rewrite this title 5 things we want from the Samsung Galaxy S26 – from clever battery tech to better zoom

With 2025 coming to a close we’re now looking towards 2026’s phones, and the Samsung Galaxy S26 series could be among the first of them, with a recent leak suggesting these might be unveiled as soon as January.

Thanks to other leaks and rumors we also have some idea of what to expect from them, but that’s not what this article is about. Rather, this is what we want from them, and it’s a mix of things that are likely and very unlikely, but none of it is stuff that would be unrealistic for a flagship phone to include.

So, from better batteries to more megapixels and beyond, here’s what we want from the Samsung Galaxy S26 series.

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1. A silicon-carbon battery

It seems like with each passing year, new Chinese phones will have higher capacity batteries, and that’s become all the more the case recently, since many switched to silicon-carbon batteries, which allow for a higher capacity without making the battery itself any bigger.

But Samsung hasn’t made this switch, and it’s really starting to fall behind on the battery capacity front. In fact, even other rivals like Google and Apple – which haven’t made this switch yet either – are starting to offer phones with higher capacity batteries than Samsung.

For whatever reason, Samsung seems reluctant to go above 5,000mAh in its phones, but for the Galaxy S26 series and in particular the Galaxy S26 Ultra, we’d like to see the battery reach new heights. Ideally it would use a silicon-carbon construction to do so, since that would allow for larger gains with minimal impact on the thickness of the phone.

Will this happen? Probably not. There’s no sign that Samsung has adopted silicon-carbon batteries here, or that it plans to equip any of these phones with a battery of more than 5,000mAh. But the Samsung Galaxy S26 at least might get a slight boost, with one report pointing to a 4,300mAh battery, which would be up from 4,000mAh in the Samsung Galaxy S25.

2. A 10x telephoto camera

Samsung’s Ultra phones were once the telephoto kings, out zooming almost all the competition with their 10x optical zooms. But then Samsung made a curious decision – it switched these phones to a 5x optical zoom instead.

Now, they still have what Samsung describes as a 10x ‘optical quality’ zoom, but this is achieved by cropping into the sensor, meaning the effective sensor size is smaller and the megapixel count is lower, so it might be optical quality but it’s the optical quality you’d get from a far worse camera.

Not only that, but many rival handsets also offer 5x optical zoom, and often ‘optical quality’ options of their own, so Samsung has really lost its edge here.

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That’s why with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra we’d love to see a return to 10x optical zoom – there’s already a separate 3x zoom camera for when you don’t want to zoom that far. So with this we’d be getting the best of both worlds, and Samsung could regain its camera zoom crown.

However, this probably isn’t going to happen, with most leaks suggesting there’ll be few if any changes to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra’s cameras, and none to its 5x zoom snapper.

3. Faster charging

Capacity isn’t the only aspect of batteries where Samsung is falling behind, as the company also persists in limited charging power to quite low levels. The Samsung Galaxy S25 for example tops out at 25W, and even the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra can only manage 45W charging, with both phones also stuck at just 15W wireless charging.

To give you an idea of how much better things could be, the recently launched OnePlus 15 is capable of 120W wired charging and 50W wireless charging, so Samsung really has some catching up to do.

Thankfully, it seems the company might at least take a small step in the right direction, with some reports suggesting the Galaxy S26 Ultra might be capable of 60W wired charging and 25W wireless. So while that’s still not where we’d like it to be, it would be a start.

4. The same chipset everywhere

One curious quirk of the Samsung Galaxy S line is that different regions often get different chipsets, with Samsung splitting them between its in-house Exynos series and more mainstream Qualcomm Snapdragon ones.

This typically means that some countries get slightly inferior versions of the phones, as one chipset is almost inevitably better than the other – with the Snapdragon models tending to have the edge.

So we’d like to see an end to this practice, so that buyers in some regions aren’t getting a worse deal than others.

Sadly, that probably won’t happen, with reports suggesting that this time around there will be a mix of Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Exynos 2600 chipsets used, though leaks suggest that this Exynos model might at least be a better match for the Snapdragon than in most years.

5. More megapixels

While some of the cameras on the Samsung Galaxy S25 line have lots of megapixels, others don’t, with the 3x telephoto camera for example being just 10MP across all models, and the ultra-wide camera being just 12MP on the Samsung Galaxy S25 and the Samsung Galaxy S25 Plus.

Given how expensive these phones are, that’s not great, and while megapixels aren’t the only factor in photography, we can’t say these sensors are particularly special in other ways either.

So for the Samsung Galaxy S26 series we’d like to see them upgraded – ideally with more megapixels, as that’s an easy feature to shout about, but if Samsung can deliver larger sensors too then all the better.

Will this happen? Well there’s some disagreement between leakers on what Samsung has planned for the cameras, but we’ve heard talk that the 12MP ultra-wide could be boosted to 50MP, and the 10MP telephoto might get a small improvement to 12MP, so there’s a chance at least some of the sensors will be better this time around.

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