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Samsung Galaxy S26 FE Review: Same as Before, but for More Money
Samsung’s Fan Edition (FE) range is designed to give you a near-flagship experience at a discounted price. Last year’s Galaxy S25 FE won plaudits as one of the best cheap phones, shaving off the superfluous and coming in at $650. Samsung upgraded the processor in the Galaxy S26 FE, but little else has changed, and the price has climbed to $700.
With a polished look, a lovely big display, a versatile triple-camera system, and decent battery life, the Samsung Galaxy S26 FE is a perfectly good phone in isolation. The trouble is, it doesn’t look as tempting when you factor in the price and competition. And Samsung has quietly downgraded the USB port.
You could easily mistake the S26 FE for one of Samsung’s flagship phones. It has the same glass back with the triple-lens camera island at the top left, the same aluminum frame, and the same flat all-screen frontage broken only by the punch-hole selfie camera. The colors are slightly different. I got a tasteful pale green Pistachio review unit, but it also comes in dark gray Graphite and indigo Blueberry.
It’s a well-built device with an IP68 rating that can survive a dunk in fresh water. I find the camera island a little annoying because it stops the phone from lying flat. The under-screen fingerprint sensor is also too low for me, but I suspect that’s muscle memory from another phone, and it seems responsive when I manage to hit the right spot.
Although unchanged this year, the 6.7-inch OLED screen is very good and supports a smooth 120-Hz refresh rate. It’s a shame this isn’t an LTPO display, because that would have let the refresh rate automatically adjust from 1 to 120 and save battery life. The peak brightness of 1,900 nits is also much lower than the regular Galaxy S26 (3,000 nits), but I found the display legible outdoors. You’ll likely only feel the difference in direct sunlight and maybe with bright details in HDR movies.
The main improvement over the S25 FE is Samsung’s Exynos 2500 processor, which brings slightly better performance and power efficiency than the Exynos 2400 in the S25 FE, but falls well short of the Exynos 2600 (used in the rest of the S26 range outside the US). For most folks, this is a perfectly fine performer. I had no issues with everyday use, casual gaming, browsing, shooting photos and video, and messaging. The only time I ran into problems was playing Wuthering Waves, which dropped frames, glitched, and then crashed, but it’s a very demanding game.
The 128 GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM in the base model S26 FE feel stingy to me, but I take a lot of photos and play a lot of games (Wuthering Waves is 40 GB alone). I’d like to see 256 GB and 12 GB as standard. Unfortunately, the 256 GB model costs an extra $100, and it still has only 8 GB of RAM.
While the 4,900-mAh battery is the same as the S25 FE, you will likely squeeze a bit more life from it because of the processor upgrade. It got me through most days with around 20 percent remaining by bedtime and could maybe stretch to two days with light use, but I’d plan on charging nightly. An hour of Monument Valley 2 claimed 10 percent, but just 20 minutes of Wuthering Waves drained 7 percent. When it’s time to recharge, there’s 45-watt wired charging or 15-watt wireless charging. Sadly, though it is Qi2-compatible, there are no magnets for easy docking.
One perplexing downgrade is the USB-C port, which dropped to USB 2.0 from the S25 FE's USB 3.2 (Gen 1). That means file transfers max out at 480 Mbps, and it doesn’t support wired DeX (wireless DeX is still available). More importantly, it lacks DisplayPort Alt Mode, which means you can’t use it with virtual display smart glasses (I tested with the Viture Beast) or plug it into a TV.
Samsung’s One UI 9 feels clean, and it’s very customizable. Naturally, it’s infused with Samsung AI, but I appreciated features like Call Screening, and I actually quite like the Now Brief, which lets you create custom cards that pull relevant info on the weather, hea