Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: Steep price, stellar tech

It’s hard to put a price on privacy, but Samsung’s latest flagship tries to make it a premium one anyway.

The newly-announced Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is the company’s latest luxury-grade phablet. On most fronts, it’s as iterative an evolution of last year’s Galaxy S25 Ultra as you might expect – for better or worse.

There are two big exceptions to this. The first is the new Privacy Display, which plays to Samsung’s strengths in display technologies but is easy to miss if you aren't looking. The second is the higher asking price, which is just as noteworthy but a whole lot more difficult to ignore.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra might be a tough sell for more everyday consumers, but Samsung has been making phones like this one long enough to know that’s not who this is for anyway.

Samsung’s 2026 flagship is built better, but it’s not particularly different to the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

On the outside, it’s slimmer, tougher, and lighter. Then, on the inside, the Galaxy S26 Ultra boasts a revamped thermal architecture that incorporates a new vapour chamber. 

Of course, as usual, the main event here remains the display. The Galaxy S26 Ultra is built around a 6.9-inch AMOLED screen with all the usual bells and whistles. It’s got 500 ppi, a 120Hz refresh rate, HDR 10+ colour, and up to 2600 nits of peak brightness. 

Adding to this, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is also Samsung’s first flagship to tout what the manufacturer is branding as a Privacy Display. When this feature is enabled, the wider pixels on the Galaxy S26 Ultra's screen get turned off. This reduces the overall brightness, but more importantly, it reduces the viewing angle such that only someone staring dead-on at the display can actually see what’s happening on it. You can even get more granular with it by concealing specific applications or your notifications. 

Genuinely, the Privacy Display is really cool. It’s not a game-changer, but it is a tangible utility-oriented inclusion that you aren’t getting elsewhere. At least, for now. 

Another technical improvement worth touching on here is support for faster 60W charging via USB-C. The usual caveats apply. You can only get these faster speeds with selected charging accessories, and you won’t find those in the box when you shell out for the Galaxy S26 Ultra. 

On the other hand, and despite these cutting-edge charging specs, Samsung’s latest flagship still lacks true Qi2 support. The device supports faster wireless charging speeds but lacks the magnets that give it the MagSafe-like functionality found on the Google Pixel 10 Pro. 

There are cases that make up this difference that you can buy. However, following the introduction of Google’s own Pixelsnap system last year, that setup can’t help but come across as even more of a compromise.

The camera setup on Samsung's portable photography powerhouse has gotten a similar upgrade, but doesn’t come with so many caveats. 

While the hardware here (which consists of a 200MP primary lens, 10MP 3x telephoto lens, 50MP ultrawide lens and 50MP 5x telephoto lens) is very similar to what you can find on the back of last year’s Galaxy S25 Ultra, the 1x and 5x lenses here now features wider apertures that are able to capture more light. The main lens has gotten the bigger uplift, but the telephoto lens isn’t far behind.

Although I found that the camera on the Galaxy S26 Ultra didn't handle motion quite as well as the one on the Google Pixel 10 Pro XL does, I still came away pretty impressed with its telephoto and low-light performance.

This time around, only the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra comes with the latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy processor as the cheaper models rely on Samsung’s own Exynos 2600 silicon instead. That’s a loss for those who prefer a smaller screen (or a thriftier price tag), but it does make the case for upselling yourself to the flagship model a little easier to justify. 

Under the hood, the Galaxy S26 Ultra comes with 12GB of RAM as standard. As mentioned above, the phone is available with as little as 256GB of storage and as much as 1TB (if you can afford the premium).

Samsung's latest flagship runs on Android 16 and the latest version of Samsung’s One UI, with seven years of software and security updates. That's as good as Android devices get. Even if it isn't an improvement on last year's device, that's still good to see given the asking price involved.

In practice, those pieces add up to a satisfying whole. Apps loaded fast, and I had no real major issues or hiccups when it came to the overall software experience. The Galaxy S26 Ultra didn't sweat too much when it came to multitasking, nor did it have any issues with more games like League of Legends: Wild Rift, Diablo Immortal and Zenless Zone Zero. 

In the past, I’ve had various technical issues with Destiny Rising on Android devices but I had no such stuttering or low-frame rates with the Galaxy S26 Ultra. It’s inevitably a bit hard to pin down how much of that is due to the silicon involved, the superior thermal architecture inside the Galaxy S26 series, or the degree to which that specific title has been optimised since launch.

Regardless of which reason you pick, you end up at the same destination – which is that Samsung’s latest high-end device is an absolute treat for those looking at gaming on the go.

Although Samsung is being a little less loud about AI this time around, the Galaxy S26 Ultra does come with a few new tricks on that front. Screenshot Analyser, Now Nudge, and a resurrected version of Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant that’s powered by LLMs round out the already long list of AI-powered features found on this year’s Galaxy flagship. The full list of the device's AI features and apps is as follows:

It's only taken a few years for that list of Galaxy AI features to get long enough that each fresh addition feels like a case of diminishing returns. Still, compared to some other brands, Samsung's AI-integrations are relatively easy to ignore if you're not interested in them. As always, though, I wish there was something like a big dial that you could use to determine how visible or in-your-face all these new software hooks are within the wider interface. 

When it comes to the battery inside the device, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is kitted out with a 5000mAh battery. Even as other high-end handsets are looking to adopt even larger capacity and new silicon carbon-based batteries, this setup serves Samsung’s latest fairly well. I could confidently make it through two days of regular usage on a single charge. 

Burned down via streaming video from YouTube over Wi-Fi, the device took 27 hours and 22 minutes to go from a full charge to zero. That's a really impressive result that puts it well above other devices in its category.