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