Samsung releases a new Ultra every year and the same conversations happen every year. Is it worth it? What has actually changed? The Galaxy S26 Ultra doesn’t reinvent anything – but it does bring a few upgrades that are harder than usual to miss. A world’s first privacy display, a customized chipset, significantly larger camera openings and faster charging. Not a revolution, but enough of a stir that the comparison with the S25 Ultra is definitely worth it.
Price and availability
The Galaxy S26 Ultra starts at $1,299.99 for the base 256GB variant. It can be pre-ordered on the company’s website as well as at Amazon, Best Buy and Samsung Experience stores. General availability begins March 11, 2026.
The Galaxy S25 Ultra, on the other hand, is already available from all retailers. If you’re lucky, you can find the phone at massive discounts of around $300 to $400, making it an excellent recommendation at an effective price.
design
The S25 Ultra was never a subtle phone. Big, sharp, all titanium, it had the energy of someone ironing their gym clothes. The S26 Ultra is just quiet enough to feel like another phone in your hand – without losing the Ultra characteristics.
It’s 0.3mm thinner and 4g lighter than the S25 Ultra, numbers that don’t grab the headlines. But if you add these much rounder corners, something changes. It no longer feels like you’re holding a rectangular plate, but more like a phone.
However, Samsung has sacrificed a bit of screen dominance to achieve this, or at least that’s how it looks. The bezels are slightly thicker than the S25 Ultra (resulting in a lower screen-to-body ratio), and the difference is clearly noticeable, at least for me.
Water and dust resistance remains unchanged as the Galaxy S26 Ultra has the same IP68 rating as before. Where things actually feel fresh is in the color palette – cobalt purple and sky blue alongside the usual white and black, with Pink Gold and Silver Shadow as Samsung.com exclusives.
The finishes have a lot more personality than last year’s palette of “various shades of titanium.”
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The S26 Ultra has the same 6.9-inch QHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel as the S25 Ultra, the same 1-120Hz adaptive refresh rate, and everything is the same. Samsung basically looked at last year’s display, said “yeah, that’s fine” and moved on. Honest? You can hardly argue with them.
Where did the show team actually earn their salary this year? Two words – Privacy Display. The S26 Ultra is the first phone in history to ship with a built-in privacy display, and before you roll your eyes and think it’s just another gimmick – it’s not the third-party privacy screen protectors that compromise the overall quality of the display.
The new feature works at the pixel level. The display literally controls how the light is diffused (using a directional OLED panel), so anyone peering from the side will only see darkness. You can set it to activate automatically when you enter passwords or open certain apps. It handles both portrait and landscape orientation without much effort and your screen still looks completely normal.
Revolutionary? Maybe that’s too strong. But most “premium features” aren’t actually useful in some way. Samsung has also given the color engine a proper workout, plus a new ProScaler feature that makes text and fine details look sharper. You won’t notice it right away, but after a few days on the S25 Ultra, the difference starts to torment you.
Performance
The S25 Ultra ran on the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy and no one really complained. It handled everything without breaking a sweat. Then Samsung did it anyway and equipped its successor with an even faster and more efficient chip.
What powers the S26 Ultra is a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, albeit with an asterisk; a Galaxy exclusive version that increases the main cores from 4.6 GHz to 4.74 GHz. Samsung essentially took the same engine and quietly bolted in a bigger turbo before anyone was looking.
The CPU is up 19%, the GPU is up 24%, and the NPU – the part of the chip responsible for all the AI heavy lifting – is up 39% compared to the S25 Ultra. It’s worth thinking about.
The Galaxy’s AI runs almost entirely through the NPU, meaning the 39% gap is less about impressing reviewers and more about whether your phone’s AI features actually feel instant or make you tap your foot.
The CPU gains are noticeable in the little moments – the extra feeling of speed when opening apps, smoother multitasking when doing too much at once. The GPU improvements mean better frame rates and richer graphics when gaming.
And a completely redesigned vapor chamber keeps everything running cooler under sustained pressure, which anyone shooting serious long-form videos or gaming will quickly appreciate.
software
The S26 Ultra ships with One UI 8.5 and Android 16 – and the gap between it and One UI 7 is larger than a version number suggests.
Galaxy AI gets a serious personality transplant here. Now Nudge reads the context in your apps and makes suggestions before you’ve even asked – text messages from friends asking for travel photos, the phone is already retrieving them. Is there a calendar conflict hiding in your messages? I caught that too.
Now Brief works similarly, displaying reservations and trip updates based on actual context rather than just burying you in notifications.
Bixby finally speaks like a normal person. Natural language, no rigid command structure, proper device control. Whether this is the version that stops people making Bixby jokes is another question, but Samsung is the closest to it.
Gemini and Perplexity are also now alongside, completing multi-step background tasks with a single keystroke.
Elsewhere – Circle to Search now recognizes multiple objects at once, Creative Studio turns sketches and prompts into wallpapers and stickers without switching apps, and an updated Photo Assistant lets you edit images in simple, conversational language.
AI call monitoring rounds up unknown callers before you answer the call, and privacy alerts flag suspicious app behavior in real-time. As for S25 Ultra owners – some of this will likely leak at some point. Some of this almost certainly won’t be the case. Samsung hasn’t released a concrete roadmap yet, so we can only wait and see.
Cameras
On paper, the camera systems look like Samsung simply pressed “copy and paste.” 200 MP main camera, 50 MP ultra wide-angle lens, 50 MP periscope telephoto lens, 10 MP 3x, 12 MP front – the S26 Ultra has exactly the same sensor configuration as the S25 Ultra. But a lot happened between the lines.
Samsung has expanded apertures across the board – the 200MP main lens goes from F1.7 on the S25 Ultra to F1.4 on the S26 Ultra, while the 50MP periscope telephoto lens goes from F3.4 to F2.9.
These aren’t just numbers floating around. Wider apertures mean more light hits the sensor, and more light means your zoom shots in a dimly lit restaurant or at a late-night outdoor concert will actually look like photographs rather than abstract impressionist paintings.
Samsung claims 47% more light on the main camera and 37% more on the telephoto camera compared to the S25 Ultra, and low-light performance is really where you feel that most.
Nightography Video has also received an upgrade. Enhanced Super Steady adds a horizontal lock option and the S26 Ultra is the first Galaxy to support the APV codec – professional video compression that remains visually lossless even after repeated rounds of editing.
Photo Assist and Creative Studio round out the AI editing side, allowing you to change outfits, correct lighting, and restore missing objects, all from simple conversation prompts. The selfie camera also features improved AI ISP processing for more natural skin tones in difficult mixed lighting conditions – a little thing that really stands out, but the 12MP sensor remains the same.
battery
Both phones pack a 5,000mAh battery, so Samsung didn’t mess with the cell size, which, to be fair, was already competitive. What has changed is everything around it.
The S25 Ultra peaked at 45W wired charging. Completely sufficient. The kind of charging speed that gets you work done when you plug in before making breakfast and don’t need to be on the go urgently.
The S26 Ultra increases power to 60W with Super Fast Charging 3.0, reaching 75% in about 30 minutes. This is a real difference – the kind where you plug in the device while you’re cooking in the morning and leave the house with enough battery to not have to worry about it again until the evening.
Wireless charging also receives an upgrade and is switched to Super Fast Wireless Charging (25 W) on the S26 Ultra. The S25 Ultra had wireless charging, but the S26 Ultra moves faster without a cable – handy for anyone who has built their life around a charging pad on their desk.
One thing is worth mentioning: the 60W adapter is not included, which seems a bit cheeky in this price range. But that’s apparently the world we live in now.
Diploma
The Galaxy S26 Ultra is definitely the better phone. Faster chip, larger apertures, really useful privacy display, better loading speeds, more up-to-date software. It moves the needle forward on any measurable axis. If you go into a store today and are deciding between the two, the S26 Ultra is the one for you – period.
The more interesting question is whether S25 Ultra owners should care. And honestly? Probably not. Here’s the thing about owning last year’s Ultra: It was already overkill in the best possible way. It handled everything without complaint, the camera was already excellent and nothing in daily life with it felt compromised.
You should only upgrade if the best possible camera is more important to you than anything else, such as if you are a professional smartphone photographer or videographer. In this case, you may also benefit from the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5’s improved processor performance for on-the-go editing. Otherwise, you should sit this one out and save for what Samsung does next year.
