Samsung Galaxy S26 FE Review

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Introduction

The Galaxy S26 FE is Samsung’s sixth attempt at watering down its flagship S series phone into a cheaper version that offers premium features at a more reasonable price. At £699/$699, it’s the most expensive FE to date, but remains good value in the context of the prices of the S26 and S26 Plus, which start at £879 and £1,099 respectively. 

The S26 FE has the same size 6.7-inch display as the Plus, so it’s a great option if you want a large, performant Samsung phone with decent cameras and lengthy software support. 

Its value proposition falls down when compared to cheaper mid-range smartphones that offer similar or equivalent specs and performance, but for the most part, the S26 FE looks, feels and performs much in the same way as the pricier S26 phones – which is to say it has an iterative design and comes with cluttered software that at times verges on bloatware.

Maybe it’s because I review phones for a living, but the S26 FE is also just a tad dull, when competitors such as Nothing are charging less but launching more exciting handsets. 

Design 

• Glass back with aluminium sides 
• IP68 
• Very similar to S25 FE 

The S26 FE looks at first glance like the S26 Plus thanks to their similar sizes and dimensions. The FE is pleasingly slim to hold at a svelte 7.4mm thick, but it’s a shame it has a glossy glass back. This does make it less slippery to hold than a matte finish, but it shows fingerprints, especially on the darker cobalt and blueberry colours. 

I reviewed the pistachio colour, which I veered between liking and thinking it looks like gaudy 1970s ceramics. Overall though, the design is plain, with three cameras on the back in a matte finish bump, with silver aluminium side rails. Besides the addition of the bump to house the cameras, this is the same design as the S25 FE. 

Unlike the Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus, the phone’s frame is not made from Samsung’s stronger Armor Aluminium, and the FE’s glass on the front and back is Gorilla Glass Victus+, not the Victus 2 found on its pricier S-series siblings. 

The only other design features of note are a volume rocker on the right edge above the power button, and a USB-C port on the bottom next to the speaker grille and SIM card slot. If you asked me to draw a generic smartphone, I’d probably draw this phone. It’s not one to get if you value interesting design in your personal tech purchases. 

Another couple of niche but disappointing downgrades over the S25 FE are USB 2.0 transfer speeds instead of USB 3.2. Moving files to and from the phone to a drive or computer will be slower, and it means the phone does not support wired DeX, Samsung’s desktop mode, only wireless.

The phone also loses DisplayPort video out, so you can no longer use the phone to output video to a monitor. These seem like cynical things to shave off the phone when it surely does not cost too much more to include them. 

Screen 

• 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED 
• Optical fingerprint sensor 
• Non-uniform bezel 

While the S26 FE’s screen is the same 6.7-inch size as the display on the S26 Plus, Samsung had to cut some corners somewhere. That means the cheaper phone has a lower resolution of 2340 x 1090 and has a lower peak brightness of 1900 nits.

Though it has a 120Hz refresh rate, it does not have the LTPO technology that allows the screen to dynamically drop down to 1Hz for things such as the always-on display, meaning it’s a little less power efficient, only able to switch between 60Hz and 120Hz. 

But the good news is that this is still an excellent screen, and one of the reasons to go for this phone compared to others in its price vicinity. Samsung knows how to fine-tune a display, and for my money this looks better than the £499 Nothing Phone 4a Pro and is as good as the £799 Xiaomi 17T Pro. 

Apps scroll smoothly by, and video looks great thanks to support for HDR10+. The panel is only interrupted by a punch-hole selfie camera at the top, and each corner of the screen is gently curved. 

One other thing that gives away the cheaper build here is the screen’s black bezels, which are not uniform the whole way round. This probably won’t bother most people, but it is noticeably thicker at the bottom than the top and sides. 

The optical fingerprint sensor, another downgrade, is noticeably slower to read my thumbprint than the ultrasonic version in the pricier S26 models, but it worked reliably enough. 

Cameras 

• Identical cameras to the S25 FE 
• Disappointing 8MP telephoto lens 
• Dull colour profile for selfies 

In keeping with Samsung making barely any upgrades over the S25 FE, the S26 FE has the exact same camera hardware as its predecessor: a 50MP main camera, 12MP ultra-wide and 8MP telephoto. On paper, this is also the same as 2024’s S24 FE and 2023’s S23 FE. 

The main lens takes good, sharp photos in daylight. Samsung is known for its punchy, sometimes oversaturated colours in its smartphone photos, and the S26 FE generally falls in line. But in some images I found the colours washed out, which was disappointing. 

Photos also fall down in low light, where the small sensor size shows its shortcomings. Focus is tough to find, and images become noisy. That said, this is a camera that will please most users who just want a reliable point-and-shoot for WhatsApp photo sharing and Instagram Stories posts. 

Less fun to use are the ultra-wide and telephoto, both of which lack quality. An ultra-wide is handy to take in more of an outdoor scene, but the 12MP sensor can’t capture much detail, so shots are more demonstrative than pleasing to look back on. 

The telephoto is also nothing to write home about, but photos are fine in a pinch, and I do commend Samsung for including an optical telephoto lens on its £699 phone when Apple’s £899 (thanks to a September 2026 price rise) iPhone 17 doesn’t include one. If you’re not too bothered by mobile photography, the S26 FE’s cameras are solid enough, especially given I was not overly impressed with the S26 and S26 Plus’s cameras, despite their apparently better hardware. 

The 12MP selfie camera is also not much to get excited about, unable to cope with light levels and capturing mostly dull coloured images. It’ll do for well-lit selfies and for video calls though. 

Samsung needs to up its game in this area, but I will admit these are not offensively bad cameras. That said, I would pick the £499 Google Pixel 10a on main camera quality over the S26 FE, even though that phone has no telephoto lens. You can also pick up the Xiaomi 17T from £649, which has much more impressive triple sensors. 

Performance 

• Exynos 2500 
• 8GB RAM 
• Can cope with most graphically intense games 

One upgrade over the S25 FE is the use of Samsung’s own Exynos 2500 chipset, which is based on a more powerful 3 nanometer (nm) process than the 2400 used last year, but has less oomph than the 2nm Exynos 2600 found in the S26 and S26 Plus (for most buyers – Samsung’s flagships use the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 in the US and Korea). 

I found performance on the S26 FE absolutely fine for daily use, although I do not tend to push my phones to the absolute limit. Apps loaded quickly and I could flick between them without any noticeable slowdown. 

The phone comes with 8GB RAM across the board, and the £699/$699 base model I tested has 128GB storage. That’s not a lot, and prices creep up if you want 256GB or 512GB. There’s no expandable storage or headphone jack, alas, but Samsung does still include dual physical nano SIM card slots, and the phone is also eSIM compatible. 

Graphically intense games such as Asphalt 8 and even Call of Duty: Mobile run well. Casual and mid-level interest mobile gamers will be suited fine, but this is not the handset to get if you want to play Genshin Impact with full settings activated. For that, Samsung buyers will want to bump up to a regular S26 for the more capable hardware. 

Software & AI 

• One UI 9 is competent but cluttered 
• AI stays out of your way if you want it to 
• Seven years of software updates is excellent 

Samsung’s One UI Android software is much better than it was a decade ago or so when it was known as TouchWiz, but in its evolution through the years it has become a bit of an overstuffed beast. Yes, Samsung phones are customisable and can do a lot – part of the appeal of Android – but I find One UI 9 overstuffed with options.

It took me a solid couple of days to wrestle the software to my liking. Samsung by default only displays notification icons on the lock screen rather than full previews with text. This setting to change is surprisingly difficult to find, and it’s possible new owners wouldn’t realise they could even change it. 

Samsung Keyboard is also the keyboard out of the box on this phone, and it is far inferior to Google’s Gboard. Its autocorrect is worse, and suggestions aren’t as useful. I switched to Gboard quite fast despite trying to give Samsung’s version a good go. 

Samsung has at least finally stopped shipping its phones with Samsung Messages, so Google Messages is the texting app here, but you still get a Gallery app that sits alongside Google Photos, and Samsung Browser as well as Google Chrome. There’s other cruft preinstalled like Samsung’s Global Goals app, as well as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Perplexity. These are popular apps, but it irks me that they are there when you set the phone up. 

More annoying is Samsung’s AI, even though it can be tamed. The Now brief widget on the home screen (which can be removed) is very useless. It’s meant to be a personalised feed of your day, but it mostly just shows the weather, your calendar and, if you let it, recommended YouTube videos and Netflix shows. Hardly AI. 

Google Gemini is the main assistant here, alongside a smattering of Bixby, Samsung’s own fading voice assistant brand. The most useful touch is being able to type things like “bigger font” in the search bar in the settings app and have the ‘Font size’ setting come up in results. Typing natural language to search for settings is clever, and works well here. 

I personally do not want to use Galaxy AI to help draft my emails, but I do like that it can transcribe recordings from the native recorder app. Samsung also offers AI like Photo Assist to edit images, but again, you can also do this in Google Photos. The doubling up of AI tools across Samsung and Google apps goes some way to having this phone feel cluttered, along with the splitting of the notification shade and control centre to be more like iOS – though this is a setting you can change. 

I prefer Google’s cleaner version of Android, though once you’ve chipped away at the initial annoyances, One UI is stable and reliable. Best of all, the S26 FE will get seven years of software updates, keeping buyers up to speed until 2033. That’s as good as flagship Samsung and Google phones get, and is a big plus point when compared to phones like the Xiaomi 17T Pro that beat the S26 FE on hardware, but will only get five Android version updates. 

Battery life 

• Can stretch into a second day with minimal use 
• A fair bit of standby drain 
• Can fully charge in 75 minutes 

The aforementioned Xiaomi 17T series was one of the first to use newer, more energy-dense silicon-carbon batteries that offer longer battery life, but the S26 FE has a traditional lithium-ion cell. At 4,900mAh, it is sizable, but it only results in one full day of battery life in my testing. 

It can stretch into a second day with moderate use – with lower power mode employed – but this is not the phone to get if you value longevity. It never lasted me a full two days. I also found there was a steady trickle of battery drain when not in use, which is disappointing.

You do get relatively fast 45W wired charging and 15W wireless, but no charger in the box. 

Using a Samsung 45W charger I already had, I charged the phone from 1% to full in 75 minutes, and it reached 50% in 25 minutes. Although pricier phones can charge much faster if you shop around, this is more than acceptable if you have the right charger for the job. 

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