Samsung is making a big mistake with the Galaxy S26 series
The Ultra is here to stay, clearly. As the crown jewel of the series, it's predicted to have a massively upgraded main camera, faster charging, Qualcomm's highest-end Snapdragon Elite processor, a slimmer profile, and a bigger display. It might ditch the S Pen as we know it, but that's a compromise many of us are willing to live with if it means a thinner and easier phone to hold.
All is well and good so far, but it's the other two phones that have us scratching our heads. Me? I'm specifically wondering what on earth Samsung is thinking by skipping the Galaxy S Plus for an S Edge instead. That could be the biggest mistake of this new line-up.
Galaxy S26 Plus or Galaxy S26 Edge, which one appeals to you more?
0 votes
Plus. I need more battery, not less.
NaN %
Edge. I want that thin and light profile.
NaN %
Edge, but only if the battery and thermals are up to par.
NaN %
None. Give me a smaller Pro or the bigger Ultra.
NaN %
The Plus was the unsung hero of Samsung's Galaxy series
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
Samsung.com Colors
It's been 10 years since Samsung started making Plus versions of its Galaxy S phones. Over 10 generations, the Plus series has had some solid early wins (S8 Plus and S10 Plus), but it dwindled a bit and lost its purpose when the Ultra was introduced to the lineup. Forced to be good but not as good as the Ultra, the Plus had a bit of an identity crisis and some not-so-good moments (S20 Plus and S22 Plus), but slowly rose back to win our hearts again.
I still remember how good the Galaxy S24 Plus was. We gave it 9/10 in our review, and loved its excellent display, fast processor, versatile camera setup, and fantastic battery life. Putting aside the slower charging and lack of a long-range zoom lens compared to the Ultra, the Galaxy S24 Plus ticked all the boxes, so much so that my colleague C. Scott brown said you should buy the S24 Plus instead of the S24 Ultra. More than half of you agreed with him — a tall order for a less-powerful phone battling the hordes of Ultra / Note / S Pen fans. For me, this was the real crown of Samsung's series, not the larger, thicker, unwieldy Ultra with an integrated S Pen that might not appeal or be essential to everyone.
Galaxy S Plus phones have suffered from an identity crisis for years, but the S24 Plus proved that they could still win hearts.
Sadly, with the Galaxy S25 series, Samsung went back to the drawing board with the Plus and stripped it of its newfound purpose. The Galaxy S25 Plus is uninspired and lacks any significant upgrades compared to the S24 Plus. There's almost no reason the S25 Plus should exist when the S24 Plus exists, and if Samsung is looking at those sales numbers and seeing little interest for the Plus phone this year, then perhaps it should look in the mirror and ask itself why.
It's sad to say, but the Galaxy S Plus phone has the potential to be the best phone Samsung makes, barring an S Pen for note-taking fiends. Yet, because of artificial restrictions put in place to raise the Ultra, it often sits in this no-man's land of premium-but-not-premium-enough. If you have the money, you're buying the better phone, obviously, and the Plus loses each time in that battle.
Replacing the Plus with the Edge is questionable (read: a mistake)
C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
I might understand why Samsung thinks the Plus isn't the best middle element for its three-tier Galaxy S series (even if I blame the company for the frequent failures of Plus phones), but I sure don't understand why it might've decided that the Edge is the best replacement. I'm internally screaming 'lolwut' at this because, from a usability point of view, it makes no sense. From a marketing standpoint, it's another story.
The Galaxy S25 Edge is a series of bad decisions, and Samsung is making a mistake if it thinks the Edge has done enough to displace Plus phones.
The Galaxy S25 Edge phone is controversial, and anytime I see someone with it — both regular users and fellow tech journalists — I hear so much praise for the more comfortable and lighter 163g body than for the thin profile. I also hear a lot of criticism of the phone's tendency to throttle performance when it heats up. Not to mention the mediocre battery life.
There's no way the Edge, which was launched as more of an addendum to the Galaxy S25 series, has done enough to earn a permanent spot in the S lineup. Even worse, there's no way it is ready to displace the Plus and its 10-year pedigree. Samsung is making a big mistake if it thinks the Galaxy S25 Edge is more than a curiosity and a trend now. Like any bad trend (open shelving in kitchens, low-rise pants, and bad Instagram filters), those who were drawn by it will quickly spread the word about how terrible and impractical it is, and the public will do a 180. Well, unless Samsung does the work to make the Edge a more legitimate phone choice next year…
Samsung can avoid this mistake by building the best Edge there is
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
There's one outcome where Samsung wins with this transition from Plus to Edge, and that's if it can make a really good Galaxy S26 Edge. Keep the display size similar to the Galaxy S25 Plus and S25 Edge, go for the thinner and lighter profile of the Edge, but adopt the faster charging of the Plus, add a third tele lens, and please, fix the terrible throttling when the phone heats up. Sadly, a proper periscope isn't realistic at this thin profile, so I'm not asking for that. (A thicker S26 Plus could've had it, but alas, we're seemingly not there anymore.)
Fast charging, a tele lens, and a new-gen slim battery with enough capacity should fix Samsung's Edge problem.
What Samsung needs to do most of all, though, is adopt the new Silicon-Carbon battery technology that many of its competitors in the East are using. With that tech, Samsung could include a large enough battery in the Galaxy S26 Edge to make it usable in everyday life while keeping this coveted thin profile. No more silly 3,900mAh battery; it was a terrible idea on the Galaxy S23, and it's still a terrible idea on the Galaxy S25 Edge. We do so much on our phones these days, and no one wants to enter a complicated co-dependent relationship with their wall charger and power bank. By going for a Silicon-Carbon battery, Samsung could easily cram over 4,000mAh of capacity without sacrificing thinness. It's the only logical solution.
Can it do all of this in one year? The tech is there, but I have a hard time believing that the company that has recycled every possible design and spec of its Galaxy S series for years can implement this many upgrades in the span of a year. It's more likely that the Galaxy S26 Edge will be another terrible phone, but the S27 Edge will fix its mistakes.
At what price, though? The Galaxy S25 Edge already costs $1,099 — $100 more than the Galaxy S25 Plus. If Samsung made all these upgrades, the Galaxy S26 Edge or S27 Edge could increase even more in price, approaching Ultra territory. I don't know if we live in a world where paying more than $1100 is acceptable for a mid-flagship, but I don't feel comfortable with that reality. $1000 is a hard line in my mind, with less for the more basic flagship and more for the Ultra. But with Samsung also going for a 'Pro' Galaxy S26 as the basic version, well, all my math is out the window!
I just pity our collective wallets.
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Digital Trends
4 hours ago
- Digital Trends
A brief history of folding phones and why the best is yet to come
If you're a fan of the best folding phones like me, you'll know it's been a breakout year for the category. The new Galaxy Z Fold 7 caps a year of multiple releases that have all vied to solve the common complaints with previous folding phones and prove that they can be just as comfortable as a regular phone. Several folding phone makers have released phones to compete in a key metric: thickness, or, namely, the lack of it. The ultra-thin folding phones sub-category has had three competitors this year that aimed to be the world's thinnest folding phone, but only one of them also delivers the smartphone-like experience we've been waiting for. Recommended Videos This is just the seventh year of folding phones, but we've already reached the point where they feel just like a regular smartphone in the pocket. Yet, Apple is still to release the rumored iPhone Fold, and every Android phone maker will also be looking to release its best foldable phone as well. 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The folding phone market features more than just book-style folding phones, and that year also saw the revival of the Motorola Razr on November 13, 2019. Six years later, the Motorola Razr Ultra 2025 is the latest in a long line of Razr flip phones to dominate the flip phone market. A couple of months later, in February 2020, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z Flip, and the true flip phone competition began in the US. While book-style folding phones have had considerable competition, the flip phone market has featured several attempts by Android phone makers to launch a flip phone, but with limited success. Despite more than ten brands attempting different flip phones, the market remains an oligopoly dominated by Motorola and Samsung. The book-style market, however, is very different, and the launch of the Galaxy Z Fold 2 in September 2020 saw Samsung adopt a full-screen on the front, a design language that has continued through to the latest iteration. 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CNBC
12 hours ago
- CNBC
Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street's invisible backbone
CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren't corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality. From that sparse office, they launched "Frontier," Ethereum's first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system. Bitcoin had captured headlines as "digital gold," but what they built was something else entirely: programmable money, a financial operating system where code could move funds, enforce contracts, and create businesses without banks or brokers. 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With Buterin's help, IBM built its first blockchain prototype on Ethereum's early code, unveiling it at CES in 2015 alongside Samsung. "That was how I ended up down this path," Brody said. "I was done with all other technology and basically made the switch to blockchain." Even now, as EY's global blockchain leader, Brody remembers feeling a pang of envy. "This is a kid, and it doesn't matter," he said. "I was jealous of Vitalik… to be able to do that." He added, "I don't think opportunities like that could have been surfaced when I was that age." Now, a decade later, that experiment has quietly rewired global markets. "It's very impressive, just how much the space has succeeded and grown into, beyond pretty much anyone's expectations," Buterin told CNBC in Cannes on the sidelines of the blockchain's flagship event in Europe. Buterin said the change over the past decade has been staggering. 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The building's labyrinthine staircases and shadowed corridors felt like a physical map of the crypto world itself — part resistance movement, part experiment in reimagining power. It was a place built on Václav Benda's concept of a "parallel society," where decentralized technologies offered refuge from state surveillance and control. It's the kind of place where Buterin, a self-described nomad, found himself at home among cypherpunks and cryptographic idealists. At the time, Buterin described crypto's greatest utility not in speculative trading, but in helping people survive broken financial systems in emerging markets. "The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value," he told CNBC at the time. "Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don't have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there." Even in Prague, where coders worked to make payments fast and censorship-resistant, the technology felt like a resistance movement — privacy-preserving, anti-authoritarian, a lifeline in countries where banking collapses were common and money couldn't be trusted. This year, Buterin keynoted Ethereum's flagship conference at the Palais des Festivals — the same red carpet venue that hosts movie stars each spring. It was a fitting symbol of Ethereum's journey: from underground hacker dens to a network that governments, banks, and brokerages are now racing to build upon. Brody, who currently leads blockchain strategy at EY, says what matters most is how deeply Ethereum is integrating into traditional finance. "The global financial system is really nicely described as a whole network of pipes," he said. "What's happening now is that Ethereum is getting plumbed into this infrastructure," Brody continued, noting that until recently, crypto operated on entirely separate rails from traditional finance. Now, he said, Ethereum is being wired directly into core transaction systems, setting the stage for massive financial flows — from investors to everyday savers — to migrate away from older mechanisms toward Ethereum-based platforms that can move money faster, at lower cost, and with more advanced functionality than legacy systems allow. Stablecoins — digital dollars that live on Ethereum — power trillions in payments, tokenized assets and funds are moving on-chain, and Robinhood recently rolled out tokenized U.S. equities via Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer two. Circle's USDC — the second-largest stablecoin — still settles around 65% of its volume on Ethereum's rails. According to CoinGecko's latest "State of Stablecoins" report, Ethereum accounts for nearly 50% of all stablecoin activity. Between Circle's IPO and the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, now signed into law by President Donald Trump, regulators have new reason to engage with, rather than fight, this transformation. Data from Deutsche Bank shows stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year — more than Mastercard and Visa combined. The bank itself has announced plans to build a tokenization platform on zkSync, a fast, cost-efficient Ethereum layer two designed to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements. Digital asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are racing to capture this crossover between traditional securities and crypto. As part of its quarterly earnings release, Coinbase said this week it's launching tokenized stocks and prediction markets for U.S. users in the coming months, a move that would diversify its revenue stream and bring it into more direct competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro. Kraken announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of U.S. stock tokens in select overseas markets. BlackRock's tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, launched on Ethereum last year, offering qualified investors on-chain access to yield with real-time redemptions settled in USDC. Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum has proven its staying power as the trusted network for global finance. Buterin told CNBC in Cannes that there's a misconception about what institutions actually want. "A lot of institutions basically tell us to our faces that they value Ethereum because it's stable and dependable, because it doesn't go down," he said. He added that firms frequently ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, "really value." Different institutions are choosing different layer twos for different needs — Robinhood uses Arbitrum, Deutsche Bank zkSync, Coinbase and Kraken Optimism — but they all ultimately settle on Ethereum's base layer. "The value proposition of Ethereum is its global reach, its huge capital flows, its incredible programmability," Brody said. He added that the fact it isn't the fastest blockchain or the one with the quickest settlement times "is secondary to the fact that it's overall the most widely adopted and flexible system." Brody also believes history points toward consolidation. He said that in most technology standards wars, one platform ultimately dominates. In his view, Ethereum is likely to become that dominant programmability layer, while Bitcoin plays a complementary role as a risk-off, scarcity-driven asset. Engineers, he said, "love to work on a standard… to scale on a standard," and Ethereum has become precisely that. Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, sees the same pattern from inside the ecosystem. "Institutions chose Ethereum over and over again for its values," Stańczak said. "Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance." When institutions send an order to the market, they want to be sure that it's treated fairly, that nobody has preference, and that the transaction is executed at the time when it's delivered. "That's what Ethereum guarantees," added Stańczak. Those assurances have become more valuable as traditional finance moves on-chain. Ethereum's path hasn't been smooth. The network has weathered spectacular booms and busts, rivals promising faster speeds, and criticism that it's too slow or expensive for mass adoption. Yet it has outlasted nearly all early competitors. In 2022, Ethereum replaced its old transaction validation method, proof-of-work — where armies of computers competed to solve puzzles — with proof-of-stake, where users lock up their ether as collateral to help secure the network. The shift cut Ethereum's energy use by more than 99% and set the stage for upgrades aimed at making apps faster and cheaper to run on its base layer. The next decade will test whether Ethereum can scale without compromise. Buterin said the first priority is getting Ethereum to "the finish line" in terms of its technical goals. That means improving scalability and speed without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and security — and ideally making those properties even stronger. Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, could dramatically increase transaction capacity while making it possible to verify that the chain is following the rules of the protocol on something as small as a smartwatch. There are also algorithmic changes the team already knows are needed to protect Ethereum against large-scale computing attacks. Implementing those, Buterin said, is part of the path to making Ethereum "a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place." Buterin believes the real change won't come with fireworks. He said it may already be unfolding years before most people recognize it. "This type of disruption doesn't feel like overturning the existing system," he said. "It feels like building a new thing that just keeps growing and growing until eventually more and more people realize you don't even have to look at the old thing if you didn't want to." Brody can already see hints of that future. Wire transfers are moving on-chain, assets like stocks and real estate are being tokenized, and eventually, he said, businesses will run entire contracts — the money, the products, the terms and conditions — automatically on a single, shared infrastructure. That shift, Brody added, won't simply copy old financial systems onto new technology. "One of the lessons from technology adoption is that it's not that we replace like for like," he said. "When new things come along, we tend to build on a new technology infrastructure. My key hypothesis is that as we build new financial products, it will be attractive to build them on blockchain rails — and we'll try to do things on blockchain rails that we can't do today." If Brody and Buterin are right, the real disruption won't make headlines. It'll simply become the way money moves, unseen and unstoppable.
Yahoo
12 hours ago
- Yahoo
Qualcomm announces Xiaomi will have the first phone featuring the next Snapdragon 8 Elite
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. As we enter the doldrums of summer, Qualcomm, like many companies, is sharing revenue and future forecasting in its quarterly earnings call (via Android Central). The company hit double-digit growth, earning $10.4 billion in Q3 2025. Qualcomm announced that the next Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset will come out at the end of September and that Xiaomi will be the first OEM to get the powerful chip. "We are already working with several OEMs for launch of new devices based on a tremendous interest in it," Amon said. "And what you are seeing is really people getting ready for launch of new devices." The company announced that Chinese phone maker Xiaomi will be the "first OEM to launch with our next Snapdragon 8 Elite chip." Not a huge surprise since the Xiaomi 15 was announced as the first device to feature the Snapdragon 8 Elite last year. It was quickly followed by options from Honor and OnePlus. Some details of the expected Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 2 have already leaked, hinting at a huge performance boost. The chip could have a CPU running at 4.6GHz and a GPU at 12GHz, faster than the current chip, which is set at 4.47GHz. Qualcomm earning notable information The company revealed that chipset sales accounted for the bulk of its revenue, with CEO Cristiano Amon noting that the company's push into AI processing is contributing to growth. "Our leadership in AI processing, high-performance and low-power computing, and advanced connectivity positions us to become the industry platform of choice as AI gains scale at the edge," Amon said in a statement. We'll know more when the company holds its annual Snapdragon Summit, which is expected to take place at the end of September. Follow Tom's Guide on Google News to get our up-to-date news, how-tos, and reviews in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button. More from Tom's Guide Qualcomm slams Intel chips in new Snapdragon ads — and it may have a point Qualcomm-funded study shows that Apple's C1 modem is slower — but there's a catch Exclusive: Qualcomm exec says AI is going to 'completely transform' laptops as we know them
