New Galaxy S26+ (What Changed in Samsung S26 Plus?)

[00:01] brand-new Samsung Galaxy S26 Plus. Essentially, the premium Samsung phone you'd buy if you wanted the best but didn't want to spend $1,300 and have five camera bumps on the rear. So, this phone has a lot to like about it. But,

[00:14] little while, I want to talk about everything that's new, what I liked, and about this phone. So, there's a lot to talk about in this video. Let's start off by talking about the design. Samsung kind of unified the design with the

[00:28] Ultra this year and the other S series, kind of separating them a bit from the less premium phones that they offer, you know, the the mid-range phones, for example, which in the past I appreciated that they made them all look pretty

[00:40] similar, but the flagship phones now stand out a little bit more. There's six different colors. Uh this comes in cobalt violet, white, black, sky blue, and there are also two samsung.com online exclusives, pink gold, which I

[00:54] actually really liked this one way more than I thought I would, um and silver shadow, which by the way, you can check out those colors uh in the links down also pre-order starting today. They are exclusive promo links, so if you go

[01:08] have the details down in the description down below. But, usually it's an enhanced trading credit, some extra cash towards accessories, free memory upgrades, uh and sometimes other things like student and veteran discounts. So,

[01:20] you're interested in pre-ordering so you can save yourself some money. And anyway, moving on with the display here. So, this is a 6.7-in quad HD plus display, barely smaller than the S26 Ultra. And like I said, it really is

[01:35] quite a good display. It's a 1 to 120-Hz refresh rate. It goes up to 2600 nits bright when outside. You have the in-screen fingerprint sensor. It's a surprise that the display really looks quite good on this phone. One thing to

[01:50] and you may be seeing headlines, or maybe you already watched my video about maybe you already watched my video about the S26 Ultra, the S26 Plus does not get that new privacy display feature. Essentially, it it works a lot like a

[02:03] screen protector that is a privacy screen protector, but it's it's optional I talk about it in the Ultra video, which maybe you want to watch after this this phone. If you go over to the rear, you'll see, again, three cameras, very

[02:17] familiar setup. You have the 50-megapixel primary rear lens, you have the 12-megapixel ultrawide, and you have your 10-megapixel 3X lens, which can zoom in to 30X. Now, considering the price of this phone, this is $1,100,

[02:31] I was really hoping to see a telephoto lens on here that used a periscope. It's something that we see on the iPhone 17 Pro, the smaller one, that's $1,100, that has a periscope lens. The Pixel 10 Pro, which is the smaller of the

[02:45] flagships there, again, $1,000, and it does have a periscope. So, I think Samsung is a little bit behind on this phone in particular. Now, it's basically the same camera system we saw on the S26 base model, which I can definitely give

[02:57] it's a little bit more affordable. You're comparing that to like the iPhone 17, for example. But this, you're over $1,000, you're well over $1,000, and I was really hoping to see a telephoto lens on here that used that periscope to

[03:11] zoom in a little bit further. Not everyone uses this as much as I do, but little bit improved here. Now, the photos may still be improved compared to last year, and I will be doing testing as soon as I have one in the studio, and

[03:24] due to the processing because under the hood on this phone, we do have quite a few improvements. So, the first thing is the chip on the inside is now the Snapdragon Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Long name, but essentially, it is the best

[03:37] chip you can get on any Android phone out there, and it's the same chip you're seeing in the Galaxy S26 Ultra. This chip gives you 19% faster CPU for better processing, 39% improvement in NPU for AI-related tasks, and there's a 24%

[03:52] for gaming and stuff like that, which I think is probably a lot of people buying That's why they're not buying buying the base model, and they're probably going to be doing a lot of gaming or watching media, and that should really be pretty

[04:05] solid with this phone. This also has full 5G, so millimeter and sub-6 5G, unlike the base model, and you have a 4,900 milliamp hour battery, which is a and a little bit smaller than the Ultra, but the battery life should be pretty

[04:20] past years, and you know, the battery life, you know, this is a very efficient efficient. I think you should be getting a pretty solid battery life on here. The storage options with this phone start at 256 GB, go up to 512, and it's actually

[04:36] 12 GB of RAM in either one of those orientations. This has super fast charging 2.0, which means up to 45 W with wired charging, and up to 20 W with wireless charging. And speaking of wireless charging, this of course does

[04:48] charge other phones on the back, but one thing that I noticed, which is really that Samsung sent me, one thing they say in there is they list a whole bunch of products that can be used for reverse wireless charging, and unlike previous

[05:03] years, so the S25 and Plus and Ultra, they did not include the Watch 7 series, out yet, but the Watch 7 series was a huge drawback. You could not charge it on the back of your phone, but now the Watch 7 series and the Watch 8 series

[05:18] are both listed on this press release. So, I don't know if it's a little typo, definitely going to be trying this in the studio as soon as I get this, because if they changed the reverse wireless charging, and if they are now

[05:30] able to, you know, span that gap with the the new biosensor on the 7 and the 8 watches, then that would be huge. I would love to travel with just my phone and just a USB type-C charger, so I don't need to bring an extra charger for

[05:43] back of my phone, like I always used to with older Galaxy watches. Oh, and unlike the base model, this also has Bluetooth 6.0, whereas that one only had 5.4, so subtle future-proofing right there. And of course, this phone and all

[05:56] the other Galaxy phones coming out in the S series are rated for 7 years of updates for security and software, so this should be a pretty solid phone for not going to keep it for quite a few years, means that your trade-in or

[06:08] resale value should be pretty strong on this phone. Now, AI. Obviously, AI blah that in the keynote. There are some features, some of them useful, some of maybe five or six main ones that Samsung talked about with this new phone here. A

[06:23] older models as well, but at least right now, looking at what we have, one of which kind of has two aspects to it. On one hand, it is going to be useful for calls. When you get a call, you can tap on that, it'll give a transcript. It'll

[06:38] basically be an AI voice talking to whoever's calling you, and then you can decide if you want to answer it or not. So, if it's unknown number, I use that and it's a great way to kind of filter through a lot of calls. If you're in a

[06:50] meeting and your wife calls you, you can screen the call and just say like, "Hey, to be talking, and then it'll transcribe what she's saying, and if she's like, you can step out of the meeting and take the call. Or if it's like, "Hey, I was

[07:03] wanted to do this weekend," then, you know, you could you could right there say like, "I'll talk to you later." So, that's one aspect. The other aspect individuals, and this is going to be essentially listening to your call and

[07:15] transcribing it and identifying common trends that are associated with scam calls. So, it could be based on numbers that are calling or on what's actually being said. Hopefully, help some people avoid some scams, so they're not like

[07:29] Target gift cards and sending them to some scam center on the other side of the world. Again, I don't know if this is really going to be super helpful for a lot of people, but I think that's the hope that there are some people that

[07:41] enhanced Circle to Search. We have some improvements in the gallery app. So, now the gallery app has even more editing opportunity, again, based on AI here. So, instead of just like that magic eraser feature, which has been doing

[07:54] have seen in the past, we now have a lot of generative stuff as well. So, if you something from one image and put it in another image, take a t-shirt from one or a hat from one, put it onto you in another totally different lighting

[08:08] scenario, or even change the lighting setup, it's really quite impressive. I I using Google's Nano Banana or Nano Banana Pro. And of course, that is going to be incredibly powerful. There are also a ton of on-device AI-related

[08:22] So, you know, it's kind of an interesting age where some photos, like you can take them totally natural. I like doing that a lot, but you can also alter them very heavily using AI. And sometimes that is really fun and useful.

[08:36] Other times, I don't know, it just kind of changes what the memory actually is. though, and I kind of like having the feature. And although Bixby's kind of getting improvements, we also have Gemini and we have Perplexity on here as

[08:49] well. Perplexity's kind of a new add, so kind of a cool other alternative if you want to use that for your voice assistant. So, that is the Galaxy S26 Plus. I think I said that right throughout this video. Also, by the way,

[09:01] lighting I've ever had for a video. My flight got canceled. There was a huge blizzard on the East Coast by East Coast standards. Like my flight got messed up. I ended up getting in here like late in the evening today, so my my content

[09:14] there. And I'm literally filming in a hotel now. Like this chair, you guys It's like a It's like a Godfather kind of chair. I so check out those other videos. I've got five coming out at the same time.

[09:28] We've got like the S26, the S26 Ultra. Check out those videos. And I have two videos about the Galaxy Buds 4 Pro coming out at the exact same time. So, screen right here, and I'll see you in those videos.