Samsung
Samsung Electronics covers nearly every consumer-electronics category we compare on vsMars: Galaxy phones and watches, QLED and QD-OLED televisions, Odyssey monitors, and the DRAM/NAND that ends up in many competitors' products. The Galaxy S series leads the Android industry on software support length (7 years as of 2026).
All Samsung products on vsMars
51 products across 15 categories.
About Samsung
A brief history
Samsung was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-chul as a trading company in Daegu, Korea. It expanded through textiles, food processing, insurance, and shipbuilding before entering electronics in 1969 with Samsung Electronics. Memory chips arrived in the early 1980s, the company became the world's largest DRAM producer by 1992, and the Anycall mobile-phone brand launched in 1993. The first Galaxy S smartphone in 2010 marked Samsung's pivot from feature phones to Android flagship leadership. Today Samsung Electronics is the world's largest manufacturer of smartphones by units shipped, the largest TV manufacturer by revenue, and the largest memory-chip producer overall — and it operates as a key component supplier to many of its own competitors.
What Samsung is known for
Samsung's signature trait is breadth. Few brands ship competitive products in so many categories at once: Galaxy phones and tablets, Galaxy Watch wearables, Galaxy Buds, Neo QLED and QD-OLED televisions, the Frame lifestyle TV, Odyssey gaming monitors, Bespoke home appliances, and the SmartThings home-platform layer that ties them together. The component side — Samsung Display, Samsung SDI, Samsung Foundry — makes Samsung simultaneously a competitor and a supplier to Apple, Sony, Dell, and others.
Tech strengths cluster in display panels (the company invented mass-produced AMOLED, ships most foldable OLEDs, and co-developed QD-OLED with Sony), memory (LPDDR5X, UFS 4.0, HBM3E), and now silicon (Exynos in some regions, custom ISP and modem work). Samsung has also gradually closed the software gap: the Galaxy S25 series ships with seven years of OS and security updates — matching Google Pixel and exceeding most Android peers — and One UI is now well-regarded for tablet/foldable scaling.
Where Samsung excels on vsMars
Samsung products appear in nearly every category we track. The Galaxy S and Galaxy Z lines anchor the upper bracket of the smartphones category and our best smartphones shortlist, with the Z Fold and Z Flip dominating the foldable subcategory. Galaxy Watch competes in smartwatches and on our best smartwatches list. On the display side, Samsung is the brand to beat in TVs (Neo QLED, S95 QD-OLED) and best TVs, and the Odyssey range leads our monitors and best monitors charts for high-refresh-rate gaming. Galaxy Buds appear under wireless earbuds.
Trade-offs to know
The breadth that defines Samsung is also its main weakness: quality varies more from line to line than at narrower brands. Bloatware and duplicate apps (Samsung + Google versions of nearly every system app) remain a fixture of One UI, and regional Exynos/Snapdragon splits mean two buyers can get materially different performance from the same model name. Galaxy Watch features beyond basic notifications still require a Samsung phone, narrowing the value proposition for mixed-platform households. On the TV side, Samsung's refusal to support Dolby Vision continues to be a real content-compatibility gap versus LG and Sony. Repair pricing is high outside the first-party network, and out-of-warranty parts availability is uneven. Finally, Samsung's marketing-spec premium — chips, panels, batteries — sometimes outpaces day-to-day improvements, and pricing on flagship Galaxy hardware now sits at parity with Apple in most markets.
Popular Samsung head-to-heads
Hands-on coverage of Samsung
Galaxy Buds vs AirPods: Which Should You Buy in 2026?
Samsung and Apple each sell three tiers of earbuds at the same three prices. We match them up pair by pair on the spec sheet — battery, fit, water resistance, codecs and multipoint — and explain why your phone decides more than any number does.
Best Earbuds for Small Ears in 2026 — Lightest Buds, Ranked
Small ears and earbuds are a bad match more often than they should be. We ranked every pair in our catalog by weight per bud, then filtered for battery, noise cancellation and water resistance, so you can start from the lightest buds that do not give up anything important.
How We Score and Compare Products: A Worked Example
Every Mars Score and every "who wins" line on vsMars comes from code, not opinion. This guide walks one real pair of earbuds through the exact steps — normalization, group weights, the confidence guard, the display rescale, and the comparison engine — so you can check our numbers yourself.
OLED vs Mini-LED TV: Burn-In, Brightness and Which to Buy in 2026
OLED lights every pixel on its own; Mini-LED backlights an LCD with thousands of tiny LEDs. We explain what that means for contrast, brightness and burn-in, then match OLED and Mini-LED TVs from our catalog at every price.
Best Tablets in 2026 — Buyer's Guide
The ten highest-scoring tablets in our catalog — including the same iPad appearing twice, six points apart, and what that gap actually tells you.
Best NVMe SSDs in 2026 — Buyer's Guide
The ten highest-scoring 2 TB NVMe drives in our catalog — split cleanly into two groups by one specification, and why the cheaper group is the right answer more often than the ranking suggests.