Over time, small-screened flagships settled on a 6.3” size display. However, that number alone doesn’t tell you much about the phone – case in point, the Samsung Galaxy S26 and Xiaomi 17 are very different and both of them are on sale for Amazon Prime Day.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 is the safe choice – it has sold millions and the very, very similar S22 through S25 models have as well. Yeah, Samsung has been slow in upgrading the small S models.

The Xiaomi 17 stands out with a much more capable camera system. It has a larger 50MP sensor in its main camera (1/1.31” vs. 1/1.56”), a 50MP telephoto module that does 2.6x optical and 5x lossless zoom (60mm lens vs. 67mm lens and a 10MP sensor on the Galaxy) and it has a 50MP ultra-wide that captures more detail than the 12MP unit on the Samsung phone. There’s a bigger 50MP sensor in the selfie camera too, compared to the aging 12MP sensor that Samsung is still using.

Samsung has been slow in adopting Silicon-Carbon battery tech, so the 4,300mAh battery capacity of the Galaxy S26 is 2,030mAh short of the Xiaomi 17 capacity. And you can feel it too – in our testing, the S26 achieved an Active Use Score of 15:20h, while the Xiaomi outlasted it with a 21:46h score. The charging tech is quite different as well – despite having 47% more capacity to fill up, Xiaomi’s 100W charger gets the phone to full in 46 minutes. Samsung’s 25W charger needs 1 hour and 4 minutes for a full charge.

The Galaxy S26 does have its strengths too – One UI has won over many with its rich feature set and varied customization options. Meanwhile, Xiaomi’s HyperOS has many detractors. Also, the Samsung is thinner (7.2mm vs. 8.1mm) and lighter (167g vs. 191g), which might matter to some.

We should note that this year the European Galaxy S26 is equipped with an Exynos 2600, while the Xiaomi 17 uses a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Both have 12GB of RAM.

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