Samsung Galaxy Unpacked February 2026: everything announced

Samsung’s first Galaxy Unpacked of 2026 felt less like a phone launch and more like Samsung standing up and saying, “OK, this is our AI era now.” The hardware got its usual round of annual upgrades, but the real story was how aggressively Samsung is trying to turn Galaxy devices into always‑on, privacy‑conscious AI companions rather than just nicer rectangles in your pocket.

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At the center of the show was the Galaxy S26 series: Galaxy S26, S26+, and the star of the lineup, the S26 Ultra. Samsung is now openly calling these “AI phones,” and you can tell the company means it; the entire keynote was framed around a future where your phone quietly does more on your behalf, while also making a lot of noise about on‑device privacy and security.

Let’s start with the S26 Ultra, because that’s clearly where Samsung threw most of its headline tricks. The design is a subtle evolution rather than a radical overhaul: a slightly slimmer and lighter body than last year’s Ultra, aluminum instead of titanium, and a refined silhouette that still screams “top-tier Galaxy” the moment you see it. You get a large adaptive OLED display that can scale from 1Hz to 120Hz, but the real twist is the new Privacy Display, a hardware‑level viewing angle control that essentially bakes a privacy filter into the panel itself. With it enabled, content is much harder to read from the side, and Samsung lets you tune it per app or even per area of the screen, which is a smart touch if you want to hide banking details or messages while still keeping other content visible.

Under the hood, all three S26 models are running a custom‑tuned Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, branded as “for Galaxy,” and Samsung is leaning on that performance to justify its AI ambitions. RAM and storage configurations are more generous this year: there’s no 128GB option anymore, with the lineup starting at 256GB, and 12GB of RAM on the S26 and S26+ as a baseline, which should help with running multiple AI workloads in the background. It’s the kind of quiet spec bump that doesn’t look flashy on a slide, but it matters once you start stacking live transcription, AI camera effects, and agent‑style features together.

On the regular S26 and S26+, Samsung didn’t spend a ton of stage time, but there are still some meaningful changes. The standard S26 gets a slightly larger display than the S25 before it, which makes the phone a bit taller and wider, while staying just as thin at 7.8mm, and you also get a larger 4,300mAh battery to go with it. The S26+ keeps its 4,900mAh cell from last year, so endurance should remain a strong point, especially with more efficient silicon. The catch is pricing: both S26 and S26+ are going up by about $100 compared to their predecessors, landing around $900 and $1,100, respectively, for the 256GB variants, while the S26 Ultra stays at roughly $1,300. Samsung is clearly banking on the AI story (and the bumped base storage) to soften that blow.

Cameras, as always, got their own spotlight, though this year it’s less about radical hardware changes and more about making every shot more consistent and more flexible with AI. The S26 Ultra sticks with a familiar multi‑sensor setup, but with wider apertures on key lenses to pull in more light, and Samsung is promising better low‑light performance and more reliable results across lenses instead of just bragging about zoom numbers. Where things get more interesting is on the software side: Galaxy AI now sits in the camera pipeline, helping with exposure decisions, subject separation, and even suggesting edits after the fact.

Photo and video editing is where Samsung really leans into the playful, borderline sci‑fi side of AI. You can now edit photos not only by dragging sliders but by telling the phone what you want: use a text prompt or a voice command, and the system will handle things like removing objects, filling in backgrounds, or tweaking lighting. One demo that got a laugh was a bitten cupcake that the presenter “restored” to its original untouched glory using AI, essentially erasing the bite from reality in a couple of taps. The same engine powers a refreshed Creative Studio, which can spin up custom stickers and playful edits almost instantly, something Samsung clearly thinks will resonate with younger users and parents documenting daily life.

Audio and video editing also get an AI bump through features like Audio Eraser, which does the reverse of what most people expect: instead of boosting background sounds, it tries to strip them away so voices stand out more clearly in your videos. If you’ve ever filmed in a noisy café or at a concert where you really just wanted to hear your friend talking, this is exactly the kind of quality‑of‑life upgrade that makes sense, even if it doesn’t look flashy in a spec sheet. Samsung also talked up AI‑assisted video tools to stabilize footage, clean up motion, and suggest highlight clips, essentially nudging you toward share‑ready content without a manual edit.

All of this rides on Samsung’s bigger Galaxy AI platform, which is now in its third generation and is starting to look less like a bundle of party tricks and more like an operating principle for how Galaxy phones should behave. The big idea this year is “agentic AI” — in other words, making the phone act more like a proactive assistant that understands what you’re doing and quietly helps out, rather than waiting around for you to bark commands at it. That shows up in features like Now Nudge, which lives inside Samsung’s broader “Now” environment and surfaces suggestions based on what’s happening on your screen. If someone texts you about meeting up, for example, Now Nudge might propose a time that works based on your calendar, instead of waiting for you to juggle apps and figure it out yourself.

There’s also Now Brief and Now Bar, which aim to bring more personalized, context‑aware summaries and quick actions into the interface. The vision is pretty clear: your phone doesn’t just show you a static notification or a wall of text — it gives you the “so what” and a one‑tap way to act on it, whether that’s replying, adding something to your to‑do list, or scheduling an event. On top of that, Samsung is heavily upgrading Bixby, which the company now describes as a conversational device agent rather than just a voice assistant, and it’s meant to tap into all these Galaxy AI features in a way that feels more natural.

Of course, the more your phone understands about you, the more uncomfortable it can feel if the privacy story isn’t airtight, and Samsung clearly understands that pressure in 2026. The company spent a notable chunk of the keynote talking about platform‑level security, starting with a Personal Data Engine (PDE) that learns from your preferences on‑device rather than shipping everything off to the cloud. Then there’s Knox Enhanced Encrypted Protection — KEEP, in Samsung’s branding — that isolates data within individual apps, and Knox Vault, which tucks away the really sensitive stuff like passwords, keys, and biometrics in a dedicated hardware enclave. Paired with the Ultra’s Privacy Display, the message is clear: Samsung wants to sell you on AI that’s powerful but contained, not a free‑for‑all data grab.

Samsung also used the stage to reinforce its partnership with Google, which has become one of the more important storylines in the Android world over the last few years. Circle to Search — first introduced on earlier Galaxy models — is expanding so you can highlight multiple objects in a single image and search for them all at once, making the feature more useful than just a clever party trick. More significantly, Samsung and Google showed off the “next evolution of Android” with deeper AI baked into the OS, powered by Google’s Gemini 3 models. On the S26 series, this will show up initially as a Google Labs preview, with more agent‑like capabilities arriving over time, which should make Galaxy phones some of the earliest and most visible test beds for Google’s AI vision.

Phones weren’t the only hardware on stage, though — Samsung also rolled out the Galaxy Buds4 lineup as its new premium earbuds. There are two versions in the series, positioned as upgrades over the previous Buds generation, with a focus on more refined sound, improved active noise cancellation, and tighter integration with Galaxy AI features. Think real‑time language assistance in your ears, smarter ambient mode that adjusts based on what you’re doing, and better handoff between devices in the Galaxy ecosystem. For anyone already locked into Samsung phones, tablets, and TVs, these buds are meant to feel less like accessories and more like an extension of that agent‑style experience.

On the software side, Samsung gave a nod to its own browser, which is getting deeper AI integration. That includes more intelligent summarization of web pages, context‑aware suggestions as you browse, and tighter ties into Galaxy AI so that what you read and research can be used (locally) to power recommendations, reminders, and follow‑ups elsewhere on the phone. Again, the theme is consistency: wherever you are on the device — camera, browser, messaging, or home screen — there’s some layer of AI trying to cut friction and give you the “next step” without you needing to dig.

If you zoom out, Galaxy Unpacked February 2026 was less about surprising new form factors and more about connecting the dots. Samsung is taking three big swings at once: pushing AI from gimmick to infrastructure, tightening the loop with Google’s own AI‑heavy Android roadmap, and aggressively pitching privacy as a hardware and software feature, not just a policy slide. For everyday users, the pitch is straightforward: the S26 phones and Buds4 should feel faster, smarter, and a little more “on your side,” whether that means fixing a ruined cupcake photo, silencing the chaos in your video, or quietly nudging you into making that plan you’ve been texting about.

Whether that’s enough to make people upgrade in a mature smartphone market is a separate question, especially with prices nudging upward on the non‑Ultra models. But if you care about where Android flagships are headed, Unpacked 2026 painted a pretty clear picture: the future Samsung is chasing is one where the most important spec isn’t just the camera or the chip, but how much helpful, trustworthy intelligence the phone can layer on top of everything you do.