Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: show off

“Someone might be watching everything I’m doing on my screen,” I tell myself in public. Even when I’m doing nothing of consequence — just making my little Wordle guesses — there’s a sense of unease that stays with me.

It’s never bothered me too much, and I generally save the sensitive stuff like banking for when I’m home, but I realize it’s a feeling I’ve internalized whenever I’m on my phone in a crowded place. Using Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra for the past couple of weeks has offered some relief from that particular worry simmering in the back of my mind; it solves a problem I didn’t even fully recognize until I started using it in my daily life.

I used the S26 Ultra in a lot of places where people could have been looking over my shoulder. Planes, airports, crowded convention halls… wherever I was, the phone’s new Privacy Display really did relieve that feeling of discomfort. It’s not totally bulletproof — I’m sure someone could have made out my Wordle guesses if they were trying pretty hard to look at the dimmed screen — but just the knowledge that a casual glance wouldn’t reveal the way I’d missed the obvious solution four guesses in a row was enough. And the fact that I can turn it off when I’m back at home? That rules.

The question is, how much is that peace of mind worth? And how confident can you be in the display’s ability to keep prying eyes away from real stuff like passwords, not just puzzle games? Those are the $1,300 questions.

I tend to think of the S26 Ultra as existing in a class by itself. Can you think of another phone with four rear cameras? A built-in stylus? Performance specs up the wazoo? It attracts a particular kind of fan. So I think your interest in the S26 Ultra as a whole package should be your guiding star if you’re interested in the Privacy Display but unsure about the rest. It is a phone person’s phone — big, expensive, wonderful — with one especially cool new feature we haven’t seen anywhere else. I can even see a world where this display tech is slowly adopted by other phone makers until it’s something we take for granted. That’s a feature worthy of the Ultra’s lofty title.

Elsewhere, the S26 Ultra is more familiar. It offers a versatile camera, an all-day battery, and Samsung’s mixed bag of Galaxy AI features. This time, Samsung implemented a couple of smart AI tools that seem to borrow from Google’s Pixel phones, which aren’t tremendously useful now but are generally heading in the right direction. Now Nudge, modeled on Magic Cue, offers contextual suggestions based on what’s being said in a text conversation. I’m miserable at adding things to my calendar, and I find this extra bit of help genuinely useful. Now Nudge seems to work only in some narrowly defined use cases within the messaging app, and I only saw it pop up a couple of times. Still, on one occasion it helped me check my calendar and schedule an event.

Just as I was preparing to publish this review, another AI feature appeared on the S26 Ultra by way of a software update: Gemini task automation. It’s limited to ordering food and rideshare apps right now, but the idea is that you give Gemini a simple prompt, like “Get me an Uber to the airport,” it opens the app in a virtual window, and it goes about using the app to fulfill your request. In some quick preliminary tests this has worked as advertised so far; crucially, Gemini stops before the final step so you can review and submit your order yourself. This, I think, is a good idea and certainly makes me feel better about using it. There are all kinds of ways to feel about this concept of computers using computers, and I have much more testing to do, but if it works consistently then this seems like a pretty significant step toward AI assistants that can actually do useful things for us.

Over in the gallery app, things are a little weirder. Samsung has built in some generative AI capabilities designed to help you reimagine your photos in fun ways, but for me they were unsettling. The company seems intent on zipping right past “Photos are memories” and into “Photos are whatever the hell you want them to be.” With the S26 series, you can tell the phone how you want to edit the photo with natural language prompts, like you can in Google Photos. You can change your outfit, add makeup to your face, and generally mess with your photos until they no longer even resemble anything that actually happened. It’s bananas.

Thankfully there are some basic guardrails in place. I couldn’t get Samsung’s AI to completely remove my clothes or dress me in a bikini. It did oblige when I asked it to remove my husband’s shirt in a photo — it even extended the tattoos visible on his arm further up toward his shoulder. It will happily let you download a photo of a celebrity from the internet, paste them into your own selfie, and make it look like you happened upon Adam Driver while you were at the park and he posed for a picture with you. And then it can come up with some real weird stuff: I asked it to add my husband to a picture of me and it put him in my lap like a little ventriloquist dummy. This stuff is weird, I don’t like it very much, and I can’t shake the feeling that it gets harder to trust what we see in a photo every time companies like Samsung and Google add generative AI tools like this.

As for the camera itself, there’s more good news for fans of hardware updates: Two of the S26 Ultra’s cameras come with brighter apertures. The main 200-megapixel camera now uses an f/1.4 lens compared to f/1.7, and the 5x telephoto is now f/2.9 versus f/3.4. Wider apertures mean these cameras can, in theory, create more detailed images in low light since they’re able to use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds as needed. And that bears out in my side-by-side testing. The main camera consistently uses a lower ISO than the S25 Ultra, while they both stick to a shutter speed of 1/120 second.

I see the same behavior on the 5x compared to the S25 Ultra in moderate lighting. In very dim light, both phones raise ISO to 1250, but the S26 Ultra is able to use a faster 1/60th shutter speed compared to 1/30th on the S25. Longer exposures will result in more noise that the camera has to smooth out in post-processing, and you’ve got a better chance of getting a sharp image with a faster shutter speed while shooting with the telephoto camera. These are real, unequivocal improvements to the camera system, and I will take them every day over a thousand bland generative AI photo editing features.

Underneath all that, the S26 Ultra is still an object you can hold, and it’s a nice one — if a little big for my taste. It loses what was left of its Note heritage by trading the boxy corners and sharp edges for the softer curves used by the S26 and S26 Plus. The seam along the sides of the screen where glass meets frame (aluminum this year, we’re all done doing titanium I guess) is smoother than on the S25 Ultra. The S Pen silo is also right on the corner, so the end of the stylus is curved slightly on one side — now there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to fit it into the frame.

The dimensions are similar to last year’s, but the S26 Ultra looks and feels much sleeker; the silver S25 Ultra looks like the Cybertruck of phones next to it. One similarity I’m disappointed to see carrying over to this year is the lack of Qi2 magnets, which are handy for thwacking the phone onto a magnetic charger or using MagSafe PopSockets and the like. Samsung is still outsourcing those to its cases, which is bad news for those of us who don’t put cases on our phones. Otherwise, the display remains huge at 6.9 inches, and although the phone feels a bit more comfortable to hold than last year’s model, this is still a very big phone.

But the Privacy Display is the big story here. The screen uses a technology Samsung calls Flex Magic Pixel to limit the viewing angle when Privacy Display is engaged. So the question is: Does it look any different with Privacy Display turned off? Next to the S25 Ultra, they look basically the same head-on, but I can see more of a color shift from the S26 Ultra when I view it from a very low angle. This never really bothered me while using the phone, but some people are more sensitive to that kind of thing.

When you turn Privacy Display on, the screen dims slightly and the picture looks a bit flatter. Again, this might be a problem for some people, but it didn’t really bug me; after a few moments I didn’t really notice. You can enable Privacy Display just for notification banners, which is awesome, and it’s kind of wild to see the effect working on just that part of the screen. Notifications look a little dim and gray, like the ghost of a notification.

I left Privacy Display on for days, only remembering once I tried showing someone next to me something on my phone screen (which they had to squint at to make out). At its default setting, Privacy Display makes it harder to see what’s on your screen from an angle — but not impossible. Especially if there’s white text on a black background, someone standing next to you is still going to be able to read it.

Enabling the option for “maximum” privacy protection makes it much harder to make out text on the screen from an angle, though it also lowers contrast more dramatically when you’re looking at it straight on. It would be handy if you could keep Privacy Display engaged at its default setting for general use and then kick it into maximum privacy for certain apps; given all the ways Samsung lets you customize these kinds of features, it wouldn’t surprise me if Samsung is working on that for version two.

For the past couple of years, the Ultra seemed to be losing parts of its identity without picking up any meaningful improvements along the way. Sure, the switch from a 10x to a 5x zoom was probably the right one in the long run. And I can’t say I’ve missed any of the Bluetooth features that used to come with the S Pen. But altogether, it just seemed Samsung wasn’t quite sure what to do with this big phone — and a name like “Ultra” sets the standard pretty high.

Things are different this year. This phone genuinely does things I haven’t seen another phone do, and that’s not a phrase I’ve been able to apply in a long time. Privacy Display works, it doesn’t come with any serious downsides, and it’s eminently useful. Even my usually tech-disinterested husband was impressed. The camera upgrades are real, too: Faster lenses let in more light and offer you a better chance of taking sharp photos. It’s not some AI nonsense, it’s just physics.

The S26 Ultra is a return to form in some ways, but it remains a pricey device and generally A Lot of Phone. But that’s kind of the Ultra promise: unapologetically big, crammed with every feature you can imagine. This is still a phone for a self-selecting group of people, but I’m happy to report that fans of the series are finally getting an update that’s worthy of the name.

Photography by Allison Johnson / The Verge