Samsung lands with its most interesting Ultra update in recent times

Over the years, Samsung’s Galaxy S Ultra series has proved that you don’t need to win every single category to win the Android flagship game. This year, the latest S26 Ultra arrives to fend off rivals with larger camera sensors and bigger capacity batteries, but there’s more than meets the eye with its seemingly incremental changes.

A closer look at Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra

Speaking of meeting the eye, one has to talk about the Privacy Display feature, a flex so ingenious the competition should already be scrambling to copy it. Switch it on, and the phone narrows the view down to whoever is in front of the phone, switching off the normal wide pixels on the screen and effectively cutting off any folks who are ‘shoulder surfing’, sneaking a peek of your phone in public. Perfect for when you want to view a confidential document on a packed flight or open your rambunctious school WhatsApp group and not be judged by your neighbors. 

And this does way more than a privacy screen protector – you can set the privacy display to work only on notification popup, or only for certain apps (banking apps for instance), or even turn it off altogether at will. Of course, to ensure that all that the onlookers see is a darkened display, the screen does lose some amount of contrast, resolution and saturation, so it’s not something you would have switched on all the time, and certainly not on the Maximum Privacy mode (which gets significantly worse for the user and should only be used when viewing state secrets or saucy texts in public, nothing more). 

Outside of this feature, the S26 Ultra’s screen is very similar to its predecessor’s – a 6.9-inch, 3120x144-pixel resolution OLED panel – that uses frame rate control and its proprietary image engine to display more lifelike colors than its 8-bit panel would suggest (the competition has moved on to 10-bit displays). 

Pick it up and turn it around, and you’ll barely be able to tell it apart from the S25 Ultra, although the weight loss (214g) and drop in thickness (7.9mm) means it feels much better in the hand. The S-pen is still there, thankfully. I’m just disappointed that the S26 Ultra lacks the Qi magnets built directly into the phone for MagSafe-like charging that both iPhones and Pixels share. You do get higher wired charging speeds at 60W, which helps juice up the 5000mAh battery faster.

Powering the S26 Ultra is Qualcomm’s boosted “for Galaxy” variant of the top-tier Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chip, and the 12GB of memory is paired with 256/512GB or 1TB of storage (with 16GB memory). There’s a larger vapor chamber cooling system for reining in temperatures when you’re gaming or recording 4K videos, and OneUI and all the latest games fly on this device. The power comes in handy on all the new AI capabilities, such as Photo Assist which lets you delete or add objects to existing photos with just a prompt. Or Now Nudge, which helpfully adds a meeting into your calendar if you mention meeting a friend over WhatsApp…but what I am most looking forward to is the more ambitious ‘agentic AI’ features that will roll out in the coming months. In theory, you can have an agent search for and book an Uber, build a cart within Blinkit or order a meal on your favorite food delivery app simply by speaking your instructions, leaving the agents to work in the background and alert you only when it’s ready and waiting for your credit card details. For now, you get a ton of Galaxy AI features powered by Gemini, deeper integration with Perplexity AI and Bixby to handle the rest – choice is great, but this may be one AI assistant too much, if you ask me. 

On cameras, the S26 Ultra keeps the same camera hardware - 200MP main, 50MP 5x, 10MP 3x, and 50MP ultrawide - but larger apertures improve low-light results. Daylight shots are warm and detailed, and night noise is well controlled. And while the aging 3x lens lags behind, video shines with horizon-lock stabilization, clearer night footage, and 8K/30 recording using the lossless APV codec. In all, the S26 Ultra is a well-rounded flagship with an ace up its sleeve, but camera nerds will want to wait for the slew of Ultras around the corner before they commit. 

Rating: 9/10

Price: Rs. 1,39,999 (12/256) onwards

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