To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
Announced today at the Unpacked showcase in San Francisco, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is one of the bookie’s favourites to be the best smartphone of 2026. You know, if bookies took bets on such things.
Helping its case is the fact that its predecessor, the Galaxy S25 Ultra, is currently sitting at the top of our smartphone rankings, and took home the award for best premium smartphone at our annual Product of the Year Awards last month.
With that being said, we’ve seen some strong competition emerging over the past few months, with companies like OnePlus and Honor making bold new strides, particularly when it comes to battery life. With the competition pushing the envelope, is Samsung playing things too safe on the hardware front? Or is screen privacy really more appealing to consumers than better battery life? Let’s crack open a can of specs and find out.
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra hands-on: Specifications, price and release date
- 6.9in, 3,120 x 1,440, 120Hz, LTPO AMOLED display
- 4.74GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy
- 12GB or 16GB RAM
- 256GB, 512GB or 1TB of storage
- Rear cameras: 200MP (f/1.4); 50MP (f/2.9) 5x periscope telephoto; 10MP (f/2.4) 3x telephoto; 50MP (f/1.9) ultrawide
- Selfie camera: 12MP (f/2.2)
- 5,000mAh battery
- 60W wired and 25W wireless charging
- IP68 dust and water resistance
- 78 x 7.9 x 164mm
- Weight: 214g
- Colours: Cobalt Violet, Sky Blue, White, Black
- Online exclusive colours: Silver Shadow, Pink Gold
- UK price: £1,279 (12GB/256GB); £1,449 (12GB/512GB); £1,699 (16GB/1TB)
- UK release date: 11 March 2026; preorder now at Samsung
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra hands-on: Design, key new features and first impressions
For those of you who don’t have the exact specifications of every smartphone in the world seared into your brain (how I envy you), the above loadout veers close to the Galaxy S25 Ultra. The display specs are the same, as is the battery size, durability credentials and the storage configuration options. The camera selection looks the same too, until you examine the details, but more on that in a bit.
First of all, the design has been tweaked to better align with the more curvaceous Galaxy S26 and S26 Plus models, with Samsung rounding out the corners and bidding farewell to the now-iconic boxy silhouette of previous flagships. The build has also been tightened up ever so slightly, with the 7.9mm thickness making this the slimmest Galaxy Ultra handset to date, and the 214g weight making it the lightest, too.
To be brutally honest, I struggled to pick out the Ultra from the regular S26 and S26 Plus on the stands at the Samsung launch event, such has the flagship been slimmed down. But this is good news.
The potentially off-putting side of this coin is that it appears the experiment with titanium is officially coming to an end – Samsung has joined Apple in ditching the more premium metal in favour of a beefed-up Armor Aluminium 2 frame.
Dust and water resistance is still rated at IP68, meaning it falls behind the likes of the OnePlus 15 and Honor Magic 8 Pro, which have now advanced to the more robust IP68/IP69 (for resistance against high-pressure, high-temperature jets of water). And there’s Gorilla Armor 2 once covering the display for scratch protection.
Another area it looks to be falling behind in is battery life. The OnePlus 15 has a gargantuan 7,300mAh Si-Ca battery and, as a result, sits comfortably top of our smartphone battery life charts, with a result around ten hours longer than last year’s Galaxy S25 Ultra in our video playback benchmark.
While the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra could surpass its predecessor, I can’t imagine it will do so by much, since its battery remains a relatively small 5,000mAh.
Processing speed ought to be up to snuff, though. Inside the S26 Ultra is the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and an overclocked “for Galaxy” version at that, with the ability to reach clock speeds up to 4.74GHz. Samsung says this chipset delivers CPU speeds that are 19% faster than the Galaxy S25 Ultra, while GPU and NPU gains are even more impressive, at 24 and 39%, respectively. The end result should be faster operation, smoother gaming and more efficient, battery-friendly local AI processing.
Aiding the gaming improvements is a new vapour chamber with repositioned “thermal interface material” that’s designed to allow for greater heat dissipation.
Otherwise, we have a wider f/1.4 aperture on the main camera that can apparently take in 47% more light than the previous version – that should help the phone deliver better shots at night in conjunction with some software inprovements to Samsung’s “Nightography” software – and horizon lock for video capture that keeps your footage from tilting left and right, no matter what orientation you have the phone. I tested this out at the launch by spinning the phone around completely; the resulting footage was level and completely steady. You would never have known I’d turned the phone upside down.
Another neat addition, but only for those in the habit of going scuba diving on a regular basis, is Ocean mode. This automatically corrects for the blue cast that photos and video captured underwater usually take on. This seemed to work quite effectively when it was shown to me, but I can’t imagine many people making much use of it.
Elsewhere, there’s faster 60W wired charging that Samsung says will charge the phone from empty to 75% in 30 minutes and a fresh swatch of colours to choose from: Black, White, Sky Blue and Cobalt Violet are available widely, while Silver Shadow and Pink Gold will be exclusive to buy from Samsung.com.
Before we get on to the most interesting new feature, however, there is one thing to note that most of us saw coming… but none of us are happy to be right about: price increases. This will be in part due to a severe global shortage of RAM caused by the huge spike in demand driven by AI data centres. Thank God we can all generate images of cats doing a dab, though.
To Samsung’s credit, the base 256GB model isn’t that much more expensive than last year, rising from £1,249 to £1,279, but the other two are fairly hefty increases: the 512GB version jumps £100, from £1,349 to £1,449, and the 1TB model with 16GB of RAM is now £1,699 – £150 more than last year.
Privacy display
Without doubt, though, the most interesting and intriguing thing about the S26 Ultra is its new privacy display. Now, on the face of it, you might not think this was all that exciting, but unlike dumb privacy filters, the likes of which you can buy on Amazon for a few pounds, this is a whole lot more clever.
Not only does it black out the screen when it’s viewed at oblique angle – it seemed to kick in at about 15 degrees when I tried it out – but because the technology is implemented at the pixel level, it can also be set up to work with specific parts of the display, such as pop-up notifications.
It all appears to work impressively well in practice, and despite my concerns it would be complicated to set up, it’s actually very easy to operate. Simply pull down the control centre menu from the top of the screen and tap the Privacy Display button to turn it on, or press the right of the button to access the settings.
Enabling the feature does dim the screen a touch, but not by much, and for the most part, you’re getting just as bright and vibrant display as you always get on a Samsung flagship smartphone.
Galaxy AI
Finally, because we live in the times we do, AI must have its due, too. The Galaxy S26 Ultra adds a couple of new tricks to the Galaxy AI suite of features, the most notable of which is dubbed “Now Nudge”. This is essentially Samsung’s take on Google’s Magic Cue, providing context-aware information to make your life easier, popping up the details of a reservation when someone texts you to ask for them, for instance.
Call screening
Also poached from the Google Pixel’s pocket is call-screening, with Galaxy AI now able to answer a phone call from an unknown number and ask the caller for their name and a reason for calling, essentially acting as your own personal digital secretary.
I’m not a fan of the feature myself, and can’t imagine ever using it, but I’m sure someone, somewhere will find it handy.
More creative image editing
There’s now enhanced AI-driven image editing built into Galaxy AI, giving you the ability to not only remove people and objects from your photos, but also re-engineer them to, say, replace the background wholesale or snap a photograph and pop it on your subject’s head.
I saw this in action at the event and – I must admit – it was remarkably effective. But I can’t help thinking this is a mere bagatelle of a feature. Something to be tinkered with a handful of times and then stuffed away in the dusty drawer of once-raved-about smartphone features that are rarely used in anger.
Still, if this sort of thing is your bag, here’s an image of me at the event, shot on an S26 Ultra, with the background replaced and the whole image given an Anime art style – just to give you a flavour of the sort of thing that can be achieved with a few text prompts:
Now Brief and Now Bar
Elsewhere, the now familiar Now Brief and Now Bar functions have been enhanced, offering even more personalised updates and briefings, accessing key information and schedule details from your calendar, messages, notifications and more to deliver a broad overview of your day.
The Now Bar will also apparently offer up contextual suggestions of things that may be helpful – the example Samsung provided at the launch was suggesting booking an Uber when it’s time to leave for an appointment.
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra hands-on: Early verdict
There’s a certain level of confidence that tends to come with Samsung launches that is generally very hard to argue with. The South Korean brand is one of the biggest and most influential players in the industry, and it knows it. More to the point, it can deliver a polished and premium smartphone in its sleep at this point. We’ve had our hands on it, albeit briefly, and can confirm it’s a very lovely thing.
It’s good news, therefore, to see it not resting on its laurels and offering up the bare minimum selection of upgrades to justify the annual release. The privacy display is a genuinely interesting advancement – although the jury is still out on how useful or broadly appealing it will prove to be – and the deeper bench of AI tools will surely be appreciated by those for whom these things are becoming important.
My only concern is that 5,000mAh battery. Odds are that the Galaxy S26 Ultra will still deliver some impressive battery life – the last few generations have all been among the best we’d recorded at the time – but I don’t think it will reclaim Samsung’s place as the best in the business. Will that also keep Samsung from holding on to its best smartphone crown this year? Check back in soon for the full review to find out.
