February 25, 2026
By Bob O'Donnell
Making noticeable differences in smartphones that get upgraded every year isn’t an easy process. Yet that’s the exact challenge that Samsung (and other smartphone manufacturers) gives itself each year. In fact, Samsung goes through that process twice a year—once for its flagship S lineup and again for its foldable Z phones.
This time around it’s the S26 family of traditional smartphones that’s getting the upgrade and, happily, the new additions are intriguing enough to warrant further attention. Intuitive and creative new AI features and a very impressive (and unique) integrated privacy screen for its flagship S26 Ultra, in particular, bring important new twists to the normal upgrade process. These are on top of the widely expected improvements in performance and camera quality that happen reliably every year.
Starting with those basics, the S26 phones are powered with a customized version of Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SOC (system on chip). The 8 Elite Gen5 boasts an 19% improvement in CPU performance versus last year’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, as well as a 24% increase in GPU capabilities and 39% rise in the Hexagon NPU’s AI acceleration. More importantly, compared to the kind of 3- or 4-year-old phone that most people would likely upgrade from, those performance numbers are about 200% higher. In other words, it’s something that you will definitely notice.
Something else everyone will notice on the S26 Ultra is its new Privacy Display feature. When it’s enabled, what it does is limits the ability to view the screen from the side. This blocks other people nearby from shoulder surfing and seeing what you have on the display. Previous efforts at privacy screens typically involved putting filters on the display that would impact the brightness and color of the screen, but Samsung took an entirely different and very clever approach to the problem.
What Samsung did is create a display with two basic types of pixels—those that generate light straight out from the pixel and those that generate a wider field of light. Those two types of pixels are interwoven across the display and in normal operation they both work together to create a brighter image. The privacy screen feature essentially turns off the wider light pixels and only uses the direct light pixels, which you can only see if you’re looking directly at the screen. In order to compensate for those “turned off” pixels, Samsung increases the light to the direct view ones, resulting in an image that has the same brightness as when the feature is off, but with the intentionally more limited field of view. Because some pixels are off and some are brighter, the impact on battery life is reported to be almost non-existent.
Even the ability to do this across the whole screen would be a great technology, but Samsung upped the ante with Privacy Display by allowing you to turn on the privacy features on a selective basis, such as only for notifications, only for certain apps, etc. It’s an incredibly useful and effective capability that is bound to get a lot of attention (and drive even more people to purchase the Ultra model since it’s only available with it.)
From a camera perspective, Samsung again made several important improvements across the board. One of them is an increase in the aperture of certain lenses which impacts how much light they can let in. The practical result is better quality images at night and in other low-light situations. The company also improved the front “selfie” camera by increasing its field of view to 85 degrees and having it’s image pass through the AI Image Signal Processor (which previously was only available to the rear cameras).
On the video side, the S26 family offers an enhanced version of their Super Steady feature that leverages the phone’s 8K image sensor to enable improved 4K video that automatically does a horizontal lock (even when rotating the phone!) for much smoother footage.
The company is also using the 8K sensor to allow recording video in up to 8K 30 fps with the APV codec, which brings professional quality nearly uncompressed video to smartphones for the first time. Finally, there’s an interesting new Ocean mode that’s designed to automatically color correct images and videos recorded underwater and bring back the color vibrancy that is typically lost when you photograph or film below certain depths.
In addition to these hardware enhancements, Samsung made a number of interesting new AI-powered features across the entire S26 family. First, is the fact that Samsung is offering not one, not two, but three different AI assistants integrated into the experience of using the device. Gemini and Perplexity are available for general purpose inquiries and Samsung’s own Bixby has been refocused to be a device-specific agent that can be used to change settings, discover new features, and connect with Samsung Smart Home devices, among other capabilities.
There are also a lot of interesting new features that are integrated into the primary applications on the device (and not limited to Samsung’s own apps, which previous iterations did). Inside the Camera app, for example, is a new document scanning feature that can clean up photos you take of receipts, hard copy documents and much more. Plus, you can now even combine multiple images into a single document and save it as a PDF which can be very handy when you need to digitize paper documents. The Gallery app adds a slew of new creative editing options including Photo Assist that allows you to do generative AI edits to your images, and Creative Studio, which can convert them to digital stickers and much more.
What strikes me as particularly intriguing about all these new AI features is that they’re much more useful and intuitive than previous efforts. Frankly, a lot of the early AI features found on smartphones were more gimmicky than useful, but virtually every one of the new AI capabilities Samsung has introduced have real-world value.
Getting people excited about a regularly scheduled update to a popular phone line is not an easy task and many annual iterations really don’t feel much different. With the S26 line, however, Samsung has managed to pull together enough hardware and software enhancements that it does seem like an important step forward and, I believe, people are bound to take notice.
Here’s a link to the original column:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/samsung-brings-ai-hardware-refinements-s26-bob-o-donnell-lm9bf
Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on LinkedIn at Bob O’Donnell or on Twitter @bobodtech.
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