The Galaxy S26 series arrived late. The S24 generation was unveiled in mid-January and launched in late January, while the S25 was announced in late January and launched in early February. The S26 series was only made official in late February and came out in early March. The delay was likely caused by the last-minute switch from an S26 Edge to an S26+.
The upcoming Galaxy S27 series may return to the usual January/February time frame, according to user Lanzuk on the Korean micro-blogging platform Naver. The exact timeline isn't known yet, but most major decisions over the S27 series hardware have apparently been made. A few question marks remain, however. Back in September, reports suggested that Samsung would use older LPDDR5X and UFS 4.x for the vanilla Galaxy S27 and S27+, while the Galaxy S27 Pro and S27 Ultra were supposed to move to LPDDR6 and UFS 5.
The memory market appears to have heated up more than Samsung anticipated, so the company is reportedly debating whether to hold back the memory upgrades from the Pro and Ultra models as well. UFS 5 doubles the performance of UFS 4.1, with read speeds of up to 10.8GB/s and write speeds of up to 9.8GB/s, and is said to be 40% more power efficient. LPDDR6 offers up to 10.6-14.4Gbps per pin, up from 8.5Gbps for LPDDR5X.
These upgrades would bring tangible performance gains to the S27 Pro and S27 Ultra, but they would also raise the bill of materials. The S27 series will likely cost more, and the open question is by how much. There is also the Snapdragon versus Exynos question for the S27 Ultra. Qualcomm denied there are any heating issues, but no reports have yet confirmed what Samsung has decided.
Source: GSMArena · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing