Samsung's next small flagship is, by the numbers, the same phone. Android Headlines published exclusive CAD files for the base Galaxy S27, the design drawings case makers and factories work from, and they put it at 149.75 by 71.88 by 7.25 millimetres. The Galaxy S26 measures 149.6 by 71.7 by 7.2. Every dimension moves by less than a fifth of a millimetre, which is another way of saying the phone does not move at all.
The screen stays at 6.3 inches, the size Samsung has used on the base model for several generations running, and the three rear cameras stay stacked in the same vertical island, so the phone still rocks when you set it down face up. Bezels may be fractionally thinner. Nothing else in the renders has moved.
What Samsung has been designing instead sits one tier up. The redesigned camera plateau on the S27 Ultra, whose CADs Android Headlines published a day earlier, is not coming down to the base phone this year. Two phones in one line, and only one of them gets an argument made about it.
A CAD file is not a spec sheet.
It settles the outside of a phone months before Samsung will confirm anything, and it is silent on the parts that decide whether the S27 is worth buying. Those are still open. The S26 shipped with two different processors depending on where you bought it, Qualcomm's Snapdragon in the United States and Samsung's own Exynos 2600 in Europe, and the S27 may go to a single Exynos 2700 worldwide. Memory looks like 12GB with 256GB of storage at the base, held there by the shortage of memory chips that has been pushing phone prices up all year.
The camera is where a real change might land. Samsung is testing a new main sensor for the base S27, reportedly one of Sony's, which would end more than five years of the company using its own ISOCELL sensors on this model. The battery is expected to reach about 4,900mAh, roughly 14 percent more than the S26, using the silicon-carbon chemistry Samsung already put in its folding phones.
None of that is in the renders. Six months out from a launch Android Headlines puts in the week of 22 February 2027, what has leaked is the one part of the Galaxy S27 that Samsung finished first, and it finished it by leaving it alone.