Samsung Galaxy S26: Launch Delayed to March for AI

On January 13, 2026, rumors of a delay in the release of Samsung's new flagship line were confirmed. The Galaxy Unpacked event is scheduled for February 25, with sales starting only on March 11. This is the latest launch in recent years (S25 was released in January). Industry sources attribute the delay to software refinement for the new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip.

Samsung is betting on "physical AI" and full autonomy: the S26 is expected to run multimodal models directly on the device, without cloud access. The delay indicates that the company is not willing to compromise on local inference quality, aiming to beat Apple in the "AI smartphone" race.

Source: 9to5Google / Insiders