There's NFC support, no IR blaster, no FM radio & no notification lag. And finally, the price. It's a little higher than Ultra, but it has a base & a plus. You'll get the base at Rs 87,999 & this one (Plus) is around Rs 1,19,000. And I'm showing you the offers on the screen if you're interested. So these are this year's Samsung Galaxy S26 & Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus. I'd say it's an incremental update. There are some good things in the OS & the proactive AI & the bigger battery. So there are certain things.

But it doesn't have a privacy display like Ultra. And as mentioned earlier, they've dropped the Edge this year. So yeah, that's what it is. And we've shown & tested the results in this article.