Once you go to the Samsung sales space this week on the Cell World Congress 2026—which, as at all times, is being held on the Fira Gran Through conference heart in Barcelona—you can also make your well past the array of brand-new units to discover a timeline of outdated Galaxy S telephones mounted to a wall.
It’s a neat piece of historical past, however I’m undecided it had the supposed impact. Quite than demonstrating Samsung’s progress over time, it highlights how the South Korean tech large—nonetheless the No. 2 cellphone maker on this planet, proper behind Apple, in line with knowledge from Counterpoint—has been treading water on the high of its lineup.
This yr’s Galaxy S26 Extremely, introduced just a few days earlier than the Cell World Congress kicked off, is a very iterative replace in what has grow to be a line of near-identical flagships. The design is sort of indistinguishable from the earlier three years’ fashions, and there isn’t a lot to shout about on the within both.
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Nothing of observe
Whereas the S26 Extremely does include the anticipated improve to Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, it’s onerous to search out a lot else of observe on the spec sheet. Samsung switched the body from titanium to aluminum and shaved 0.3 millimeters off the thickness within the course of. The display is similar 6.9-inch 1440p OLED panel as earlier than—that’s not an issue, because it’s nonetheless nice. However the unchanged 5,000-milliampere-hour (mAh) battery is beginning to fall behind, and an overdue increase to 60-watt wired charging speeds nonetheless leaves Samsung behind its Chinese language opponents, most of which have adopted silicon-carbon expertise and proprietary fast-charging techniques.
The digital camera system is likely to be essentially the most baffling instance of inertia. All of the sensors are the identical besides on the much-maligned 10-megapixel 3x telephoto digital camera, which has remained in place since 2002. Did Samsung lastly swap it out for a greater half? No—the S26 Extremely’s telephoto inexplicably makes use of a good smaller (1/3.94 inch) sensor. The primary and 5x cameras did at the least get slight bumps to their most apertures.
Privateness replace
The largest S26 Extremely characteristic this yr, which I’ll say has truly gotten folks speaking about on the present, is the brand new Privateness Show mode. The display basically has two units of pixels, with one reserved for rendering the picture immediately in entrance of the viewer—permitting components of the panel to be switched off for anybody wanting from an oblique angle.
The implementation is intelligent, notably in how the privateness masking could be utilized to particular person areas of the panel. However the fundamental idea isn’t new—built-in privateness screens have been commonplace in Japan ever because the days of flip telephones. Samsung’s take is likely to be extra technically superior, however the thought has been sitting there for some time.
It by no means was once troublesome to level out what was new a couple of flagship Samsung cellphone. For higher or worse, the corporate developed a status for placing out concepts simply to see what would possibly stick. The Galaxy Observe line was most likely the most effective instance of that—what initially appeared like a gratuitously massive design finally grew to become normalized to the purpose the place the collection has been absorbed into the common Galaxy S lineup, stylus and all.
And Samsung continues to innovate on the provision chain facet, notably with display panels. Its Samsung Show subsidiary is understood for producing breakthrough expertise like versatile OLED screens, which led to the guardian firm inventing genuinely new kind elements with the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip series. That unit can also be liable for neat new options just like the Privateness Show.
Shedding its edge
However in different areas, Samsung is shedding its edge or falling far behind. Chinese language show makers are rapidly catching as much as Samsung’s OLED manufacturing prowess. And relating to digital camera specs, there isn’t even a comparability. Whereas Samsung selected to downgrade its telephoto lens this yr, Xiaomi stole the present at MWC with its Leica-branded 200-megapixel 3.2x-4.3x zoom.
Though it got here out within the U.S. again in January, maybe the most important attract Samsung’s MWC sales space was the Z TriFold. This can be a $2,900 double-hinged cellphone that folds out right into a 10-inch wide-screen pill. It’s the primary machine of its form to be within the U.S. and does certainly have that typical gadgety Samsung attraction, albeit barely diminished by the truth that Huawei did the identical factor with the Mate XT in 2024 and is already on its second iteration.
That may not be related to American buyers, since Huawei telephones typically aren’t out there outdoors China. Nevertheless it’s price noting that Huawei needed to utterly rebuild its shopper enterprise and provide chain after it acquired blitzed by U.S. sanctions, and it nonetheless managed to beat Samsung to market on this new kind issue.
None of that is to say that there’s no cause to go along with Samsung if you’d like an Android phone and you reside within the U.S. It’s a trusted model that gives good native help and customer support, and its One UI software program has matured to the purpose that it’s as usable as the rest on the market.
However Samsung is just holding onto an entrenched place within the U.S. market resulting from provider help and a scarcity of competitors. When what’s out there round the remainder of the world, it’s clear that the corporate is quickly shedding the technological edge it constructed its status upon. Chinese language corporations would face stiff obstacles to enter the U.S. market even when they needed to, however it’s price imagining what the panorama would possibly appear to be in the event that they did.
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