This year, Samsung clearly put the majority of its design effort into its flagship phone, the Galaxy S26 Ultra. While the company did launch the base-model S26 and mid-range S26+ alongside it, most of the major improvements came in the S26 Ultra. This meant that most of the comparisons I drew were against the Apple iPhone 17 Pro, the OnePlus 15, and the Oppo X9 Pro.
When it comes to the Galaxy S26 Ultra — as with Samsung’s Ultra tier of phones in general — the company has done an outstanding job of balancing features to deliver one of the best all-around devices on the market. The phone officially launched on March 6, 2026, at $1,299, and I have had a couple of months now to evaluate it hands-on.
The S26 Ultra embodies a few major design and engineering decisions by Samsung that affect the overall user experience. First, Samsung went back to an aluminum body after two generations of using titanium frames; this improves the weight and cooling of the phone but impacts durability a bit. I think Apple’s move back to aluminum from titanium may have allowed Samsung to make the switch back more easily. The S26 Ultra is a mere 4 grams lighter than the S25 Ultra, although if Samsung had used silicon-carbon batteries, it could have expanded battery capacity while further reducing weight. (More on that below.)
The display is a 6.9-inch 3210 x 1440 Privacy Display with Gorilla Armor 2. Samsung’s proprietary Privacy Display technology makes the S26 Ultra the only device on earth that can selectively hide certain areas of the display from bystanders so that only the user can see them. I believe that this feature will gain a huge amount of popularity with different types of users, from teens who don’t want their friends reading texts over their shoulders to executives who often handle highly sensitive corporate information on their phones. More than that, it leverages Samsung’s display manufacturing expertise to offer features that nobody else can. This is something that I wish Samsung would do more frequently as one of the leading display and memory manufacturers in the world.
The processor has been upgraded to the “Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Samsung,” which is a modified version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 with Samsung’s own custom IP in certain areas like the display controller, plus a slightly higher CPU clock speed (4.74 versus 4.61 GHz). Storage starts at 256GB, with Samsung eliminating 128GB as an option — a necessary improvement. RAM remains at 12GB but is upgradable to 16GB on the 1TB storage model. The SoC should bring improvements to performance and battery life, and the RAM and storage should be enough to run on-device AI models like Gemma 4 from Google, which will enable most of the on-device AI functionality including Gemini.
Connectivity remains mostly the same for this generation, with Wi-Fi 7 and BT 6.0 powered by Qualcomm’s FastConnect 7900. This is the best Wi-Fi combo chip that Qualcomm has to offer today but will be superseded later this year by the Wi-Fi 8 FastConnect 8800 that was announced at MWC 2026. The FastConnect 7900 also comes with UWB capabilities, enabling advanced experiences — for instance, using your phone as a car key or finding other UWB-compatible devices. Qualcomm says that the FastConnect 8800 will add Thread support for better IoT and smart-home experiences and will be the first 4×4 Wi-Fi client chip ever made, doubling theoretical performance to up to 10.6 Gbps. (If you’d like to learn more about that, you can watch my interview with Qualcomm’s Chano Gomez.)
In terms of wired connectivity, the S26 Ultra still features a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 chip, which is capped at 5 Gbps; if Samsung upgraded the port to Gen 2, that would give you 10 Gbps, which would be useful for video recording. This same USB-C port also finally enables 60W charging, up from 45W, although this still lags behind OnePlus and others that are offering 80 to 100W charging. That said, 60W is still a very welcome change and delivers a 75% charge in about 30 minutes. The S26 Ultra also adds 25W Qi2 wireless charging (up from 15W), which is faster than the comparable iPhone. Samsung didn’t include the Qi2 magnets in the body of the phone, which means you will need a case to use MagSafe/Qi2 charging accessories.
Speaking of charging, Samsung has maintained the same 5,000 mAh battery that it had in the S25 Ultra, giving you effectively the same battery life as before. This is a point of contention for a lot of reviewers and users because Chinese competitors are now using silicon-carbon batteries with 50% higher capacity, and effectively giving users two-day battery life. These larger batteries also allow you to charge up to only 80% to prolong the life of the battery; even at 80%, these batteries have much higher capacity (6,000 mAh) than the 5,000 mAh of the S26 Ultra at 100%.
The S26 Ultra’s camera setup is one of the areas where Samsung has — deservedly — received the most criticism. As in the S25 Ultra, there is a quad-camera configuration with the same 200MP main sensor, 50MP ultrawide, and 50MP 5x telephoto, while the 3x telephoto gets only a 10MP sensor. In my experience, this quad-camera configuration fosters the best photography experience; I find myself using the 3x quite a lot since it sits very neatly between the 1x and 5x. I find it most useful when taking portrait shots and photos of food, though I do find the 10MP sensor lacking at times. I also prefer the 5x optical zoom over Apple’s 4x on the iPhone 17 Pro, and the 10x hybrid zoom over Apple’s 8x. The only places where Samsung made upgrades to the camera system were giving the main camera sensor’s lens a wider f/1.4 aperture (from f/1.7), and giving the telephoto a better lens, going from f/3.4 to f/2.9. Samsung says, “The Wide camera now features a 47% brighter aperture that opens to F1.4, while the Telephoto camera opens to F2.9 for 37% improved brightness.”
What this should translate to is sharper daytime images and better night photography, with faster captures, less noise, and sharper images overall. These are the two camera sensors people are most likely to use, so it makes sense that Samsung would upgrade them. That said, I believe that Samsung should push harder on camera improvements with every generation, especially since this is its flagship device with the best camera it offers. Camera specs aren’t the complete story, but I would love for the 3x to have a 50 MP sensor, because the lower resolution of the 10MP is noticeable, especially when I use it for food photography.
Samsung did introduce Ocean Mode in the Expert RAW camera app, which it originally created as a research project with the Scripps Institute of Oceanography here in San Diego. Using Ocean Mode (along with a waterproof case) lets you fine-tune tone mapping for underwater photography, achieving more realistic colors in your photos. By the way, the phone’s IP68 water-resistance rating (for up to 30 minutes of submersion) applies to freshwater only and does not work in saltwater.
The video capabilities on the S26 Ultra are pretty much the same as last year, with a maximum resolution of 8K30 and a sweet spot of 4K60 for the best experience. While I believe that 8K video on smartphones is mostly gimmicky, I would like to see Samsung adopt spatial video capture, especially now that the Galaxy XR headset is on the market. (For comparison, I have watched numerous spatial videos captured on my iPhone on the Apple Vision Pro headset.) The ISP on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 is capable of this, so I think Samsung should enable it across the entire S26 line. Currently, most of Samsung’s experimental camera features live within the Expert RAW app, but spatial video capture isn’t one of them — and it should be.
Smartphone users have always encountered a major point of friction when moving from one phone to another. Samsung and Google have done a commendable job of making that move as painless as possible over the years. While I didn’t want to switch from my Galaxy Z Fold7, the limited camera on that phone was forcing me to use my iPhone 17 Pro much more. Moving from the Fold7 to the S26 Ultra was the smoothest transition I’ve had between phones. The one flaw is how long the actual transfer takes, though I think that if Samsung upgraded the USB-C ports, it could shorten the transfer time.
As for day-to-day usage of the S26 Ultra, it seems that Galaxy AI’s capabilities keep expanding, which adds meaningful improvements to different areas of the user experience. It’s also important to recognize that some of these improvements come from Samsung, while others come from Google. I am a big fan of Gemini and a heavy daily user, so having that experience available on the S26 Ultra is especially nice. I also like using the Galaxy Buds4 Pro, which can easily toggle between the S26 Ultra and the Galaxy Book6 Pro laptop. The “better together” story wasn’t as apparent to me until I switched away from using the Book6 Pro, which made me miss the ability to share a clipboard of copied text between the phone and laptop.
While Samsung kept the stylus on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, I find myself using it less with every generation. The stylus is a great input for people who care about it, and even I find it great for taking some screenshots, signing contracts, and other markup. But increasingly I feel like keeping it is an impediment to better design (and bigger batteries). By the way, the phone warns you that having a Qi2-compatible magnet case can impact your stylus user experience.
One thing that I really missed in the Galaxy Z Fold7 (and the iPhone 17 Pro) was the ultrasonic under-screen fingerprint sensor. This is a Qualcomm ultrasonic sensor that works when the screen is off; a single press both turns on the screen and unlocks the phone. It even works when the screen is wet, and it’s extremely quick and secure. Google must agree with me, because it implemented a similar solution in its Pixel 10 series. I believe all phones — even foldables — should have ultrasonic fingerprint sensors under the screen, because the power-button fingerprint sensors are just not that accurate or that fast.
When it comes to the phone’s camera, I found myself leaving the iPhone 17 Pro behind and almost exclusively using the S26 Ultra’s camera. This new camera has sparked joy in my smartphone photography in ways that other phones haven’t. I am a huge fan of the quad-camera setup and much prefer the 5x optical zoom and 10x hybrid zoom on the S26 Ultra over the iPhone 17 Pro or the OnePlus 15. The Oppo X9 Pro comes quite close with its 200MP telephoto, but it’s still only a triple camera. While the S26 Ultra doesn’t win any camera awards, one thing that it finally does well is capture the moment I am trying to convey, something I’ve mentioned that the iPhone 17 Pro does very well. As a photographer, there is a certain framing, expression, and lighting you try to capture to enshrine the memory in a photo, but many smartphones struggle to capture that for one reason or another.
The camera’s low-light performance is noticeably better than it was on the S25 Ultra and I would even say on the iPhone 17 Pro. Capture times for low-light images were noticeably shorter and fewer images came out blurry. I also got some beautiful sunset shots from the plane that would be noisy in previous Samsung flagship phones. The camera also came in quite handy at tech industry events in low light with its 50MP 5x sensor, being able to easily capture event photos at very high quality without needing to pull out my big and heavy SLR. The combination of low-light environments, telephoto, and bright screens really challenges the camera’s hardware and software to deliver a good quality image.
The other thing I noticed about this camera that isn’t easily quantified is that the dynamic range is much improved. Even if there’s a very bright light source in the background, the foreground isn’t too dark, and people’s faces are clear and visible. I hope that we’ll see Samsung beef up the camera in the next generation, but I will say that the S26 Ultra is the first time I’ve felt that Samsung’s camera can compete with Apple in delivering memorable photos.
When it comes to performance, this phone is no slouch. In Geekbench 6 single-core testing, it performed as well as the OnePlus 15 (with the same processor) and as well as the iPhone Air with the A19 Pro chip. That said, the iPhone 17 Pro still outperformed it in single-core benchmarking, which means that Qualcomm’s QRD platform is still the most performant Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 I’ve tested and is the only one to beat Apple’s A19 Pro so far. That said, it’s a different story for multi-core performance, with the S26 Ultra being again on par with the OnePlus 15 and beating the Oppo Find X9 Pro and iPhone 17 and Air by a similar 20%.
As for graphics benchmarks, in 3Dmark Wildlife Extreme, I found that the S26 Ultra was 10% faster than the OnePlus 15 with the same chip and it handily beat every other Android phone I’ve tested — by a considerable margin. It was 40% faster than the S25 Ultra, which must surely translate to much better game performance and battery life. For AI performance testing, I used MLPerf mobile and found the S26 Ultra to be quite close to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 mobile test platform, within about 5%. Additionally, against older devices, it was really no contest; for example, it doubled the performance of the S24 Ultra across all six benchmark tests. All of this is to say that the S26 Ultra is extremely performant; it’s the fastest performer in most benchmarks, and when it isn’t, it’s close.
Battery life on the S26 Ultra has been pretty good — much better than the Z Fold7, which struggled to last a day after the first month or so of use. The S26 Ultra almost never gave me a battery-life warning, and most days it had around 30% battery remaining before I went to sleep. The 60W charging is incredibly fast, and it really does charge nearly to 100% before you even realize it. The 25W wireless charging is also quite good, and it’s worth noting that that rate of charging basically matches the iPhone’s peak charging speed on a wired connection.
Ultimately, evaluating the S26 Ultra requires us to remember that the U.S. smartphone market is effectively a four-way battle among Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Google Pixel. While I believe that Google wants to compete with Apple, it doesn’t fully want to compete with Samsung considering the Korean maker’s global scale and market share. Meanwhile, Motorola has done really well in foldables with the Razr series and is poised to do well again with the Razr Fold. In this context, Samsung carries the Android flag in many ways, and the S26 Ultra is the flagship for the entire Samsung line.
I truly believe that Samsung is moving in the right direction with the S26 Ultra, especially with features like Privacy Display. The phone feels really well thought out and doesn’t make any drastic changes that might upset existing users. That said, it’s also still a very safe design that doesn’t upset the apple cart in terms of UX. I suspect that Samsung is still a bit cautious about battery technology (e.g. avoiding an aggressive rollout of silicon-carbon batteries) because of the debacle that caused Note 7 batteries to catch fire or explode back in 2016. Still, I think Samsung needs to get with the times and match its Chinese competitors in the Ultra category.
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