Samsung Galaxy S26+ review
Design, build quality, handling
This year, the Ultra received the brunt of Samsung's design overhaul efforts. Previously, it had a distinctive silhouette of its own, typically with sharper and straighter corners. The S26 Ultra, however, is closer to its two S26 siblings in design than ever before.
Galaxy S26+ • Galaxy S26
As for the S26+, unless you count a slightly tweaked camera island design as a major change, it basically has the same overall design as last year's S25+.
As we said, there is a bit of a camera bump on the back now instead of just three "free-floating" camera modules, and that's about it for the design changes. Just enough so that cases are not interchangeable between the two phones.
Galaxy S26+ • Galaxy S26
Samsung did change around the color selection, or at least most of it is tweaked, or at the very least has a new name. Silver Shadow and Pink Gold are here from last year, and the rest of the lineup includes Cobalt Violet, Sky Blue, Black and White. Mind you that some of these are exclusive to the Samsung.com online store, as is usually the case.
Unsurprisingly, the S26+ is really well made. There is practically no flex to the chassis nor any hollowness to the back. In terms of materials, you get Gorilla Glass Victus 2 on both the back and the front and an Armor aluminum 2 frame. Samsung trusts the latter aluminum material so much that this year, even the Ultra is back to using it instead of titanium.
The phone is IP68 certified and should be able to withstand a dip in up to 1.5 meters of fresh water for up to 30 minutes. So, the usual Samsung flagship deal.
Controls are absolutely standard. No surprises there. A volume rocker and power button on the right-hand side, and a pretty much empty left-hand side.
Samsung Galaxy S26+
The top is not exactly busy either, with just a couple of tiny holes, likely for the secondary mic. The bottom houses the main speaker output, the SIM tray and the Type-C port. We will dig into their specifics in the connectivity section.
The front is very clean with its flat piece of glass and very minimal display bezels.
There are no visible sensors anywhere. Everything is neatly tucked away under the display. The earpiece is just a small, barely visible slit, too.
Being a flagship offering, the S26+ uses an under-display fingerprint of the ultrasonic variety. We found this one to be very accurate and snappy. We have no complaints with it whatsoever just like last year.
