Samsung Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26+ review: Lack of ambition

I couldn’t even get Samsung’s Now Nudge feature to work. It’s built into Samsung’s keyboard (which, yes, still sucks and has bad voice dictation), and it’s supposed to proactively suggest things based on the context of what’s on the screen. For example, if someone asks you to send photos from a recent trip, you should see a button to go to the Samsung Gallery app and choose Select to send. But I didn’t see any payment.

Triple camera

Not much has changed with the cameras on these phones. In fact, Samsung has added larger apertures to two of the cameras of the S26 Ultra series, but the S26 and S26+ don’t get any such improvements. It’s hard to complain too much because this is still a solid triple-camera system.

However, I compared many low-light photos from the Galaxy S26+ with those from the cheaper Google Pixel 10, and in many cases, I preferred the photos from the latter. Especially the 5X zoom that Google offers versus the 3X zoom that Samsung offers – it’s sharper and has more magnification, giving you more versatility, although Google has issues with white balance. This is not always the case there; There are several images where the S26+ achieved a stronger result.

I’m glad the new feature that has caught on is Samsung’s Horizon Lock, which you enable when using Samsung’s Super Steady mode. It allows you to be more comfortable holding the phone while shooting video, as the camera locks onto the horizon and uses the phone’s accelerometer data to keep shots steady. I shot an HDR clip on a bright day, and intentionally moved the phone a little, but you wouldn’t know it when looking at the clip.

Ultimately, I think most people will find an Android phone like Google’s Pixel 10 — which regularly drops to $599 on sale — more than capable of meeting their needs, or they’ll try to find last year’s Galaxy S25 series on sale. The Galaxy S26 and S26+ are great flagships, but they don’t really raise the bar.