Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Review: A Smarter Camera and a Screen You Can Actually Hide

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy S26 series at Galaxy Unpacked on February 25, 2026, in San Francisco, with the S26 Ultra going up for preorder that same day and shipping March 11. It's the third phone generation built around Samsung's Galaxy AI platform, and the changes this year lean less on flashy new gimmicks and more on refining the camera and display hardware that actually gets used every day.

Design

The S26 Ultra is 0.3mm thinner than its predecessor and weighs 214 grams, a small but noticeable difference when you're holding a phone with this much camera hardware packed into it. Samsung is offering it in Cobalt Violet, Black, Sky Blue, and White, keeping the familiar flat-edged Ultra design language with a rounded curvature refinement across the lineup.

The headline design addition is Privacy Display, a screen mode that limits how much can be seen from a side angle without needing a separate physical screen protector. It can be assigned to a double-press of the side button, so switching it on when you sit down on a train or in an open office is a one-handed gesture rather than a trip through settings.

Camera

The rear camera system is built around a 200-megapixel wide-angle main sensor with a wider aperture than last year's model, aimed squarely at improving low-light performance rather than chasing more megapixels. The telephoto moves to a 50MP sensor with 5x true optical zoom and what Samsung calls 10x optical-quality zoom through in-sensor cropping and processing.

Samsung has also extended its AI image signal processor to the front camera for the first time, and paired it with an updated Nightography mode for after-dark shooting. On the software side, Photo Assist adds AI-driven object removal and object insertion, while Creative Studio generates text-to-image stickers directly on-device.

Galaxy AI

The AI feature set is the most crowded it's ever been on a Galaxy phone. Now Nudge surfaces context-aware suggestions based on what you're doing, Circle to Search expands to handle multi-element searches rather than a single circled object, and Samsung has wired in three separate assistants — its own Bixby, Google's Gemini, and Perplexity — rather than picking one. Whether that's a genuine convenience or just more menus to dig through will depend a lot on how much AI assistance you actually want baked into a phone.

Price and verdict

US pricing starts at $1,299 for 256GB, $1,499 for 512GB, and $1,799 for the 1TB model — in line with where the Ultra line has sat for the past couple of generations. Samsung didn't detail battery capacity or charging speeds in its initial announcement, which is a notable gap for a phone this expensive, and we'll update this review once those specifics are confirmed.

On the specs Samsung has confirmed, the S26 Ultra reads as an incremental but genuinely useful upgrade: a camera system built around real low-light improvements rather than headline megapixel counts, and a display feature — Privacy Display — that solves an everyday annoyance rather than a hypothetical one.