The Samsung Galaxy S26 FE offers a vibrant 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, a capable 50MP main camera with FanCam, and a 4900mAh battery, all powered by the Exynos 2500 chipset. It runs on Android 17 with One UI 9.0 and stands out with a promise of seven years of OS and security updates, though it includes some cutbacks like a USB 2.0 port and may struggle with extremely demanding games.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 FE offers a vibrant 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, a capable 50MP main camera with FanCam, and a 4900mAh battery, all powered by the Exynos 2500 chipset. It runs on Android 17 with One UI 9.0 and stands out with a promise of seven years of OS and security updates, though it includes some cutbacks like a USB 2.0 port and may struggle with extremely demanding games.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 FE offers a vibrant 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display, a capable 50MP main camera with FanCam, and a 4900mAh battery, all powered by the Exynos 2500 chipset. It runs on Android 17 with One UI 9.0 and stands out with a promise of seven years of OS and security updates, though it includes some cutbacks like a USB 2.0 port and may struggle with extremely demanding games.

Samsung's Galaxy S FE series of smartphones has been quite popular for those looking to try the company's latest offerings at a not-so-high price compared to the Galaxy S Ultra models. The new S26 FE is priced at Rs. 79,999 for the 256 GB storage option and comes with some interesting features and some not-so-interesting cutbacks.

This is a slim device at about 7.4 mm in thickness, weighs 193 grams, and has an aluminium alloy frame—feels nice in the hand and isn't uncomfortable to carry around, even with that 6.7-inch display in place, with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+ on top for added protection, along with IP68 dust and water resistance.

The 6.7-inch Full HD+ (1080 × 2340) Dynamic AMOLED 2X display supports up to 120 Hz refresh rates, and it is one of the better parts about this phone. It is a vivid and bright display with decent viewing angles and good colour reproduction.

Coming to the camera performance, you get a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera and a 12MP (f/2.2) camera. The phone took good, detailed shots with nice dynamic range on most occasions. There's something called FanCam, which can track the subject of the video, as we saw in the Galaxy Z series, too. You can expect images to keep details intact up to around 2× zoom, and then it can crack up quite a bit. The front-facing 12 MP (f/2.2) camera can take good-looking selfies with decent skin tone close to the natural look and not make it artificial.

The 4,900mAh battery unit lasted me nearly a day in moderate usage and a little less with a bit of gaming or 4K video recording. The phone didn't heat up much while charging. It supports 45-watt charging, but there's no charger bundled in the box.

The Galaxy S26 FE runs on Samsung's One UI 9.0 based on Android 17 out of the box and the September security patch, which is nice to see. There are some flagship Samsung phones that still haven't got this update.

Under the hood, there's the Exynos 2500 chipset (up to 3.3 GHz deca-core processor, Eclipse 950 GPU), 8 GB LPDDR5X RAM, and 128 GB or 256 GB UFS 4.0 internal storage.

Samsung has downgraded the USB Type-C port from USB 3.2 Gen 1 to USB 2.0 this time, which means DeX works wirelessly but not wired with the S26 FE.

The general performance of the phone is quite satisfactory—no slowdowns noticed while scrolling through social media apps while having voice calls in the background, video calls, or playing music in the background.

App animations didn't show any major drops. You can expect to play games like NFS as well as Monument Valley just fine, but more demanding titles like Wuthering Waves—this phone would struggle to keep up.

Samsung promises seven years of OS updates as well as security patches for the device, which is nice to see and better than some of their flagship offerings.

Call quality on the device is top-notch, and so was the Wi-Fi performance during my usage.

All in all, the S26 FE shows us the rising RAM and chip pricing effect again. While the phone has a really nice display and battery life generally is good, it cannot be called a mid-range device as of now.

If you already have an S25 FE, there's no reason to upgrade, but if you are looking for a device around ₹70,000, are more used to Samsung's One UI take, and can get some discounts on this, then you can consider the device a good fit.

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