Samsung Galaxy A26 Review- Watch Before Buying!

Hi everyone, Pratima here and this is the Galaxy A26, Samsung's latest mid-range phone that you can buy under Rs 25,000 in India. And with this phone, I feel like Samsung has made a huge mistake. See, the Rs 25,000 price bracket is a very important segment. All major smartphone brands launch their hero products here. It's basically the segment that sells the most number of phones. But Samsung is clearly struggling in this segment and that's one of the reasons why Samsung's market share in India is also dipping since they are just not able to sell as many budget phones. Interestingly, Samsung's overall revenue has increased though because they are selling more high-value products in their top-end A-series, S-series and foldable lineup. But when we look at its budget as well as the mid-range lineup, they are just nowhere as good as the competition. And after using the Galaxy A26 for a couple of days now, I can 100% confirm that there are much better options out there that will give you better value for your money spent. Now don't get me wrong, there are a few upgrades with the Galaxy A26, the biggest of which has to be in terms of the build quality. We have a brand new look with this cool looking camera module that resembles Samsung's more expensive A36 and A56. And most importantly, this one has a glass back Gorilla Glass Victus Plus protection on the front as well as at the back of the phone and IP67 water resistance, all of which were missing on last year's A25. The color options this time are also nice too. These pastel colors look very refreshing. So yeah, the design of this phone looks and feels really premium. Even on the front, I don't have a lot of complaints. Yes, there's this water drop notch and these huge thick bezels making it feel like a display from 2022. But the core quality of this display is quite good. It's big, it's bright and has amazing color reproduction. But things start to get really boring with the Galaxy A26 as we get inside the phone. We get the Exynos 1380 chipset here, which we first saw on the Galaxy A54 two years ago. Then this chipset was reused by Samsung on last year's Galaxy A35. And this year we get the same chipset on the Galaxy A26. So chances are we might see this chip on next year's Galaxy A70. Anyway, the Exynos 1380 chipset is just far behind what we get on phones under Rs 25,000 in 2025, be it in benchmarks or regular usage. It's just not very good. Here app opening still takes a second or two moving across the UI elements does not feel as instantaneous and this phone generally feels slow while using. I even tried reducing the animation speed from the settings but the A26 did not feel faster. And since we get an Exynos chipset here, it's not the best device for gaming either. Even basic games like PUBG and Mobile Legends are stuck at 60 FPS with mediocre gameplay experience. And let's not even talk about Genshin Impact. There was this one time when the game crashed when I was just roaming through the areas with a lot of enemies. I was not even fighting. Plus the thermals here are quite messed up even though the A26 is not able to push higher frame rates. And for some reason Samsung has chosen to go with the slower UFS 2.2 storage here even though the Exynos 1380 has support for faster UFS 3.1. Yes, the caveat here is that with Samsung phones you get a great update policy. Like with this phone you get six years of OS updates which is the most number of years you can get on any device in this particular price segment. But then for a device that feels a bit slow in the first week of usage, it's kind of hard to perceive how will hold up in years to come. Not just in terms of performance but Samsung has sort of held back even when it comes to basic things like speakers and vibration motor. Here Samsung has downgraded from stereo speakers on the A25 to a single speaker grill on the A26. Likewise the vibration on this thing isn't great either. It's quite fuzzy and weak. The battery life and charging remain the same as last year so nothing interesting here as well. If you're not aware Chinese phones are now offering 6400 or 7000 mAh silicon carbon batteries in their mid-range phones which is sadly not the case here. Okay let's talk about the camera now and if there is one area where Samsung usually does well it's in the camera department. But here on the Galaxy A26, number one we're getting the same camera specs as before. No hardware upgrades, no telephoto lens and number two Samsung hasn't really worked on the optimization side of things here. As a result when you shoot zoom photos or portraits something like the Nothing Phone 3a shoots much better portraits with great bokeh that too at four different focal lengths while the Galaxy A26 can only shoot portraits at 1x. Now to be fair the skin tone and all are not bad on Samsung but I don't understand why Samsung at least could not enable a 2x digital zoom option for shooting portraits here. And compared to the Nothing Phone 3a I found its ultrawide sensor to be pretty underwhelming too. They're both using an 8 megapixel sensor but for some reason the dynamic range on the A26 is really poor especially in shadowy areas. The A26 does click nice enough pictures from its main camera with good colors and details from this thing but the one thing I consistently noticed was how striking the Phone 3a's photos looked thanks to its punchier contrast. Like A26 images are good but Nothing's photos are eye-catching. And even in the slightest of challenging conditions the A26 struggles to maintain proper exposure. It's all the same in low light conditions as well and when I thought turning on night mode would fix some of the issues it turns out all Samsung does is needlessly brighten up the exposure level and that is all. The Galaxy A26 shoots quite nice selfies though it uses the same 13 megapixel sensor as last year and just like the portraits Samsung just knows how to process human skin tones. As for videos I can shoot at up to 4k 30fps from only the main camera here but even though it has optical image stabilization I found that Samsung has disabled any form of stabilization at 4k so you're gonna have to move to 1080p resolution if you want steady videos on the Galaxy A26 which once again is not the vibe in 2025. I like the selfie videos from the Phone 3a more as well I can shoot up to 1080p 60fps here versus just 30fps on the Galaxy A26 and it's got a wider field of view as well. Honestly great performance and competitive specs aren't things that I normally expect from a mid-range Samsung phone but the fact that they have been so sluggish to optimize the cameras have made me feel sort of disappointed. At this point the only people who should go for this phone are the people who absolutely want that Samsung brand value and people who are hooked on Samsung software because if I have to be fair no other brand provides the kind of good-looking fun to use and optimized Android experience than what Samsung does. I also absolutely love the presence of useful AI features sprinkled across the UI including circle search, object eraser and smart select but if you ask me my verdict about the A26 is it doesn't do anything to stand out against the competition so if you the absolute value for money if you're looking for a balanced phone this is not it. Maybe during sales and offers if you get this phone for three or four thousand less it makes sense otherwise there are so many better options in the market right now to even consider this phone. Alright everybody that was all for our short and sweet review of the Samsung Galaxy A26. What do you think about the device? Do let us know in the comments below and while you're there do not forget to subscribe to our channel. Saying this I'm Pratima Adhikari and thank you so much for watching.