Alright, listen up, tech enthusiasts, because Samsung just dropped something pretty significant on us. At a recent San Francisco event, CEO TM Roh unveiled the new Galaxy S26 line, and he wasn’t shy about making a bold claim: these aren’t just smartphones; they’re the world’s first ‘agentic AI phones.’ No cap, that’s a serious declaration in a market where every brand is trying to out-AI the other. But what does ‘agentic AI’ even mean, and why should you care?
For years, our phones’ AI has been, well, a little passive. You ask a question, it gives an answer. You issue a command, it executes. That’s reactive AI. But the new Agentic AI in the Galaxy S26 is straight up different. Imagine a phone that doesn’t just wait for you to tap or talk, but actually anticipates your needs, learns your patterns, and takes actions on your behalf across various applications. Roh himself put it on point, describing a device that ‘imagines your needs before you even realize them,’ adapting in real-time and taking action. For real, this is the Holy Grail tech companies have been chasing since Siri first charmed us back on the iPhone 4S.
Remember all those dedicated AI gadgets that popped up recently, promising to be your ultimate personal assistant? Yeah, like the Humane AI Pin, which launched with a hefty price tag and, to be honest, got roasted in reviews before getting snatched up by HP for a fraction of its former glory. Or the Rabbit R1, a $199 pocket companion that, despite some initial hype, pretty much underwhelmed everyone once it landed in users’ hands. Their core pitch was always that your existing phone couldn’t handle truly agentic AI, so you needed a separate device. Turns out, Samsung and Google are here to tell us that our trusty phones just needed some seriously upgraded software, not another gadget to lug around.
Samsung’s approach is to bake this next-level intelligence right into the device you already carry. The brains behind a big chunk of the Galaxy S26’s agentic wizardry is Google’s Gemini, specifically a new capability that lets the AI open and navigate apps in a virtual background window while you’re doing something else entirely. During the Unpacked event, Google’s Samir Samat showcased a demo that had everyone buzzing: your family’s group chat blows up with pizza orders, Gemini sifts through the requests, figures out everyone’s craving, fires up DoorDash, fills the cart, and then just waits for your final confirmation tap. All this happens while your phone remains fully usable for whatever else you’re up to. That’s some legit multi-tasking, dude.
Now, while that sounds totally sick, it’s launching as a limited preview in the U.S. and South Korea, initially supporting a short list of apps like DoorDash, GrubHub, Uber, Kroger, and Walmart. Google is openly calling it a beta and is highkey collecting feedback from early S26 users. A crucial guardrail, though, is that Gemini will never hit ‘confirm’ or ‘pay’ without your final explicit tap. And if you’re feeling a little sketchy about an AI operating unsupervised, you can always watch it work its magic in real-time – which, fair enough.
But Gemini isn’t riding solo here. Samsung is also bringing in Perplexity, an ‘answer engine’ that sees itself as more than just another chatbot, as a second system-level agent. You can summon Perplexity with a wake phrase or a quick side-button shortcut on the S26. Inside Samsung’s web browser, its ‘Ask AI’ feature can sweep across all your open tabs and recent browsing history, pulling together info to answer your research questions without you having to jump from source to source. Samsung claims that nearly 80% of users already juggle more than two AI agents daily, which is their solid justification for offering a multi-agent stack instead of picking just one.
And get this: Bixby, Samsung’s much-maligned AI assistant that they refuse to let go of, has also gotten a complete overhaul. It’s no longer just about simple commands; it’s designed to operate with a deeper understanding of context. You can now tell Bixby something like, ‘My eyes hurt after looking at the screen,’ and it’ll automatically open the brightness settings. It also pulls live information directly into your conversation, keeping you in the loop without kicking you out to a different app. Whether this revamped Bixby can finally win over the masses is a whole other conversation, but it’s clear Samsung is giving it its best shot.
Beyond the core agentic functions, the S26’s AI feature list is seriously extensive. ‘Now Brief’ is a personalized daily digest that proactively surfaces everything from restaurant reservations (pulled from notifications!) to schedule conflicts and even gauges your energy levels for events you never manually added to a calendar. ‘Call Screening’ identifies unknown callers and summarizes their intent before you even pick up. And a new ‘Nudge’ feature detects context in a chat – for instance, if someone asks if you’re free this weekend, it brings your calendar right into the message thread, saving you the hassle of switching apps.
Photographers, heads up: ‘Photo Assist’ lets you describe something missing from a shot, and Galaxy AI will straight up add it in. The front camera now uses an AI image signal processor for sharper, more detailed selfies, and night video gets some sweet grain reduction. The S26 Ultra also shoots 8K video using the new APV codec, which promises near-lossless quality, meaning your footage will survive multiple rounds of editing without losing its shine. The entire camera pipeline is heavily leaning on AI at the hardware level, making every shot a potential masterpiece.
When it comes to competition, Apple has been talking about a smarter Siri since at least 2024, but those announced features are still MIA. Google’s own Pixel 10 will eventually get these same Gemini agentic features, but Samsung is shipping first, and in far greater volumes, to way more countries. No other phone maker is currently claiming the ‘agentic’ title, so Samsung has definitely grabbed the label. Whether they truly earn it long-term will depend on how fast that beta expands and how seamlessly these AI features integrate into our daily grind.
But the actual standout from Wednesday, for many privacy-conscious folks, wasn’t even the AI. It was a dope piece of display hardware: a built-in privacy display that lets you control whether nosey onlookers can actually see what you’re doing on your phone. Think about it: no more shoulder-surfers trying to peek at your sensitive info on the subway or at the coffee shop.
This tech works like magic: a ‘black matrix’ layer physically narrows the path of light from each pixel, ensuring that only the person holding the phone can see the screen clearly. Anyone watching from an angle gets nothing but pitch black, like the display is off. Someone sitting right next to you sees squat. Unlike those old-school plastic privacy films that permanently darken your screen and make it a pain to share, this one toggles on and off. You can even apply it only to specific apps – keeping your banking info private, for example, while your games remain open for all to see – or just to the notification bar, so people can see most of your screen but not your incoming messages. That’s next-level privacy, for real.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, starting at $1,299, is the only phone on the planet with this built-in display hardware privacy feature. Pre-orders are open now, with shipping kicking off on March 11. The standard Galaxy S26 starts at $899, and the larger Galaxy S26 Plus will run you $1,099. This is shaping up to be a serious contender for the most innovative phone of the year.
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