Samsung Galaxy S26 FE review
One UI 9 on top of Android 17
The Galaxy S26 FE comes out running the latest and greatest Samsung has to offer on the software front. That would be One UI 9 on top of Android 17. Our review unit is currently on an August security patch, which is pretty much perfect.
Being part of the flagship Galaxy S line, the S26 FE gets the full ambitious Samsung software support promise of "up to 7 major OS updates". It's hard to complain about any of that.
Overall, nothing really major has changed about One UI, as you will see in our One UI 9.0 video below, which lists most of the new features you can expect to see here. You can head on over to our comprehensive video overview of One UI 8.5 for a deeper dive.
Starting with the overall UI, it all looks very familiar, but just a bit "tidier" and "cleaned up" here and there. For example, the brightness and volume sliders in the Quick Toggles pane appear to be a bit thicker and easier to use by default. They are also quite customizable; you can even position them vertically.
General One UI 9
You might remember that the Galaxy AI menu used to accompany pretty much every option with a lengthy description, making the whole thing look a bit cluttered at first glance. Samsung has cleaned that up now, relegating the extra explanatory text to the bottom of the menu. It is a small change, but exactly the kind of polish that makes the interface feel more refined.
One UI 9 Galaxy AI menu
One entirely new addition we noticed is the Warranty and Care menu in Settings. It brings together all Samsung devices registered to your account in one place, where you can check basic device information and warranty status, as well as access troubleshooting options and try to resolve common issues.
New Warranty and Care menu
Everything is neatly organized into topics and sub-menus. As far as we can tell, the content is pulled dynamically from an online source and tailored to the particular device you have selected. A couple of taps in, you usually end up with a reasonably useful list of troubleshooting steps to try on your own or, if those fail, a single button to start a support chat.
The whole system is clearly designed to encourage self-help first, and there is an AI assistant built in as well. Still, in 2026, simply being able to tap through a few menus and potentially even start a remote support session through a trusted platform directly on the device you are trying to fix feels like a surprisingly personal level of after-sales care - the sort of thing that somehow got lost along the way as consumer tech became more complicated.
Most of the other additions we noticed are once again tucked away inside Galaxy AI. We expected to see the new Call brief inside Call assistant. That's where we found it on the Galaxy Z Fold8, but for one reason or another, it is missing from our S26 FE review unit.
Thankfully, the new fancy custom cards in Samsung's Now Brief are present. These are genuinely cool. They are AI-powered, which is probably why the system currently limits you to only three at a time, and there are also some limitations on how often you can create and edit prompts for the cards.
Custom cards in Now Brief
At the moment, the feature organizes its "sources" into three categories - Weather, Health and Videos - which broadly determine where the information is pulled from. Some sources require additional permissions to communicate with third-party apps such as YouTube.
We were able to very easily put together a personalized feed consisting exclusively of GSMArena YouTube videos related to Samsung devices. This mostly worked, though, as clearly visible from the preview, a Google Pixel video is in there for some reason. It is a pretty neat idea already, and one that could become considerably more useful as the number and variety of supported sources grows. But, being AI, such mistakes might be inevitable at this time.
Bixby, now in its expanded form and bolstered by Perplexity integration, has picked up a few new widgets as well. These mostly provide quick access to voice prompts and your chat history, and function very similarly to the equivalent Gemini widgets.
New Bixby widgets
Since we are already looking at the home screen, the Google search bar seems to be a bit more firmly anchored than before. As far as we can tell, this is related to Android 17 itself, but you can no longer simply long-press the bar to move or remove it. You can still hide it, or "expand" the setup by placing the local Finder bar alongside it, but both options now live inside the Home screen settings menu for some reason.
Making matters even more confusing, the Google app still offers its own search widget, which does essentially the same thing while behaving like a regular widget - you can move it around, resize it and generally treat it as you would expect. A rather odd bit of inconsistency.
Google search
Driving report appears to be a new addition we haven't come across before. It lives inside the Connected devices menu and promises to automatically keep track of your car journeys and various bits of driving-related data.
Setup is fairly straightforward - you select your car's Bluetooth connection so the phone knows when you are driving and, naturally, grant the feature quite a few permissions to let it do its thing.
Driving report
Samsung Health has been completely overhauled with a brand new UI, after the launch of Galaxy Watch9 and Galaxy Watch Ultra2. Other apps like My Files and Reminder have seen smaller UI changes, but are in fact different.
Samsung Health • My Files • Reminder
My FanCam is another new addition to the Galaxy AI arsenal. It is essentially an AI-powered auto-framing and zooming video editor. Better yet, it works with any compatible video - seemingly HEVC-encoded clips - rather than just footage captured on the phone itself.
You select a person in the frame and let the AI analyze the clip. It then dynamically re-crops the video to keep that person centered throughout. As far as we can tell, the subject does need to be a person, but the system is clever enough to recognize related action as well. For instance, if the subject throws a ball into a hoop, My FanCam can follow the ball and the resulting play instead of rigidly sticking to the person's face.
And, perhaps most importantly, it works surprisingly well.
My FanCam
Finally, at least from the stuff we noticed, the Pro video capture mode in the camera app has gained access to a whole bunch of additional frame rate presets. This is great for creative freedom.
Pro video capture mode frame rates
Benchmarks and performance
The Galaxy S26 FE comes with the Exynos 2500. Compared to the Exynos 2400 inside the S25 FE, the Exynos 2500 is made on a more advanced and efficient 3nm node, compared to last year's 4nm one. It is still a 10-core chip, with one prime Cortex-X925 CPU core, working at up to 3.3 GHz, two Cortex-A725 cores, clocked at 2.74GHz, another five Cortex-A725 units, capped at 3.36 GHz and finally two Cortex-A520 cores, with a modest 1.8GHz frequency. It's a rather odd setup with a surprising number of cores. The onboard GPU is an Xclipse 950 - another upgrade compared to the Xclipse 940 inside the S25 FE and S24 FE.
The Exynos 2500 is paired with 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and you can get it with 128GB, 256GB or 512GB of UFS 4.0 storage. There is no microSD card slot for expansion. At one point, we did spot an official listing for the S26 FE with 12GB of RAM, but that was apparently a mistake as it's gone now.
The S26 FE does offer virtual memory. Samsung calls it RAM Plus, and it can be set to anything from 2GB to 8GB or outright disabled, in case it causes a bug in your particular use case or anything like that. Out of the box, our S26 FE unit came with RAM Plus enabled and set to the highest possible 8GB value, so that's what we used for benchmarking.
Looking at some actual benchmark numbers, the Exynos 2500 sits far from the top-dog Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. It's closer to the top-dog Exynos 2600, though. As we said, you still get a notable bump in overall performance compared to the Exynos 2400 and Exynos 2400e.
Interestingly, you are looking at very similar performance to the Snapdragon 8 Elite - the one from the Galaxy S25 generation, so the S26 FE is definitely not starved for raw power.
GeekBench 6
- Single-core
- Multi-core
Galaxy S26 Ultra
Honor 600 Pro
Poco X8 Pro Max
Galaxy S26 FE
Galaxy S24
Redmi Note 17 Pro Max (Global)
Vivo V70 FE
AnTuTu
- v10
- v11
Xiaomi 17T Pro
Honor 600 Pro
Galaxy S25 Ultra
Galaxy S26 FE
Galaxy Z Flip8
Redmi Note 17 Pro Max (Global)
Vivo V70 FE
3DMark
- Wild Life Extreme (Highest)
- Wild Life Extreme (Lowest)
Galaxy S26 Ultra
Galaxy Z Flip7
Honor 600 Pro
Galaxy S26 FE
Motorola Edge 70 Pro
Redmi Note 17 Pro Max (Global)
Vivo V70 FE
Thermal-throttling
Depending on which test you trust more, the S26 FE throttled to between 62% and 68% of its peak performance under prolonged stress testing. That's not ideal, but also not unexpected for a modern powerful chipset. You can expect cleaner behavior from mid-range and budget chips for sure, but this is about as good as it gets for a powerful chip in 2026.
Compared to the S25 FE, even after Samsung pushed an update and fixed its thermal behavior, the S26 FE is a lot more stable and loses less of its performance over time. Perhaps Samsung tweaked something in the cooling setup, or perhaps it's the improvements in efficiency from the smaller node.
Thermal-throttling
Regardless, the S26 FE seems to handle its heat pretty well. Even its surface doesn't get as uncomfortable as the S25 FE did. It's still not pleasant to touch, but it's manageable. We're pushing it more in our stress tests than anyone would in regular use.
Reader comments
- Cap44
- 17 Sep 2026
- j2n
This is without doubt the WORST phone I have ever owned. I can't use it in my house and have to stand outside to receive a call. Drops calls constantly. It is of no use to me if I can't actually use the PHONE function
- thenamelessone7
- 17 Sep 2026
- D}@
S26 FE has a better SOC than S24+ while S24+ has more RAM. S26 FE will get 2 more years of OS support but it might be irrelevant since it only got 8GB of RAM. Everything else about these 2 models is equally shit.