“Our trip to Australia was already a year ago. I miss it so much. Don’t you have any photos from then?”

While exchanging text messages with a friend, tapping the input window to reply to the friend’s comment asking “Don’t you have any photos from the Australia trip?” immediately brings up a “Share photos” icon right below. This is normally where “auto-complete,” which predicts what the user intends to say while typing a message, appears. By tapping this icon, artificial intelligence (AI) selects photos related to Australia stored on the smartphone and brings them up for sharing.

This function is “Now Nudge,” a key AI feature of Samsung Electronics’ newly unveiled Galaxy S26 series. Meaning “to give a quick nudge right away,” this function combines into a single step what previously required manually launching the gallery application (app), searching for the desired photos, selecting them, and then sharing them.

Samsung Electronics held its “Galaxy Unpacked 2026” event at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, United States, on the 25th (local time), and unveiled its new Galaxy S26 series smartphones. Roh Tae-moon, President and Head of the Device eXperience (DX) Division at Samsung Electronics, said, “The Galaxy S26 series is a product that enables anyone to use AI easily and intuitively, based on powerful hardware.”

● “Evolving into a true AI assistant”

The Galaxy S26 series has evolved into a “quick-witted AI” that autonomously carries out functions the user needs. Through Now Nudge, it can perform a variety of context-appropriate functions in addition to sharing photos. For example, when coordinating a meeting schedule with a partner company employee, if the other party asks “Is 10 a.m. on the 26th okay?”, AI checks the calendar and informs the user if there is a conflicting appointment.

Another key advancement of Galaxy AI is that it processes the desired outcome in a “one-stop” manner. If the user tells Gemini, the AI agent embedded in the smartphone, “Book a taxi to the Dong-A Ilbo building in Gwanghwamun,” the smartphone launches the taxi app, sets the current departure location and destination, and calls a taxi. If the user says, “My eyes hurt. Do something about the screen,” the “Eye comfort shield” function, which reduces blue light to minimize eye strain, appears. Unlike before, when it merely suggested “There is a certain function, so go find it,” it now directly connects the user to change the settings immediately.

● Privacy protection display

The premium model Galaxy S26 Ultra is equipped with a “privacy display” that prevents the screen from being viewed from the left or right sides or from above or below. This is the most significant form-factor (external design) change in the Galaxy S26 and is a technology introduced for the first time across all smartphones worldwide. It is not supported on the standard Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models.

Until now, smartphone users who did not want others to look at their phones had to purchase separate “privacy protection” films and attach them to their screens. However, when using such products, the screen brightness typically declined by about 30% even when the user looked straight at the screen, due to the characteristics of the technology.

The privacy display implemented by Samsung this time minimizes screen distortion compared with existing privacy protection films. When viewed from the front, screen brightness hardly declines at all. In particular, the privacy protection function can be turned on and off through the display settings. If the protection function is inconvenient, it can be disabled and the device can be used in standard display mode. Another advantage is that, when certain apps such as YouTube are running or when a notification window appears, the viewing angle can be controlled only for that specific area.

● Processor performance upgraded by 40%

The Galaxy S26 Ultra is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite 5th generation application processor (AP), which serves as the brain. Compared with the previous model equipped with the 4th generation, the performance of the neural processing unit (NPU) improved by 39%, and the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) performance improved by 19% and 24%, respectively. This enhances task processing efficiency, enabling AI workloads to be handled faster and more intelligently.

The Galaxy S26 series will be rolled out sequentially in more than 120 countries worldwide, including Korea, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Vietnam, starting from the 11th of next month. On the same day, Samsung Electronics also unveiled its new wireless earphones “Galaxy Buds4 Pro” and “Galaxy Buds4.” The Galaxy Buds4 series was designed based on ear data from more than 100 million people worldwide and more than 10,000 wearing simulations.

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