Inside the Galaxy S26 FE Leak: What’s New and What’s Not

Leaks about Samsung's upcoming Fan Edition have a way of feeling like déjà vu. This time, the S26 FE arrives with a familiar silhouette but a quietly upgraded heart.

Instead of reusing another Exynos 2400, Samsung appears to have moved to the Exynos 2500, built on a 3nm GAA node. The chip packs a 10-core CPU in a 1+2+5+2 arrangement and an Xclipse 950 GPU based on AMD RDNA 3 with eight work groups. Short version: better efficiency and a GPU that finally starts to edge toward modern mobile graphics expectations.

Memory and storage remain conservative. The S26 FE is reported to ship with 8GB of RAM and either 128GB or 256GB of storage. Don’t expect the baseline model to expand. And yes, the price is creeping up. The 128GB variant could start at about €800 — roughly €50 more than last year.

Physically, this is essentially the same phone you already know. Thickness sits at 7.4mm and the weight at 193g — a negligible 3g increase. IP68 protection stays on the spec sheet, keeping dust and water worries to a minimum.

Battery capacity is unchanged at 4,900mAh, and charging speeds stick to 45W wired and 15W wireless. There’s chatter about a silicon/carbon battery chemistry and a noticeable change in the official EPREL cycle rating: down from 2,000 cycles on the S25 FE to around 1,200 for the new unit, a shift we already saw with the Z8 series. Still, the refreshed chipset seems to deliver better endurance on paper — Samsung’s rating climbs to roughly 50 hours from the previous model’s 42 hours and 37 minutes.

The display is classic Samsung: a 6.7-inch Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel at 1080 x 2,340 pixels with a 120Hz refresh rate. Brightness reads strong at a typical 1,200 nits and can spike to near 1,900 nits in high brightness mode. Selfies are handled by a 12MP front camera with an f/2.2 fixed-focus lens.

Camera hardware largely carries over. Expect a 50MP main camera (f/1.8) and an 8MP telephoto with a 3x optical reach (f/2.4). The ultra-wide receives an update to a new 12MP sensor, while the main shooter supports 8K video at 30fps and 4K at 60fps for those who still want maximum resolution recording on a non-flagship FE model.

Connectivity covers the usual: dual-SIM tray without microSD expansion, support for one or two eSIMs, Wi-Fi 6 (ax), Bluetooth 5.4 and NFC. Nothing revolutionary there, but solid and predictable.

Launch timing hasn’t been confirmed. The S25 FE arrived in September, so a similar window seems likely — which means we may not have to wait long to see how much of this actually makes the final cut.

So yes, a few internal upgrades and a modest price increase, but the headline feels familiar: Samsung polishing the FE formula rather than reinventing it.