It is difficult to review a smartphone, especially a flagship device, in a fortnight, but two to three months of use offers a far fairer idea before recommending it to buyers. The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has an overwhelming amount of features and hardware to love. The privacy display with anti-reflective coating stands out immediately, as does the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which is an absolute screamer of a chipset. The S Pen, once properly learnt, proves genuinely useful, and OneUI remains incredibly in-depth, packed with features without leaning too heavily on AI the way Pixel does. The 200-megapixel camera sensor, with log video and Horizon Lock, is by far one of the most capable cameras on an Android phone. Having lived with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra over the long term, rather than just through a first-week impression, it is clear the device holds up as a fully complete phone in almost every way.
Privacy display and screen quality
The privacy display feature is not a gimmick. Across restaurants, the gym and outings with friends and family, it has quickly become the single most useful piece of technology on the entire device, called upon almost daily in some form. At the cafe, for instance, browsing work emails containing private information becomes possible without anyone else catching sight of the screen. On other phones, the usual workaround is turning brightness right down and angling the phone awkwardly. With privacy display, a simple toggle offers genuine peace of mind that text stays legible without the content being compromised.
It is not just about shielding private documents, either. On an eight-hour flight, watching a film with graphic content while seated next to a child, most people would feel uneasy about exposing that sort of material to a young viewer. With privacy display switched on, the screen remains visible to its owner but not to the child beside them. This is precisely the kind of technology smartphones should be offering in 2026 — additions that make everyday use genuinely better.
Privacy display can be accessed quickly from the settings panel. A single tap enables a basic level, mildly inconvenient for others to view, while a long press unlocks maximum privacy protection, rendering the screen essentially impossible for anyone else to make out. There are further customisation options too, allowing the feature to be applied on a per-app basis, or restricted to notifications only or passwords only. It is a superb tool built directly into the device, and considerably better than fitting a privacy screen protector, which permanently narrows a screen’s viewing angles.
Beyond privacy display, this remains one of the finest screens Samsung has produced, holding its own even against the Pixel 10 Pro or the iPhone 17 Pro. The anti-reflective coating continues to lend the display extra depth while cutting down on glare, and the panel itself is excellent: a 6.9-inch LTPO AMOLED screen, covered in Gorilla Glass Armour. It remains vibrant and gorgeous to consume content on, with little to fault. The one genuine complaint concerns peak brightness, which could have been pushed beyond 2,600 nits.
Customisation is key
Another aspect that continues to impress over time is just how different One UI feels compared with Pixel UI. It ranks among the best Android skins available, arguably surpassing Pixel, with an enormous degree of customisation on offer. There are countless ways to configure the device exactly as desired within the core operating system itself. Every single tab in the settings menu carries dozens of tweaks, whether in display options, battery options, home screen options, quick settings customisation or the advanced features section. Samsung consistently goes further than most to hand over control, and each year brings more still, which makes for a refreshing contrast with other Android manufacturers.
On the visual side, even greater control comes via Good Lock modules, downloadable from the official Galaxy Store without the need for any third-party apps, keeping everything Samsung-endorsed. .
S Pen and Samsung DeX experience
One feature unique to the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra among smartphones is the S Pen, offering one of the smoothest digital writing experiences available. Samsung Notes carries every conceivable feature for the S Pen, with the summarisation tool and handwriting clean-up proving particularly useful. Combined with the line paper option, taking physical notes has become a genuine pleasure.
The S Pen also doubles effectively as a precision cursor, particularly useful in games demanding accurate touch input. Extended sessions of PokeMMO on the phone screen, with its many small touch targets, benefit hugely from stylus-like precision, evoking memories of the Nintendo DS era.
Samsung DeX has also proved a consistent pleasure over time. Pixel’s own desktop mode, introduced with Android 16, invites comparison, but even a year after release it remains fairly basic. DeX, by contrast, feels essentially feature-complete: a genuinely well-thought-out notification centre, the ability to use the phone as a secondary extended display, and considerably more besides.
What ultimately makes it the more definitive desktop mode, beyond all those features, is the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which allows graphics to be pushed to their limit for an almost console-like experience.
On software more broadly, One UI carries plenty of AI, with Samsung offering exclusive features not found on Pixel devices, even as many of the latest Gemini features tend to launch alongside both the Pixel 10 and Galaxy S26 series simultaneously. Within One UI, AI features sit as an extra layer on top of an already feature-rich software experience; switching them off still leaves a comprehensive package intact. On Pixel phones, by comparison, AI forms much more of the core proposition, and disabling those features leaves a comparatively barebones experience.
Camera performance and video features
Finally, the camera — arguably the icing on the cake, from both a hardware and software standpoint. It is a quad-camera setup comprising a 200-megapixel main sensor, a 50-megapixel ultrawide, a 10-megapixel telephoto and a further 50-megapixel telephoto. Whatever the shooting scenario, results are consistently strong, with the typical Samsung tendency towards oversharpened images that most users will enjoy. Day or night, bright sunlight or low light, cropped, zoomed, indoors or outdoors, image quality holds up throughout.
The headline video specification on the S26 Ultra is APV, or Advanced Professional Video, an intra-frame codec that records every frame individually, ensuring quality does not drop regardless of how much movement occurs within the frame. The resulting files are very large — 4K at 30fps, for example, is captured at around 900Mbps — though footage can be recorded directly to an external SSD plugged into the USB-C port. It also helps that APV recording locks the frame rate, which makes it well suited to syncing footage across multiple devices. A collection of preview LUTs is built into the device too; a few lean a touch heavy-handed, but most prove genuinely useful.
Samsung has also worked on fixing noise patterns across all the cameras, applying noise reduction individually to each sensor. Low-light images from the main camera are excellent as a result, with the combination of improved noise reduction and a brighter aperture doing much of the heavy lifting.
Horizon Lock is impressive too, if somewhat niche. Samsung has also redesigned the S26 Ultra’s vapour chamber, sustaining high performance while trimming the phone’s overall thickness.
For anyone reaching for a top-of-the-line Android flagship, this is a phone built to deliver everything, including the kitchen sink — and one that, months into ownership, still holds up to that promise. If you are in the market for a new Android phone, the Galaxy S26 Ultra is well worth considering; it has far more going in its favour than the privacy display party trick alone.