At MWC 2026, we didn’t — unsurprisingly — see a bunch of phones.
This year’s Mobile World Congress is rich with phones that serve a variety of purposes and demographics, such as Honor’s Robot Phone, which is part handset and part camera gimbal. While Xiaomi has previously announced another premium device, its graphics capabilities are next-level. Honor unveiled the fold…without the crease. Products can be expected, but phones are not.
This year’s MWC comes with its own set of challenging conditions. I Samsung Galaxy S26 phones arrived just ahead of the show to set the stage for this year’s best Android phones, and it also comes with a $100 price increase on its base models and the Galaxy S26 Plus. This could be a result of the RAM shortage, which is expected to pressure phone makers to raise prices on more phones. How they choose to balance new features and affordability could be 2026’s biggest hurdle for the phone industry.
Despite all that uncertainty, manufacturers still hold the biggest phone show of the year to release their new phones. Here are all the best phones we saw at MWC.
Xiaomi Leitzphone.
Leitzphone by Xiaomi
We’ve seen the Leica name attached to phones for years, but Xiaomi’s Leica Leitzphone takes the phone-camera-company partnership to the next level. There’s a nice array of features in the middle of the image: Leica’s famous high-quality Summilux lenses, the new Lateral Overflow Integration Capacitor image sensor to enable a better dynamic range and moving features on the telephoto lens that allow it to change gracefully from 75- to 100-millimeter focal lengths. Also, rings a large lens on the back of the phone that acts as a customizable control for zoom, exposure, or other settings.
Best of all, as CNET Editor at Large Andrew Lanxon notes in his review, the Leitzphone has the same color profiles you’ll find on Leica film and camera cameras — and the photos it took look like they came from a pro camera, not a phone. In short, Lanxon wrote, the Leitzphone is so advanced that it earns our Editors’ Choice award, and competitors like the new Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra need to catch up.
Honor Magic V6’s 7.95-inch internal display looks bright and bold.
Honor Magic V6
The Honor Magic V6 is a fold that seems, at least at first glance, to significantly reduce one of the persistent problems of flexible displays: the crease above the fold line is gone. This alone may make the Magic V6 attractive to high-end phone fans, but it has other neat touches — it’s only 4.1mm thick, is one of the first foldables to be IP68 and IP69 dust-resistant (meaning it should survive spilled drinks and dust), has a 6,600-mAh battery (older than the Galaxy Z40000000000 and has a 700Ah of the Galaxy Z400 is a triple rear camera with features that seem better than any competitor: main 50-megapixel, telephoto 64-megapixel and 50-megapixel ultrawide.
For all those adjustments, expect to pay. While the Honor Magic V6 doesn’t have an official price yet (and won’t be sold in the US), its predecessor, the Honor Magic V5, was priced at £1,699 (converting to around $2,285).
The Motorola Razr Fold is a sleek device that feels surprisingly well-built when I hold it.
Motorola Razr Fold
After years of sticking with clamshell-style foldables in the Razr series, Motorola is finally bringing a larger book-style foldable to take on its rival Samsung and its Galaxy Z Fold 7. Motorola continues to differentiate its phones with other materials and finishes such as the wood finish on the Razr Ultra, and the new Motorola Razr Fold has a luxurious “silk” touch.
Motorola’s new book-style folding has a triple rear camera system (50 megapixel sensors with three lenses: wide-angle, telephoto and ultrawide) and other specification advantages over Samsung’s large folding phone. The Razr Fold has a 6,000-mAh battery and 80-watt and 50-watt wireless charging, which easily surpasses the Galaxy Z Fold 7’s 4,400-mAh capacity and its 25-watt wireless charging and 15-watt wireless charging.
Look at that cheeky little camera sticking out of the phone. It’s lovely, in a way.
Respect the Robot Phone
We first got a sneak peek at an Honor phone with a vertical camera on the end of a robot arm (think one of those pocket-sized DJI cameras on a gimbal) during CES 2026, but we finally got a good look at MWC 2026 a few months later. With its separate, stable camera, the Honor Robot Phone lives up to its name, capturing images that can be of much higher quality than those from standard phone cameras at the end of our (human) arms. When it’s not working, the curved Honor phone arm folds back in and tucks into a notch on the back of the phone. It’s a neat return, and expansion, to the neat pop-up phone cameras of the past, equipped with all the latest modern photography technology.
ZTE Neo 5 GT.
ZTE Nubia Neo 5 GT
The ZTE Nubia Neo 5 GT brings features from premium gaming phones down to a half-priced handset. About 450 euros (about 525 dollars), the Neo 5 GT has several advantages inherited from the almost $1,000 RedMagic 11 Pro: shoulder-sensitive triggers, a clean back design and, the cleanest of all, an internal fan that combines thermal-absorbing heat to reduce the phone’s temperature by 4 degrees Celsius, says the 4 Celsius sheet.
The Nubia Neo 5 line is part of ZTE’s efforts to make phones for gamers without deep pockets. The rest of the devices in the lineup are neat enough, with the roughly 350 euro (about $405) Neo 5 Max boasting a larger 7.5-inch display, but it’s the Neo 5 GT that packs the best gaming features (and style) into the most affordable handsets.
Galaxy S26.
Honorable mentions: Samsung Galaxy S26 and Apple iPhone 17E
While Samsung and Apple weren’t at MWC 2026, they still seemed to want in on the fun, releasing smartphones just before and during the show, respectively. They are not part of the conference, but should be mentioned anyway.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 is the company’s latest flagship, with a larger 4,300-mAh battery and more AI features than its predecessor, but it feels very similar to the Galaxy S25 before it. But this time, it’s a $100 price, starting at $900, and it’s not clear if that’s due to last year’s cost or this year’s lack of RAM – or the base configuration makes the storage 256GB. Still, with a powerful Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, a slightly larger 6.3-inch screen, a still 7.2mm thickness and more AI tricks, the Galaxy S26 is an Android phone worth calling for other flagships coming later this year.
The iPhone 17E comes in three colors: Black, White and Pink.
The iPhone 17E is now the most affordable phone in Apple’s lineup. Besides keeping the same $599 price as its predecessor, the iPhone 16E, the new handset has double the storage at 256GB and comes with MagSafe charging support and other features (many critics didn’t like that the 16E didn’t have it). It also cuts some corners to achieve a lower price than the iPhone 17 released last fall, with a quad-core (rather than five-core) GPU, a single 48-megapixel rear camera, no Center Stage feature on its selfie camera, no Dynamic Island, no Camera Control button and no always-on display. But its 6.1-inch screen is more resistant to scratches on the 17E than on its predecessor, which is.
