A leak from prolific (and often reliable) tipster Ice Universe has given us some clues about what the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S26 series phones could look like. The leak shows a photo of protective film panels seemingly cut to fit over the camera islands on the S26 Pro, S26 Ultra and S26 Edge.
If the leak is legitimate, then the S26 Edge would have the most obviously different camera island design when compared to the current S25 Edge. Where the existing model has a small (if thick) camera bump, the S26 Edge looks to have a far wider camera island, much like the full-width protrusion sported by the iPhone 17 Pro.
Quite why Samsung would want to emulate Apple for the S26 Edge is hard to fathom. The whole point of the Edge is to minimize phone thickness, so giving the S26 Edge a significantly larger camera bump than its predecessor seems counterintuitive.
By contrast, the camera islands for the S26 Ultra and S26 Pro (the Pro is allegedly what the vanilla S26 will be known as) look to be far more conservative. Both follow Samsung's typical triple lens in a vertical stack design language, albeit with a slight change from the S25 phones. Where those featured three distinct camera lenses, each protruding out of the phone's rear panel, with no surrounding camera island, Samsung does appear to now be grouping all three lenses into one raised camera bump.
From a technical standpoint, this does make sense. Samsung is on a mission to make its phones thinner, and not just the Edge model. There are reports that the S26 Ultra could be 0.4mm thinner than its predecessor, while other rumors suggest it could also have a larger aperture lens for its primary, wide-angle camera. If both rumors are true, then a camera island becomes essential. Why? Because if Samsung was to retain the same separate lens design we've seen in its last few flagship generations, the main camera lens on the S26 Ultra would stick out of the phone way too far. The use of a camera island serves to soften the thickness transition between the main body of the phone and the end of the camera lens.
However, in giving the S26 Ultra a camera island, Samsung would potentially be sacrificing what was a relatively clean design language to make the S26 Ultra look like any other flagship phone with a big camera bump. The leaked S26 Ultra image also shows the phone's frame corners are more rounded than those on the S25 Ultra, which in turn deviated from the completely square corners of the S24 Ultra.
The new rounded look appears to ape the iPhone, which is sure to come as a disappointment to many Samsung fans who'd prefer the brand to retain a more distinctive look.
If the rumors and leaks turn out to be correct and the S26 Ultra has to rely on little more than a larger aperture lens to differentiate itself from the S25 Ultra when it comes to camera hardware, and that in turn compromises the phone's styling, the likely January launch could be a disappointment.
