After spending the past week just testing the new Galaxy S26 series non-stop, here’s my review of this new Galaxy S26+. It’s not going to be our typical review since many things are already talked about in other videos. And also, there aren’t that many changes compared to the S25+.
Specs and performance
Starting with the performance, for certain regions around the world, the S26 and the S26+ are equipped with the Exynos 2600 chipset. Yeah, Samsung employed this dual-chip strategy again.
As a quick rundown, the Exynos 2600 has a 10-core configuration, and all of them are using Arm’s C1 series of CPU core designs. As for the GPU, it is the Xclipse 960 GPU that is made in collaboration with AMD, based on the RDNA 4 architecture.
As shown in the gaming tests and another video where we talked about the Exynos 2600 in depth, it is indeed a powerful chipset and manages to run a lot of games at the highest graphical settings with rather good frame rates – but the problem is the wattage.
Yeah that AMD GPU is indeed super powerful, but it’s also power-hungry at the same time. With Samsung’s new Performance Mode turned on, it can take in however much wattage it needs, and that allows power spikes of up to around 23W for a split second. With high wattage also comes high heat, so it will hit the thermal limit and throttle really fast.
We can, of course, limit the wattage by using the balanced mode. This limits the wattage and, hence getting lower performance, but the FPS/watt is – surprisingly – better than the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy.
In this regard, the Exynos 2600 is really doing a good job.
Battery life
But, what’s important here is going to be the battery life. The sad news is that the Exynos 2600 is not going to be more power efficient than the Exynos 2400 that was released 2 years ago. I guess Samsung LSI just spent the time cooking up more performance and forgot about efficiency.
I mean, using our standardized battery life test, at 1440p resolution, the S26+ lasts for around 13 hours and 51 minutes only. So, when we did some math to calculate the battery consumption, it’s only about 3.5% better than the Exynos 2400. And yes, it is worse than the Snapdragon 8 Elite from last year.
To be honest, I am disappointed in this regard. I am someone who prefers more efficient day-to-day usage battery life, and to see basically minimal progress here is just saddening. It’s one big thing that Samsung needs to improve.
Charging speed
The charging speed actually remains unchanged! Well, the wireless charging speed has improved but I never test the wireless charging speeds since it’s so inefficient. Anyway, the battery capacity and the wired charging speed remains the same as before – so 4,900mAh with 45W of wired charging.
It takes about an hour to charge from 15% to completion, and phone takes in around 40W at most. While I thought this charging speed is the same as the S25+ and also the S24+, it’s actually a tad bit faster. Not by much, but a measurable difference of around 7% faster charging speeds. This is probably due to optimizations and how much longer it can take in that 40W power before slowing down the charging speed.
Screen
The screen practically remains the same since the S24+. We can quickly go through it here. So, we have a 6.7-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X display with 3120×1440 pixels in resolution, and goes up to 120Hz refresh rate. Nothing out of the ordinary indeed.
The screen has a maximum auto brightness of around 1340 nits, and a minimum brightness of around 0.92 nits. Pretty good in that regard.
As for the color gamut coverage and color accuracy, it is at vividness level 1 by default when it is out of the box, and it can reach 99.94% of sRGB and 88.79% of DCI-P3, while the ΔE numbers are impressively low too.
Bumping it up to vividness level 3, we can see that the display covers virtually 100% of both sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts. The average ΔE is really low – and I think that the max ΔE is just one spike.
Overall, the display has been unchanged for years but this is a really good display nonetheless. I just wish that Samsung added the S25 Ultra’s anti-reflection tech to the S26+ and the base S26.
Software
Now, let’s also talk about the software. It is equipped with One UI 8.5 on top of Android 16, and with it comes a lot of tiny changes across the board, and new features everywhere too. First, the default icons are changed and they have kind of a 3D look to it. The search bar on the app drawer and the settings menu are also different.
One interesting thing is that Samsung brought forth the Audio Eraser that was used to remove unnecessary noise from videos into 3rd party apps like Instagram, YouTube, and Netflix. I can see why it is useful for Instagram and YouTube as we can just enable it in the quick settings panel and the video that we’re watching sounds a lot clearer. However, for Netflix though… they professionally mixed the audio, right? Why do we need the audio eraser feature for this?
Either way, more apps are going to be added in the future – and I think this is one of the best additions to One UI.
Other than that, there are some many other changes that I discovered but I don’t want to put them all in this video. Maybe another video in the near future – we’ll see how.
Cameras
Then we have the cameras. I’m not one to take a lot of pictures with my phone so I am definitely not qualified to talk much about. For all I can say, switching over to the Exynos 2600 means that it uses a different ISP – and even if it is using the exact same camera sensors and lenses, the end result will be different.
I just have a bunch of random pictures taken with this phone to show you and I don’t think I can get any night shots. I’ll leave this part for other more qualified YouTubers to do their part, as I have already did mine with the performance and gaming section.
To have a look at all the pictures and videos taken with the Samsung Galaxy S26+, watch the video at the top of this review.
Design
All of that is packed within this design of a phone. Truthfully speaking, the design is basically the same as the previous generations. I actually don’t mind, as I think changing the design just for the sake of changing the design is a stupid thing to do.
The camera bump’s design has changed to this two-tiered bump now. I do like this kind of design more than the big circular camera bump at the back of the phone.
As for the colors, the entire Galaxy S26 series will share the same colors. We have it in the Cobalt Violet here, and the Ultra has the Sky Blue color, and I think these two colors look the nicest out of the 4 standard colors. Not like I care anyway, since I’m going to slap a phone case on it and all of the colors are going to get blocked off. Except for the gaps between the cameras, I guess.
A few more things to mention
Alright, a few more things to mention about the Galaxy S26+. We do have a dual SIM card slot at the bottom, has a USB 3 port beside that slot that also supports display output so that we can use DeX on the big screen, and that’s basically it.
Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S26+?
Now, should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S26+? This is such a tough question to answer, honestly. I have to use the Malaysian pricing for this part so your consensus may vary because I am going to compare with the previous generation’s price.
At the time of scripting this review, the entire S26 series is actually way much more expensive than the previous generation. This is also the first price hike that I’ve seen that is caused by the global DRAM shortage that effects RAM and SSD, but the price is quite egregious to say the least.
Now, you might say other brands are very low in price – so why not get those? Well, their price hikes are coming soon too.
But in the uniqueness of the Galaxy S26+, I’d say you can just get it now and score the free double storage upgrade, or wait till the price drops. I’m not sure how much the price will drop since there’s a DRAM shortage that we still don’t see the end of.
In any case, I assume Samsung will bring the latest One UI 8.5 alongside all of the new features to the previous generations as well, but at a later date. And since we have that in mind, maybe you can also consider getting the S25+ too. The price of that is waaaaaaaaaay lower right now.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
The post Samsung Galaxy S26+ review appeared first on Nasi Lemak Tech.
