Now that the announcement date and venue of the
Galaxy S26 series are officially official, I feel that it is time to have a serious discussion about Samsung’s intentions with these phones.
The perfect starting point for said discussion could well be a recent PhoneArena poll that tried to gauge your enthusiasm over the S26 Ultra‘s AI capabilities. Unsurprisingly for me, said enthusiasm is virtually nonexistent based on the votes of more than 800 of our readers, which is likely to cause some big problems for Samsung’s marketing department.
Is it too late to find a new advertising angle?
In theory, no, but in practice, I think we all know the Galaxy S26 Ultra ads are mostly done already (and they’ll probably start leaking like a broken faucet soon). And besides, the real issue is that, even if Samsung were to register and admit that it was a mistake to build the advertising campaign of its “next big thing” around AI, what could that focus be replaced with in the eleventh hour?
The truth is the S26 Ultra is simply not that exciting (at least on paper), and the same goes for the “vanilla” Galaxy S26 and the S26 Plus as well. Unless, of course, a good chunk of the specs revealed yesterday ultimately prove to be inaccurate, which seems highly unlikely.
Basically, Samsung may have left itself little choice but to trumpet the S26 family’s achievements and innovations in the field that no less than 54.83 percent of you don’t really care about. Granted, that might sound like it leaves a pretty big percentage of people open to being impressed by the Galaxy S26 Ultra‘s AI features, but only 17 percent of our survey respondents are truly looking forward to the much-discussed Privacy Display functionality, with 28 percent of you that Samsung will need to win over with “new experiences.”
AI is not bad, just… a little boring at the moment
I might be the only one who feels that way (although I highly doubt it), but as hard as I’ve been trying to share Samsung or Google’s enthusiasm over the latest and greatest mobile AI tools released over the last year or so, I’ve just been unable to muster anything more than a general sense of apathy.
Not everything is bad, useless, or gimmicky (at least if you ask me), but I can’t think of a single AI-related announcement in 2025 that blew my mind or caught me by surprise (in a positive way). I also don’t see how any “normal” Galaxy S25 Ultra user could take advantage of a single proprietary AI tool or feature in their daily use, and at least for the time being, I expect the same to be true for the S26 Ultra.
Yes, the Privacy Screen tool does look… more exciting than anything else I’ve seen or heard about in the same general AI landscape the last couple of years, but even that only managed to generate 32.81 percent positive reactions in a separate PhoneArena survey started a little while back.
Clearly, these are not the kind of numbers Samsung was targeting when it decided to label the Galaxy S26 Ultra as the “next AI phone” aimed at “making your life easier”, but perhaps we truly don’t have the full story yet.
Is there more to come?
Probably, and although I’m not ready to abandon my pessimism just yet, I’m definitely open to being surprised. I still can’t imagine what AI-related surprises Samsung could possibly have up its sleeve to justify those rumored price hikes and the nearly guaranteed unchanged battery size of the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but I’ll certainly continue to keep an eye on the phone’s advertising campaign and let you know as soon as I see any hint of something truly useful or revolutionary.
