Samsung could miss its usual on-shelf date for the new crop of high-powered Galaxy S26 smartphones you absolutely have to upgrade to next year.* There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that a (rumoured) rebrand of one of its handsets turned out to be a bad idea. The other is that the base model might not be ready in time for its annual announcement.
Missing the Galaxy S26
We can speculate at least one more reason why Samsung might be pumping the brakes. The South Korean company is supposedly making its own Qualcomm headline chipsets this year, and a slight delay might be enough to let it cram a few into its best-selling premium phones. Again, that’s only speculation, but there’s a ton of stuff that could explain a possible March announcement of the Galaxy S26 lineup.
Concerning delays in the lineup, the recently shelved Galaxy S26 Edge is one possible reason why Samsung isn’t making a January announcement. The other is the rumoured failure of a (similarly rumoured) rebrand of its base phone. It was supposedly going to have a ‘Pro’ tacked onto the end, meaning buyers would have a choice between the Pro, Plus, and Ultra models in 2026. That, according to the most recent reports, isn’t going to happen. Pity. It would be one way to stick the reportedly-completed S26 Edge into the range without too much mental overhead. It would’ve been silly, but it would have solved a short-term issue.
The other cause for delay, broadly speaking, is that the base S26 won’t be ready in time. This would line up with Stuff‘s thinking that Samsung might have stalled development, hoping to incorporate the shuttered S26 Edge instead of designing a whole new smartphone. The report outlining the delay and the projected March 2026 announcement date notes that there’s no specific reason given for why the Galaxy S26 won’t be ready in time.
That same report says that the S26 Ultra will have that lovely Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 inside, with the Plus (and presumably the base model) going with the Exynos 2600. That’s been said in previous years, however, and Samsung has wound up going with Qualcomm across the board. Perhaps this year will be different. We’ll find out, perhaps later than usual, what the case is in the new year.
* Not really
