Samsung Kills the Budget Tablet for Its 2026 Lineup

Samsung's tablet strategy just took a sharp turn upmarket. The company has dropped the entry-level model from its flagship range entirely, so the new lineup consists of just two premium machines: the Galaxy Tab S12 Ultra with a 14.6-inch screen and the Galaxy Tab S12+, a 12.6-inch alternative. As GadgetGuy's launch report notes, this year's premium range is down to two larger models, with no smaller option in sight. Both went on sale in the United States on October 7, 2026 — and the message is clear: if you want a budget tablet with current specs, you will have to look at last year's 11-inch model instead.

According to Samsung's official product pages, both tablets run on a MediaTek Dimensity 9500 chip built on a 3-nanometer process. Samsung says the new silicon delivers a 19 percent faster CPU and 17 percent faster graphics than the previous generation's chip. The neural engine gets the biggest leap, with 61 percent more AI processing power, and a redesigned 3D vapor chamber keeps temperatures down during demanding work like video editing.

Brighter screens and battery that outlasts the day

Both slates use Dynamic AMOLED 2X display panels with a 120Hz refresh rate and peak brightness of 1,600 nits, bright enough for outdoor use without squinting. The larger screen measures 2,960 by 1,848 pixels, while the smaller one comes in at 2,800 by 1,752. At 5.1 millimeters thick, the Ultra is the thinnest tablet Samsung has ever shipped, yet it still fits an 11,600mAh battery rated for up to 23 hours of video playback. The Plus carries a 10,600mAh cell rated for up to 21 hours. Both charge at 45 watts — a full refill takes about 95 minutes — and both carry an IP68 rating against dust and water, which is rare on hardware this thin. The stylus ships in the box, and the fingerprint reader has moved underneath the display.

Photoshop comes preloaded — a first for Android

Software is where this generation pushes hardest. The tablets ship with Android 17 running Samsung's One UI 9 software, and the company promises up to seven generations of operating-system upgrades and security patches — a support window that rivals Apple's. Adobe's photo-editing app comes preloaded with a stylus-optimized interface, which Samsung says is a first for any Android tablet, bundled with four months of free access to the mobile plan. The Notability note-taking app arrives preloaded with a six-month trial, alongside a year of Goodnotes, a discount on LumaFusion and a Notion trial — a software bundle Samsung values at roughly four hundred and forty-five dollars. A six-month trial of the Google AI Pro package is included too, for boosted Gemini features.

The catch: higher prices, and the memory crunch behind them

None of this comes cheap. In the United States, the larger tablet starts at $1,399.99 for the base Wi-Fi configuration, while the smaller model opens at roughly twelve hundred dollars — both above the equivalent launch prices a year ago. The storage ladder climbs steeply from there. In Australia, where the tablets reach stores on October 22, 2026, pricing runs from about two thousand Australian dollars for the Plus to about twenty-three hundred for the Ultra, according to ITBrief's launch coverage.

The increase is not mostly about the hardware. Memeburn's analysis of the launch pricing traces it to the AI-driven memory crunch: mobile DRAM contract prices jumped by roughly eighty percent in a single quarter earlier this year, and memory now eats up to forty percent of a device's component cost, up from around fifteen percent. Samsung sits on both sides of that squeeze, since its chip division ranks among the biggest winners from AI memory demand while its mobile division absorbs the cost.

For context, last year's 14.6-inch flagship debuted at a lower starting price, and this year's hardware changes are modest: the same battery capacity, the same charging speed, and a design that barely moved, with the chip upgrade doing most of the heavy lifting. That makes the new lineup a strong pick for students and creators who will actually use the preloaded creative apps and the long software support — that many years of updates means a tablet bought for college could still be receiving new features at graduation — rather than for anyone content with the 2025 model. If the giant screen and the bundled apps do not matter to you, the remaining 11-inch tablet from the 2025 range is the closest thing to a budget tablet Samsung still sells, and that is precisely the gap Samsung seems comfortable leaving open. Samsung is not the only company rethinking cheap tablets, either — Amazon just killed its Fire tablet line for a pricier Alexa-powered range.

The premium-only lineup is a bet that tablet buyers have split into two camps: people who want the cheapest usable screen, served by older or discounted models, and people willing to pay for a genuine laptop replacement. They arrive alongside the rest of Samsung's ecosystem push, including a SmartTag that finally works with iPhones. With battery life measured in days rather than hours, a first-of-its-kind photo-editing deal and software support stretching into the next decade, Samsung's new tablets make a serious case for the second camp — as long as your wallet survives the memory crunch too.