Samsung’s Galaxy S26 and S26+ Are Fine Flagship Phones Lacking Ambition

I have not even once gotten Samsung’s Now Nudge feature to work. It’s built into Samsung’s keyboard (which, yes, still sucks and has terrible voice dictation), and is supposed to proactively suggest things based on the context of what’s on the screen. Like, if someone asks you to send photos from a recent trip, it should prompt a button to go to the Samsung Gallery app and choose a selection to send. But I just haven’t seen any nudging.

Camera Trio

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

However, I compared several low-light images from the Galaxy S26+ with those from the cheaper Google Pixel 10, and in many instances, I preferred the photos from the latter. Especially the 5X zoom Google offers versus the 3X zoom on Samsung—it’s just sharper and zooms further, giving you more versatility, though Google does have white balancing issues. That’s not always the case there; there are several photos where the S26+ delivered a stronger result.

I’m glad the one new feature that did trickle down is Samsung’s Horizon Lock, which you enable when using Samsung’s Super Steady stabilization mode. It allows you to be more carefree when holding the phone while shooting video, as the camera locks onto the horizon and uses the phone’s accelerometer data to keep footage looking steady. I shot a clip with HDR enabled on a bright day, and purposefully shifted the phone a little, yet you wouldn’t know it looking at the clip.

Ultimately, I think most people would find an Android phone like Google’s Pixel 10—which has regularly dipped to $599 on sale—more than capable for their needs, or try to find last year’s Galaxy S25 series on sale. The Galaxy S26 and S26+ are perfectly fine flagships, but they just don’t really raise the bar.