Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra quick review: Now you see me, now you don’t
While the industry has spent years focusing on folding glass, the Galaxy S26 Ultra focuses on what you can’t see. Here are our first impressions.
Is Samsung a magician? It probably is. The company has always been bending glass and doing all kinds of crazy things with it. Even in 2026, when AI has taken the world by storm and any piece of new hardware faces a tough task to meet basic consumer expectations, Samsung has come up with another display innovation. It’s called Privacy Display, and it’s making its debut on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, which is launching in India today.
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Samsung has been teasing this feature for some time now. Although its “privacy demo” has already been leaked, I guess it’s one of those things you have to see for yourself to believe. No photo, no video, no leak can capture this magic in its purest form. What it does and how it does it. When I say magic, I mean two things: 1) It will blow your mind and 2) Every phone display you’ve seen to date (even bendable ones) will seem a little changed once you see it.
magic in pixels
It’s so ahead of its time and yet somehow, so simple, it makes you wonder why you had to stick with third-party screen protectors for so long. How good are these defenders anyway? They force you to increase the brightness of your phone all the time and even then, your screen looks dull and lifeless. What’s worse is that they physically isolate you. You have to learn to completely abandon shared experiences. You’re alone and although it’s okay in pieces, you’ll wish there was a way you could turn it off. After five years of R&D, Samsung was able to create a workaround – a hardware-software combination that does everything these screen protectors do without all the hassle.
Samsung is going to call it “a new class of displays” altogether. Here’s the technical drawback: Unlike traditional privacy screens, which rely on physical film or layering to block light, privacy display technology works at the pixel level through a sophisticated interplay of electronics and physics. By adjusting the current sent to each pixel, the display changes how that pixel interacts with light. When the refractive index of a pixel is significantly different from that of the glass above it, light is prevented from exiting the glass at certain angles. Instead of passing through the environment, light is effectively trapped or redirected. Since light is physically blocked by refraction at wide angles, the viewing experience changes depending on your position.
When you’re looking directly at the phone, light passes through the glass normally, delivering a rich, full-brightness image on the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s stunning 6.9-inch 1440p 10-bit AMOLED display. For anyone viewing from an angle, such as a surfer over the shoulder, light fails to bypass the glass. Since no light reaches their eyes, the screen appears completely black. The Samsung executive who explained the feature to me at the launch summed it up beautifully: “It’s a game of pixels, optics, and currents that are manipulating the information coming in.”
You can turn this privacy display on and off whenever you want from Settings. You can choose to run it selectively, for example, on notification pop-ups and specific apps. In the limited time I spent with it, the execution seemed perfect. It just works and that’s the beauty of it. Rumor has it that Samsung’s Chinese counterparts are looking to copy this feature. Honestly, I’d be surprised if they didn’t. But then again, Samsung’s anti-reflective glass coating, which is fantastic, hasn’t really caught on so we’ll see.
If you’ve come this far and are wondering why I spent so much time and effort on this Samsung feature – Privacy Display – well, again, two reasons: 1) It impressed me, 2) The rest of the Galaxy S26 Ultra is mostly business as usual.
if it ain’t broken
The design is more integrated in both visual consistency and overall construction. The chassis is a bit more compact than before (7.9mm to be exact) and mirrors the rest of the phones in the Galaxy S26 lineup (and even the Galaxy S25 Edge) in almost every conceivable way in color options, including Cobalt Violet, White, Black, and Sky Blue. The Ultra retains the S-Pen, but there’s still no Bluetooth.
Due to the customary chip upgrade, Samsung is moving to the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 (the Galaxy S26 and Galaxy S26 Plus have an Exynos 2600), so everything should feel a little faster. RAM can go up to 16GB (12GB for S26 and S26 Plus) and storage can go up to 1TB (512GB for S26 and S26 Plus). Thermals have been slightly improved, and charging can now go up to 60W (Samsung says the S26 Ultra’s 5,000mAh battery can reach 75 percent in 30 minutes).
The S26 Ultra gets fresh eyes in the form of a brighter lens promising better nitography (marketing speak for Samsung’s Night-Mode), especially when shooting video, even if the basic setup remains largely unchanged: a 200-megapixel wide, a 50-megapixel 5x periscope telephoto, a 10-megapixel 3x telephoto, and another 50-megapixel ultrawide. On the S26 and S26 Plus, you get a 50-megapixel wide, a 10-megapixel 3x telephoto, and a 12-megapixel ultrawide. All phones in the Galaxy S26 series have the same 12-megapixel camera on the front for selfies.
They run the latest One UI 8.5 based on Android 16, with Samsung committing to seven years of software support across the board. Galaxy AI is still around, and it’s clearly thriving. Samsung says 90 percent of its users have used it, or are using it and so, to make it more worth their time, it’s announcing more partnerships, like Perplexity, and new features like Now Nudge that provides “timely and relevant suggestions to help users stay in the flow without distractions.” Bixby is also making a comeback with agentic capabilities so it can better understand context and retrieve relevant information from the web more efficiently.
As far as price is concerned, the Galaxy S26 price starts at Rs 87,999, the Galaxy S26 Plus at Rs 1,19,999 and the Galaxy S26 Ultra at Rs 1,39,999.
The Galaxy S26 Ultra is a top-tier phone built with a clear purpose, which is to balance the flashy magic of its new display technology with the reliable, professional power that Ultra users demand. However, a few minutes in the briefing zone is very different from a week in the real world. We’ll be testing the privacy display, enhanced performance, and new 60W charging speed in the coming days. Stay tuned for our full, in-depth review of the entire Galaxy S26 series coming soon.
