Update, Sunday Dec. 7: This article has been updated with details on Samsung’s three new Galaxy S smartphones.

Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

Ewan Spence

2026’s smartphone calendar has the pivotal Mobile World Congress event running from March 2 to March 4. Countless manufacturers will debut new smartphones around the event. Samsung will be one exception, as it looks to launch earlier than the Barcelona parties. Why is it essential for the Galaxy S26 Ultra to be first out of the gate in 2026?

The Galaxy S26 Ultra Can Explain Its Own Path

The most significant advantage for Samsung is that Galaxy Unpacked is a standalone event. Unlike MWC, where launches and moments are stacked throughout Barcelona, Galaxy Unpacked is 100 percent Samsung. Not only that, but given Samsung’s size and the appreciation that the Galaxy S26 family are the elephants in the room, other manufacturers will actively go out of their way to avoid clashing with the South Korean company.

The knock-on effect of that is there’s no other consumer tech news, giving Samsung a clear run when pitching the new hardware and software to journalists around the world. When you have a raft of new products with complexity beneath the clean UI, you rely on stories from the event to explain the latest ‘invisible’ magic running in the background.

With others dodging the date, expect Galaxy Unpacked to dominate tech headlines in the days before, during, and after a launch early in the annual cycle.

Samsung’s OneUI Code Reveals Galaxy S26 Ultra Design

Update, Sunday Dec. 7:

No matter when the release date is, or what software is shipped, you need a solid smartphone to run everything on. The upcoming Galaxy Unpacked event should see three new handsets: the Galaxy S26, Galaxy S26+ and Galaxy 26 Ultra.

This wasn’t always the case as a Galaxy S26 Edge was on the cards during the autumn months. Following disappointing sales, Samsung has reportedly moved back to the Vanilla/Plus/Ultra combination. Those reports have been backed up by one of the best sources possible… Samsung.

The latest build of OneUI 8.5 has been examined by the team at Android Authority (a public beta release for the Galaxy S25 family should be available before the end of the year). The code refers to three smartphones, the M1, M2 and M3, along with accompanying rendered images of the phones.

These match up with the leaked designs of the S26, S26+ and S26 Ultra. Of note is the use of a single camera island for three vertically aligned lenses across all three models (with two smaller lenses mounted away from the island for the M3-labelled Galaxy S26 Ultra).

The Galaxy S26 Ultra Exclusives

Previous Galaxy Unpacked events have first launched and then upgraded Galaxy AI, Samsung’s artificial intelligence toolset. At the 2024 Galaxy Unpacked event, Samsung launched Galaxy AI with Google’s Circle To Search feature. It was exclusive to Samsung for several months before Google opened it up to the broader audience. But for the months after the launch of the Galaxy S25 family, and during MWC and the subsequent launches by other manufacturers, Circle To Search remained a massive point of differentiation in the market.

A unique feature, a window of exclusivity, and the opportunity to have it explained in depth across the press? What’s not to love about going early?

The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s Competitive Advantage

Ultimately, it has been Google that gets to ‘go first’ with new Android features, specifically with the Pixel series. Galaxy AI may have debuted at Galaxy Unpacked in 2024, but in Oct. 2023, Google announced the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, labelling them the first AI smartphones.

Part of that saw AI services added to Android for all manufacturers to use, but Samsung was the first major consumer brand to step up and push AI heavily with the Galaxy S24 family. The company laid out a path that tracked Google to begin with (including the aforementioned Circle To Search exclusive) but also introduced Samsung’s own features, which have been steadily improved over the last two years.

Samsung set out to define what an AI smartphone would mean for the general audience. Any other AI-focused smartphone would be drawn into direct comparison with the Galaxy range, and with a lead in promotion and execution, the Galaxy was the yardstick. Samsung’s yardstick.

The same was true in 2025; Google opened the door with the Pixel 9, and Samsung roared through it with the Galaxy S25 trio. It screamed “this is the way forward”, and the smartphone world, once more, followed.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s First Mover Advantage

As we look towards 2026, Google has already made its key move for this generation with the headline inclusion of MagicCue, an agentic AI service that will proactively surface information from a phone’s content to support the user. When someone messages to ask where you are meeting later that day, MagicCue can find the restaurant reservation and add that into a draft reply, along with supporting information such as the address.

Last year, Samsung brought Now Brief and the Now Bar to the Galaxy S25 and Galaxy AI. This pulls in information from your phone, as well as external sources (such as weather or sports results) to offer relevant information throughout the day.

If Samsung were to make a big play with an extension to Now Brief that adds more AI smarts, more data, and more local processing, it would not only complement Google’s MagicCue approach but also mark it out as the feature to have.

It may not be this exact feature, but whatever it is, if the competition at MWC is running similar ideals, they’ll confirm Samsung as the leader in the space (at least to consumers). If the competition is looking elsewhere, there will be a point of differentiation, and Samsung will have had more time to establish its choice as the ‘correct’ one.

The exact date of the next Galaxy Unpacked is not yet confirmed. There is an air of expectation that it will be in late January, as opposed to a mid-February, that was being discussed in the fall. Whichever of those dates it takes, Samsung will still be ahead of MWC, which starts on March 2 2026, and will still have the first-mover advantage.

Now read the latest Android headlines, including the Galaxy S26 Ultra, in Forbes’ weekly smartphone news digest…

Tom Paton, whose Where the Robots Grow was one of the first AI animated feature films, debuted a new AI generated series today, Non Player Combat. His small team in the UK has been building AiMation Studios around a pipeline for long form generative AI content and a companion iOS microstreamer for distribution.

Non Player Combat introduces six photorealistic contestants who are dropped on a remote island in a survival contest that blends elements of battle royale games and unscripted competition shows. Each contestant carries a detailed psychological history created by AiMation’s writers. It all seems very familiar except for one twist: they are actually going to kill each other, or die trying, and the writers don’t know who, or how, or where this will happen.

Madison Cross is a survivalist who plans to survive Non-Player Combat.

AiMation Studios

Once the simulation begins, the Ai characters make each decision independently. They may form alliances or forgo them as they hunt each other, avoid predators, and fight for survival. Paton describes the show as a mix of Naked and Afraid and The Truman Show, unfolding because the characters believe their circumstances are real. In Hollywood the log line would be: Hunger Games in Westworld. The production team does not plan outcomes. Episodes are edited from logs of the simulation. The first episode debuts December 8 on YouTube and on the AiMation VOD app, with additional episodes released weekly.

Paton describes the approach as a hybrid of game development and documentary editing. “Every player has hundreds of pages of backstory. Childhood, trauma, love, crimes, philosophy. Their behavior emerges from that foundation. The AI takes those inputs and becomes the character,” he says. “We did not pick the winner. We did not pick who died and when. We created the psychology, not the plot.”

AiMation built the series with a five person team using its Omnigen workflow platform. The core reasoning system that controls the internal reasoning of the agents and governs moment to moment behavior was built in-house. ElevenLabs provides the synthetic voices. Seedance and other ByteDance models are the main generative AI models used in the production workflow. Paton says four episodes were completed in under two months at a reported cost of about 28K for the entire season. Traitors, a survival series with a comparable format, clocks in at one million dollars per episode.

The six contestants (four men, two women) in Non-Player Combat come straight out of a video game, consisting of a former Navy Seal, an egghead Chess champion, a hot influencer, a wilderness guide, the suicidal ex-con, and an a lethal martial arts. These not-quite human AI agents in Non-Player Combat don’t know they are AI. But we do. From the looks of the trailer the performances may be subtly uncanny, and have what I call an ‘AI accent,’ but that doesn’t matter. The agents don’t know they are AI, we do. That’s what makes this original, and dramatic.

We see AI animated characters everywhere now, and it seems like every other producer is working on some secret AI entertainment project on the down-low with “the studios.” If you like this sort of thing, there are thousands of responsive avatars waiting for you in places like Grok, Character.ai and Replikant. Showrunner’s Sim Francisco also follows AI animated characters, but the AI ‘animation’ of the characters is crude.

The characters in Non-Player Combat act with instincts inherited from a century of storytelling rather than written instructions, because of all the media the AI generators have been trained on. Paton believes the intended audience will absorb this without hesitation. “When they see the show and someone explains it is not real, it is AI, they will say who cares,” he says.

Paton says Non Player Combat is the beginning of a new AI driven entertainment format. “The future lies where the characters from the shows and films we watch are living their stories in real time, and it is those stories we are seeing edited down,” he says. The effect is unsettling and commercially interesting. Paton is marketing the series with a Gladiator line, a reminder of what entertainment has always relied on: spectacle. Are you not entertained?

The highly anticipated Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is rumored to retain its 5,000mAh battery, according to leaked specs. This suggests the 2026 Samsung flagship may delay adopting advanced silicon-carbon battery technology seen in rival phones. Photographer: Yuki Iawmura/Bloomberg

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As rival companies release phones with giant batteries using new silicon-carbon technology, a new leak suggests Samsung will stick with a familiar battery size for the upcoming Galaxy S26. But that doesn’t mean the Korean company won’t release a big-battery phone next year. Read on for more and check out my video on silicon carbon batteries below.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Will Feature A Normal-Sized Battery

Reliable leaker Ice Universe posted the full leaked specifications of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26 earlier this week. These are by far the most comprehensive details we’ve seen of the Galaxy S26 range so far, and they reveal some interesting tidbits.

The most eye-catching is that the Galaxy S26 Ultra will sport a 5,000mAh battery, just like the Galaxy S25 Ultra. If accurate, that means Samsung’s next flagship phone likely won’t be powered by a denser silicon-carbon battery, and we won’t see a huge jump in battery life for the Korean company’s 2026 flagship.

It’s the same story with the Galaxy S26 Plus, which will feature the same 4,900mAh power pack as the Galaxy S25 Plus. However, the base Galaxy S26 will receive a small 300mAh increase in its battery, up to 4,300mAh.

No Silicon-Carbon Battery In The Galaxy S26? Maybe Not Yet

Korean publication The Financial News reported in February that Samsung was considering incorporating silicon batteries into its “next smartphone.” These leaks suggest otherwise.

Samsung also said in a June interview with Tom’s Guide that the company is “always looking at…emerging technology” in response to a question about silicon-carbon batteries.

But Samsung’s “next smartphone” doesn’t necessarily just mean the initial Galaxy S26 handsets that will be unveiled in January. There are the foldable devices in the summer, alongside the Galaxy S26 FE launch in fall, in addition to other mid-range releases throughout the year.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the May release spot reserved for the Galaxy S26 Edge, which could be cancelled due to poor sales, will be repurposed for a Galaxy S26 silicon-carbon battery-powered phone.

Launched on May 13th, the Galaxy S25 Edge used a new mounting system and camera redesign to make the phone slimmer, which we have seen redeployed in the Galaxy Z Fold 7 and likely the new Galaxy Tri-Fold. Before that, Samsung released a one-off Note Edge in 2014 (on a separate date to the then flagship Galaxy S5) using new curved-glass technology, which eventually made its way to the main Galaxy S line a year later.

Samsung’s habit of releasing one-off devices with new technology, separate from its regular phones, would be a perfect vehicle for a phone powered by a silicon-carbon-battery. The risk that comes with these batteries (swelling and shorter lifespan) won’t be etched into the Galaxy S26’s Wikipedia page while providing a useful testing ground for gauging consumer interest.