Samsung Galaxy A26 review

One UI 7 and Android 15

The Galaxy A26 ships with the latest Android 15 and One UI 7 pre-installed, and Samsung promises six generational OS upgrades and 6 years of security patches. That's quite the commitment for such a budget device but getting the updates is one thing, but keeping this sort of budget hardware working smoothly after six updates to the OS is another matter entirely.

If you've used One UI in the past, you will feel right at home. Although there are quite a few design changes, so make sure to check out the new aesthetics in the video below.

Here's our One UI 7 review in mobile view format - watch it on your phone:

You should also check out the Galaxy S25's software section to get familiar with One UI 7.0.

Keep in mind that some of the advanced features and almost all of the AI-related functionalities are unavailable on the A26 due to hardware limitations. Google's Circle to Search, however, is here to stay along with the Object eraser in the native Gallery app. However, the latter is not the amazing feature you see in demos of the S25 series phones.

Home screen • quick toggles • settings menu

The A26 also gets AI Select, an updated version of Smart Select, with which you might be familiar. The AI can now analyze the screen's content in more detail and offer actions based on it. It can grab any text appearing in a photo, make a photo clipping, create GIFs from Instagram reels, or make wallpaper using a photo you have open on the screen.

Receant apps • Intelligent features

As far as day-to-day performance goes, it's okay but leaves more to be desired. Navigation could be a tad more responsive.

Benchmark performance

The Galaxy A26 is based on the Samsung Exynos 1380 chip - a familiar piece of silicon that is now effectively trickling further down having been used in the Galaxy A54 first and then the Galaxy A35. It is not a bad chip per se. It offers 5G connectivity and modern connectivity features such as Bluetooth 5.3 and dual-band Wi-Fi 6.

Don't expect too much in the way of raw performance, though. The CPU setup consists of four Cortex-A78 cores, clocked at up to 2.4 GHz, and another four Cortex-A55 cores, working at up to 2.0 GHz. The GPU is a 950 MHz Mali-G68 MP5 unit.

The available memory options are a lot. The base configuration is 6GB/128GB, but you can upgrade to 8GB/256GB, 12GB/256GB, 8GB/512GB or 12GB/512GB. The storage can be expanded via microSD card up to 2TB. And as far as storage speed goes, Samsung used UFS 2.2.

As you can see, there are a handful of smartphones that are more powerful than the Galaxy A26 for roughly the same price. In fact, the only phones that the Galaxy A26 outperforms are the Moto G Power (2025), which is strictly a device for the US market, and last year's Galaxy A25.

Sustained performance

The Galaxy A26 was able to sustain decent CPU clock speeds throughout the CPU stress test, but we expected more, given that the Exynos 1380 SoC isn't very powerful to begin with. The chip throttled down to 71% of its theoretical performance but maintained levels around 80% most of the time.

CPU and GPU stress tests

The GPU stress test was excellent with 99% stability reported.