Just below a high price

Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 FE – Slimmed down at a higher price

Some familiar features and well-known news from the spring S26 launch and the summer's foldable flagship phones, but also unwelcome weaknesses and a price point that puts people off.

Erik Mörner Erik Mörner

Published 24 September 2026 - 14:19

A sharp, bright display, premium materials and good performance meet most hardware requirements, while an appealing software experience, useful extra features and seven years of promised Android updates ensure the phone has a long lifespan.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 FE is one of Samsung's slightly more affordable flagships, and the idea is to make many of the features from the S26 series available at a lower price. Many features, then, but not all of them. When I compare the current models, the most striking thing is that the S26 FE is very similar to last year's S25 FE, which is now several thousand kronor cheaper and therefore emerges as an attractive alternative, as long as you can still get hold of one.

Well-crafted software

You may have read that phones are becoming increasingly expensive today, largely because of rising memory prices, and that is clear here too. The S26 FE comes with the latest Android and also gets a range of the features Samsung launched this summer in its foldable phones, such as the My FanCam feature, which lets you select a person in a video you have recorded and have the phone subsequently create a cropped video with that person in focus throughout. It works fairly well in our tests. This is part of Samsung's One UI 9 system, which it layers on top of Android and which improves the system in many respects. It includes the customised interface, Samsung's Galaxy AI services for translation, image editing, writing assistance and more. The most valuable aspect is probably the promise of seven years of system updates, which I have already mentioned.

Problematic price trend

Although we do get quite a few advantages, most of them identical to what last year's model, now significantly cheaper, offers, there are also shortcomings. If we compare the S26 FE, or indeed the S25 FE, with the top models in the S26 series, Samsung has cut back on RAM, performance and cameras in the FE models. Comparing prices directly, the S26 FE currently costs SEK 10,700 from Samsung's own online store with 256 GB of storage, while the S26 with the same amount of storage costs SEK 11,990. The S25 FE costs from SEK 8,990 at Samsung, but can be found for SEK 7,000 from the retailers with the lowest prices.

If you read our review of its predecessor, the S25 FE, you can see that its cameras are the same as those in the predecessor S24 FE, and the fact that Samsung has not upgraded them naturally becomes increasingly apparent with each passing year. Then, as now, the telephoto camera delivers decent images at 3x magnification, but the resolution of just 8 megapixels means that further zooming produces clear defects.

Already last year, when we tested competing phones at the same time, they outperformed the S25 FE, and the same applies to the S26 FE today.

Looking specifically at the S26 FE, as that is the model we are testing here, photos from the cameras are often good, but do not quite reach the standard of the slightly more expensive flagship models. Much is similar, but the telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom has a reduced resolution, and this is noticeable in the results. The processing power in the system chip can also limit the image quality we actually get, as much is determined in post-processing today.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 FE has an always-on display that shows the clock and notifications even in standby mode, it has wireless charging, although slower than the S26, it has an in-display fingerprint reader, but of a simpler type than the S26, and it has a lower screen resolution than the S26.

Overall, then, these are clear priorities, which do not necessarily have to be wrong, but when the price remains at such a high level, we naturally look either to the S26 series or to phones in the class below, which in several respects even outperform the S26 FE while also leaving you with thousands of kronor to spare.

Questions and answers

How have the cameras been upgraded compared with the predecessor from a year ago?

In all essential respects, the cameras are the same as those in the S25 FE, S24 FE and S23 FE. The S22 FE never arrived, and compared with the S21 FE, this is a clear upgrade.

Does it have call recording?

Yes, it is included as part of Galaxy AI.

How noticeable are the performance shortcomings?

It has less RAM and a simpler system chip than its S26 siblings, but the interface feels fast and it does not fall particularly far behind when we put it under pressure either; it has enough power.

An alternative

As the S26 FE is so close to the top models in price, we would rather look at the Motorola Edge 70 Pro, Xiaomi 17T, Redmi Note 17 Pro and Nothing Phone 4a Pro, all of which are significantly cheaper.