Samsung is sleepwalking

The Galaxy S26 Ultra is the latest in a long line of uninspiring updates

If you visited the Samsung booth last week at Mobile World Congress 2026, which as always was held at the Fira Gran Via convention center in Barcelona, you might have made your way past the array of brand-new devices to find a timeline of old Galaxy S phones mounted to a wall.

It’s a neat piece of history, but I’m not sure it had the intended effect. Rather than demonstrating Samsung’s progress over the years, it highlights how the South Korean tech giant — still the #2 phone maker in the world right behind Apple, according to data from Counterpoint — has been treading water at the top of its lineup.

This year’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, announced a few days before Mobile World Congress kicked off, is an extraordinarily iterative update in what has become a line of near-identical flagships. The design is almost indistinguishable from the previous four years’, and there isn’t much to shout about on the inside either.