On 25 February, Samsung hosts Galaxy Unpacked 2026 in San Francisco — its first major event of the year — and if the torrent of specifications, benchmark scores, retail unit sightings, and official pre-announcements that preceded it are any guide, the Galaxy S26 series is shaping up to be among the most technically ambitious Samsung launches in years. The expected headliners: the Galaxy S26, S26+, and S26 Ultra; the Galaxy Buds 4 and Buds 4 Pro; and — hovering at the edges of credible executive disclosure with the studied nonchalance of something that has been confirmed without quite being announced — a first official glimpse of Samsung's long-anticipated smart glasses. None of this is confirmed. The devices are unannounced. What follows is grounded in the most credible leaks from established tipsters, official Samsung pre-launch communications, regulatory filings, benchmark appearances, and Samsung's own confirmed announcements — all of which, taken together, paint a picture of what 25 February is most likely to look like.
There is a particular ritual that surrounds every major Samsung launch, and it goes something like this: a beautifully choreographed stage show in a city chosen for maximum journalistic inconvenience; an executive in an impeccably pressed suit delivering the phrase "the future of mobile" with the solemnity of a funeral oration; a hall full of people who already know the specs pretending to be surprised — and then, inevitably, the question that has haunted every Unpacked since the Exynos 990 turned the Galaxy S20 into a pocket-sized radiator: which chip are *we* getting? This year, if the leaks are to be believed, the answer is not the one anyone was expecting.
The Stage, The Invite, And What Samsung Has Already Said
The choice of San Francisco is deliberate — positioning the launch within Silicon Valley's gravitational field, signalling to an AI industry currently burning capital at a rate that would alarm a central banker that the most consequential AI consumer device of 2026 may be made in Suwon, not Cupertino.
Samsung's official invite, sent on 10 February, offers the clearest distillation of its intended narrative: "The Next AI Phone Makes Your Life Easier." The language is instructive. Samsung is not promising the future. It is promising *frictionlessness* — a more intimate, more operational ambition, and a harder one to deliver. Making AI genuinely useful is a substantially more difficult engineering problem than making it impressive, and the history of consumer technology is full of features that inspired standing ovations and were disabled within a fortnight.
What Samsung has done ahead of this Unpacked — whether by design, by leak, or by the inevitable entropy of a launch involving thousands of people across multiple continents — is pre-disclose more than it usually does. The Exynos 2600's full specifications were published by Samsung Semiconductor in December. A Privacy Display-equipped Cobalt Violet Galaxy S26 Ultra was filmed in a pavement-side unboxing in Dubai. Perplexity's system-level integration was confirmed in Samsung's own press release. The element of surprise at this particular Unpacked is, in the most diplomatic terms available, limited.
This could be read as a failure of information security. It might also be read as a company that, for once, is sufficiently confident in what it is about to show that the pre-show is not diluting the main event.
The S26 Ultra's Display That Could Hide Itself
The Galaxy S26 Ultra is expected to be the centrepiece of the keynote, and if the specifications that have been circulating prove accurate, one feature is likely to dominate the conversation in a way that no Samsung display has since the first foldable.
Samsung is expected to unveil what leaked materials have called Flex Magic Pixel — or Zero-Peeking Privacy — a hardware-level privacy display claimed to provide per-pixel control over the viewing angle of the M14 OLED panel. Not a software overlay. Not a privacy film. An optical layer embedded within the display stack itself, managed in real time by on-device AI from a company called Nota AI, that — if Samsung's claims hold up to independent scrutiny — makes the screen optically black at off-axis angles while remaining fully legible to the person holding the phone.
The early evidence is intriguing. A Dubai retail unit — the most widely circulated piece of pre-launch hardware — showed the screen going dark at side angles during what appeared to be normal operation. Samsung's own teaser video demonstrated both a full-screen privacy mode and a more nuanced selective mode, in which specific UI elements could be obscured while the rest of the screen remained visible. The on-device AI is claimed to activate automatically in public environments, and to classify content by sensitivity without requiring manual intervention.
The important caveat — and it is structural, not cosmetic — is that the technology's behaviour in *normal*, non-privacy viewing has not been independently verified. Every privacy filter technology in recent memory has involved a compromise: reduced brightness, shifted colour temperature, a slight optical fog at angles beyond dead centre. Samsung's claim is that the Flex Magic Pixel exacts none of these. The industry's scepticism is earned by precedent, and will only be resolved by units in the hands of reviewers.
The concept itself, though, is worth sitting with for a moment. The smartphone screen has been a fundamentally public object masquerading as a private one for fifteen years. Everyone has evolved some physical choreography to manage the gap — the body-turn, the aggressive brightness reduction, the reflexive pocket-shove at a notification from the wrong person. If the Privacy Display functions as described, it does not close that gap incrementally. It eliminates it architecturally. Ice Universe has noted that Apple is reportedly evaluating similar hardware-level technology for future MacBooks, with 2029 cited as a potential window — which, if accurate, would give Samsung a first-mover advantage measured not in months but in years.
The remaining S26 Ultra specifications, per WinFuture and multiple corroborating leaks: a 6.9-inch M14 AMOLED panel with QHD+ resolution, 120Hz adaptive refresh, and a claimed 2,600-nit peak brightness; a 200-megapixel main camera at f/1.4, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, a 10-megapixel 3x telephoto, and a 50-megapixel 5x periscope; a 5,000 milliampere-hour battery; 60W wired charging, up from 45W on the S25 Ultra; a titanium frame at 7.9mm and 214 grammes — thinner and lighter than its predecessor. The S Pen is expected to be retained. Pricing is harder to pin down: leaked figures range from approximately Rs 1,29,999 in India to $1,299 in the United States, with an early Dubai retail listing putting the European price at €1,469 for the base 256GB model — a figure that, if confirmed, would represent a meaningful increase over the S25 Ultra.
The chip geography is worth establishing clearly before the dedicated section below. The Galaxy S26 Ultra is expected to ship with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 For Galaxy in every market — FCC certification documents filed under model numbers SM-S948B (international) and SM-S948U (US carrier-locked) both list the SM8850 chipset identifier with no regional exceptions. The Galaxy S26 and S26+, by contrast, split by territory: Snapdragon in the United States, Canada, and China; Exynos 2600 in India, South Korea, and Europe. What that split actually means for the people on the Exynos side of the line is a more interesting question than it has been in years, and is addressed in full below.
2 Nanometres: Why This Chip Changes Everything
If the Galaxy S26 Ultra is the commercial centrepiece of Unpacked, the Exynos 2600 is the story that extends beyond it — into semiconductor geopolitics, foundry competition, and a redemption arc several years in the making.
Every flagship chip currently shipping in a commercial smartphone — Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, MediaTek's Dimensity 9400, Apple's A18 Pro, Google's Tensor G5 — is built on a 3-nanometre process. The Exynos 2600, which is expected to power the Galaxy S26 and S26+ in India, South Korea, and Europe, is built on Samsung Foundry's SF2 node: 2 nanometres, Gate-All-Around (GAA) transistor architecture, and — if Samsung's manufacturing yields are as strong as the pre-launch indicators suggest — the first 2nm chip to ship in mass-market consumer quantities anywhere in the world.
Apple's A20, anticipated to reach 2nm via TSMC's competing N2 process, is not expected until the iPhone 18 Pro later in 2026. The timing, if everything goes to plan for Samsung, would give the Exynos 2600 a six-month first-mover window at the frontier of mobile semiconductor manufacturing. That is not nothing.
The physics of the leap matter. GAA — in which the transistor gate wraps around all four sides of the channel rather than the three sides managed by the older FinFET architecture — reduces current leakage at small geometries, enables lower operating voltages, and theoretically allows the chip to sustain higher clock speeds for longer before thermal throttling intervenes. Samsung's 2nm process is, in the company's own testing, claimed to be 25 to 30 per cent more power efficient than their 3nm node used in the Exynos 2500. Whether those figures translate to real-world gains of similar magnitude is a question reviewers will answer once units arrive.
The architecture of the chip itself: a 10-core CPU built on Arm's latest v9.3 instruction set, in a 1+3+6 configuration — one prime Arm C1-Ultra core at 3.8 GHz, three C1-Pro high-performance cores at 3.25 GHz, and six C1-Pro efficiency cores at 2.75 GHz. Samsung claims 39 per cent CPU performance improvement over the Exynos 2500. Leaked Geekbench 6 scores from pre-release units put the Exynos 2600 at approximately 3,197 to 3,336 single-core and 11,012 to 11,369 multi-core. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 For Galaxy — Samsung's overclocked exclusive variant, with prime Oryon V3 cores pushed to 4.74 GHz against the standard chip's 4.61 GHz ceiling — scores approximately 3,601 to 3,724 single-core, a 16 per cent lead that directly reflects the frequency advantage of nearly a full gigahertz over the Exynos prime core.
The multi-core story runs the other way: the Exynos 2600's 10-core configuration (1+3+6) against the Snapdragon's 8-core arrangement (2+6) produces multi-core scores that are within the margin of error, with some runs giving the Exynos a marginal edge. One benchmark comparison is worth carrying forward: the REDMAGIC 11 Pro, running the standard non-overclocked Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with active liquid cooling and a fan, posted higher scores than the For Galaxy variant in the same test series. The overclock buys single-core headroom; it does not override thermodynamics. For daily use, the practical difference between the two chips is expected to be negligible in either direction.
Where The Exynos May Actually Lead
The more interesting finding from the pre-launch benchmark cycle concerns the GPU. The Xclipse 960 — which doubles the compute performance of its predecessor and boosts ray tracing by up to 50 per cent, built on AMD RDNA 4 architecture through Samsung's long-running Radeon IP licensing agreement — posted a Basemark In Vitro ray tracing score of 8,262 from a pre-release Galaxy S26 unit. The closest result from a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 device in the same test landed around 7,500. A 10 per cent lead for the Exynos, in graphics, in 2026, is a sentence that would have seemed implausible a year ago.
If the benchmarks translate to shipping hardware — and that is the conditional upon which the entire Exynos narrative rests — Indian and European buyers of the S26 and S26+ may find themselves with a marginally superior graphics chip to their US counterparts for the first time in this decade. Ice Universe's codename for the GPU, "AMD JUNO," has not been confirmed by Samsung and should be treated as unverified; the RDNA 4 architecture relationship, however, is established.
The Split, And What It Means
The chip geography of the Galaxy S26 series deserves a moment of clarity, because it shapes what the Exynos redemption narrative actually means in practice. The Ultra, in every market, gets the Snapdragon. The S26 and S26+ are where the split lands: Snapdragon in North America and China, Exynos 2600 in India, South Korea, and Europe. For Indian buyers of the standard and Plus models, then, the Exynos 2600 is not a consolation prize to be compared unfavourably against someone else's Snapdragon. It is the chip Samsung is making its reputation on in 2026 — and on multi-core workloads, it is not losing that argument. The single-core gap is real and visible in benchmarks, but it is a gap felt in synthetic tests far more than in opening Instagram or sending a WhatsApp voice note. The GPU gap — if the Basemark figures hold — runs in the other direction entirely, favouring the Exynos for graphics-intensive tasks. India, which gets the Exynos 2600, may well be getting the better gaming chip.
ENSS And The Mobile Gaming Argument
The most immediately relevant feature in the Exynos 2600 for India's market — one of the world's largest mobile gaming populations by active player count — is not raw clock speed. It is ENSS: Exynos Neural Super Sampling, Samsung's mobile equivalent of Nvidia's DLSS.
ENSS uses the chip's NPU to render games at a lower internal resolution and AI-upscale the output to native resolution in real time, while simultaneously generating interpolated frames to make 60fps gameplay feel closer to 120fps. Samsung claims gaming experiences up to 3 times smoother at materially lower thermal load. For BGMI and Free Fire players — and for anyone who has watched a flagship Android phone throttle into mediocrity during the third squad wipe of the evening — the practical implication is higher settings, sustained frame rates, and a device that does not become uncomfortably warm in the process.
ENSS requires developer integration to function optimally, much as Nvidia's DLSS requires the Nvidia SDK. Samsung has not confirmed which titles will support it at launch, and this is among the most important details to watch for during the Unpacked presentation.
On The Thermal Problem
No account of the Exynos 2600 is credible without acknowledging the weight of recent history. The Exynos 990, in the Galaxy S20, documented thermal throttling severe enough that independent reviewers recorded measurable performance degradation within minutes of sustained load. The backlash altered Samsung's regional chip strategy for three subsequent generations — the silicon equivalent of a band releasing a catastrophic album and quietly pulling it from streaming while they spent three years in the studio trying to remember what they were supposed to sound like.
The Exynos 2600 is expected to address this through two mechanisms: the inherent efficiency of 2nm GAA, and a hardware packaging innovation called Heat Path Block (HPB). HPB relocates the DRAM from its traditional position directly above the processor die — a configuration that traps heat within the package — to the side of the chip, replacing the stacking arrangement with a copper heatsink in direct contact with the processor surface. Samsung claims a 16 to 30 per cent reduction in thermal resistance compared to the Exynos 2500.
The independent signal worth noting: reports from Gizmochina suggest Samsung's HPB packaging approach is attracting evaluation interest from Apple and Qualcomm, both of whom have relied on TSMC almost exclusively for recent silicon. Rivals do not study the thermal packaging of a chip they do not consider threatening.
Whether the HPB delivers its claimed thermal advantage under the sustained loads that mobile gaming demands — not a 10-minute Geekbench run, but 45 minutes of BGMI at maximum settings — is a question that cannot be answered by leaks or press releases. It will be answered by reviewers with stop-watches and thermal cameras in March.
3 AI Agents, 1 Phone: The Galaxy AI Architecture
On 22 February — three days before Unpacked, in a move that either reflects extraordinary confidence or a studied indifference to suspense — Samsung officially announced that Galaxy AI is becoming an open, multi-agent framework. Three intelligences, operating in concert on a single device: Bixby, repositioned as a "device agent" that translates natural language into device settings and actions; Gemini, handling generative tasks; and Perplexity, embedded at the system level with its own wake phrase ("Hey Plex"), side-button assignment, and native integration within Samsung Notes, Clock, Gallery, Calendar, and Reminder.
The theoretical elegance of this architecture is genuine. The engineering challenge — three AI agents trained on different datasets, operating under different data access models, expected to feel like one coherent system rather than three companies sharing a device and arguing over the thermostat — is equally genuine. Samsung's pitch is that the orchestration is seamless: Perplexity handles real-time web intelligence, Gemini handles generative creation, Bixby handles the device itself. Whether the seams are invisible in daily use, or merely well-upholstered, is something only time in hand will determine.
One UI 8.5 — expected to ship on S26 devices from 25 February, with a wider rollout to the S25 and S24 series planned for late March — also introduces Now Nudge (context-aware overlays; your Calendar surfaces when a friend's message mentions lunch), Storage Share (access files across linked Galaxy devices from within My Files), and continuous non-destructive editing in Photo Assist. The Perplexity and new Bixby integration is included in the One UI 8.5 Beta currently active in India, suggesting both features are confirmed for the Indian market at launch.
The Buds And The Missing Speaker
The Galaxy Buds 4 and Buds 4 Pro, if Roland Quandt's pricing is accurate — and his track record on Samsung audio accessories is close to statistical — are expected to hold at $179.99 and $249.99 respectively. In India, pricing is expected to follow the Buds 3 series pattern.
The Buds 3 had a difficult year. The design drew comparisons to AirPods with a persistence that Samsung found uncomfortable, and the audio performance — particularly ANC quality and sub-bass reproduction — was broadly considered a regression from the Buds 2 Pro. The Buds 4 series is, in this context, a correction: distinct metal stems, a Samsung aesthetic rather than a pale imitation, and a flat-rest case orientation that echoes the more considered industrial logic of earlier Buds generations.
The Buds 4 Pro is expected to add Head Gestures (nod for yes, shake for no, for calls and Bixby), improved Adaptive Noise Control with better handling of the 5 to 8 kHz high-frequency range where the Buds 3 Pro's ANC drew the most criticism, and a slightly larger 61 milliampere-hour battery per earbud against the Buds 3 Pro's 53. The transparent-lid case is either a piece of considered industrial theatre or an unnecessary window into things that do not need to be seen — depending entirely on your position on whether product design should acknowledge its own mechanism, or simply get out of the way.
Both models are expected to have removed the case speaker. The practical casualty is Find My audio functionality. For a product category in which physical loss is not an edge case but a reliable biennial occurrence, this is not a small decision.
The Dark Horse: Glasses, If They Show Up At All
The device most capable of shifting the entire conversation on 25 February is also, most likely, the one that will not be launched — only shown.
Samsung's Q4 2025 earnings call, in which EVP of Mobile Experience Seong Cho confirmed a 2026 launch for "next-generation AR glasses," established the existence and partnership structure of Samsung's most ambitious consumer electronics project since the first foldable. Google is providing the Android XR operating system and Gemini AI layer. Warby Parker is handling mainstream accessibility design, with a reported $150 million R&D investment. Gentle Monster — the Korean luxury eyewear brand whose understanding of the precise cultural frequency at which a technology product crosses from gadget to object of desire is arguably Samsung's most valuable non-technical asset in this project — is handling the fashion dimension.
Two models are understood to be in development: an audio-first device (12-megapixel camera with autofocus, microphones, speakers, Gemini AI, no display) that would compete directly with Meta's Ray-Ban Smart Glasses; and a display variant, adding a transparent in-lens overlay for navigation, real-time translation, and contextual information.
The probability of a full retail announcement at Unpacked is low. The probability of a first official look — a developer preview, a concept demonstration, enough visual information to reframe the post-smartphone conversation for a week — is considered high by most observers tracking Samsung's product calendar. Galaxy Unpacked is the largest stage Samsung has in the first half of the year. The glasses are confirmed for 2026. The mathematics of these two facts are not complicated.
Meta's Ray-Ban glasses have a two-year market presence and retail distribution that Samsung cannot replicate overnight. What Samsung is expected to bring is the depth of the Galaxy device ecosystem, Gemini AI capability that Meta's assistant cannot yet match in breadth, and Gentle Monster — which is not a concession to fashion. It is a calculated bet on the cultural vector through which premium consumer technology actually diffuses into the populations that matter most to premium device margins.
What 25 February Needs To Answer
There is one detail from the pre-launch cycle that deserves to be carried into the event and held there. Samsung's teaser video for the Galaxy S26 Ultra's low-light camera — the one that asked, pointedly, "Can your phone do that?" — was disclosed to have been generated with AI tools. Not filmed with the S26 Ultra. Constructed in post-production, using artificial intelligence, for a launch event explicitly positioned around the transformative power of its camera's artificial intelligence.
Samsung's disclosure was made with the weary transparency of a company that knew it had been caught rather than one that felt it had nothing to hide. It is the most honest encapsulation of the challenge the Galaxy S26 faces: a phone selling AI-generated experiences whose actual real-world output — the Day-to-Night camera transformation, the EdgeFusion multi-frame reconstruction, the Privacy Display's behaviour in normal viewing mode — has not yet been independently verified. Pre-launch benchmarks from Geekbench and Basemark are real data points. They are not the same as daily use.
The five questions that 25 February should be expected to address, and which will define the S26's legacy: Does the Privacy Display preserve colour fidelity and brightness when operating normally, or does it exact the familiar compromise of every privacy filter before it? Does the Exynos 2600 sustain its claimed performance under the thermal load that mobile gaming demands? Which titles will support ENSS at launch, and when will the broader library follow? What is the confirmed pricing — particularly for India, where the Exynos chip story is the most consequential market narrative? And is there anything on stage that looks like glasses?
Samsung has made large claims about intelligence — in the chip, in the camera, in the three-agent AI architecture. It has built a launch cycle that has pre-disclosed enough to make those claims verifiable, which is either confidence or recklessness depending on how 25 February goes. The devices haven't been announced. The spec sheets are still technically rumour. But the breadth and consistency of the pre-launch evidence is, to put it in the language of the FT rather than a press release, unusually convergent.
Whether it amounts to the most consequential Android launch in years, or the most elaborately leaked one, is a question that San Francisco will ask — and the next six months of real-world use will answer.
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