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We've got our hands on the latest flagship smartphone from Samsung, which aims to be powerful, elegant, and hardy.
"Hello everyone and welcome to another Gamereactor Quick Look.
Now the year has for many, many years been divided up into sort of separate battlefields because we know that iPhones launch in September."
"We also pretty much know that Pixels will launch around that September-October window and we also know that the beginning of the year usually belongs to the Samsung Galaxy S series.
So this year is no different, albeit that they are a little bit later than I think they have in previous years."
"So here is this year's contender on the ultra side.
This is the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra and it maintains somewhat the same boxy design with the same kind of profile and camera Mesa layout that they've done over the past recent years.
But like a lot of other phone manufacturers, they have rounded the edges ever so slightly creating a more curved feeling that is kind of like a retreat from those very hard edges that we saw particularly a couple of years ago."
"Now obviously as you can see here, we still have the little S Pen, although it seems that Samsung is less and less inclined to sort of, you know, put proper new features in it.
I believe it still maintains the same sort of response rates and sort of pen tip to screen ratio, but there isn't really a lot of new stuff to talk about in this particular regard."
"But it is there, it is housed within and charged within the actual case of the phone.
So that is all good news.
Now what do we have inside?
We have a couple of new things, which are the good stuff."
"So it has the brand new Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Octa-Core SoC, which enables it to do a bunch of different things, speedy performance is one.
It will now get up to seven major Android upgrades, which is also because of that Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 just being performant over a longer period of time and not slowing down or dragging."
"So it has Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 7 and a new image signal processor, all of these good things.
It also enables a bunch of other cool things.
So for one, this now charges faster than before.
So it's up to 60 Watts wired and 25 Watt wireless."
"It should be said that Samsung and Apple are still among the most hesitant when it comes to charging speed, both wirelessly and wired because, well, these are bought more broadly and in larger numbers and having a slower speed will probably reduce the amount of heat, therefore stress on the battery, therefore not as many failures as you would get from, say Chinese competing models, which would easily do like 120 Watts, but how much damage does that do?
We simply don't know."
"So there is also a brand new cooling system in here, a new display scaler, but obviously it is not like the big things that you would probably expect.
We even have like kind of similar camera array here consisting of a 50 megapixel ultra-wide, a 200 megapixel standard wide and a 50 megapixel telephoto, all making up these and some time of flight sensors."
"There are some new camera tech in here, just meaning that these can capture more light, particularly the standard wide will get up to 47% extra light intake, just meaning that the HDR effect will be better and it will also be able to draw more light from the shadows if the shooting conditions are, let's say in the middle of the night."
"So all of that is very, very good.
Now the big thing that people will talk about is this display.
Now it is, you know, as you can see 7.9 millimeters thick, so the slimmest ultra ever, it's 214 grams."
"So again, holding it, you won't feel much of a difference.
This display is also kind of similar, it's a 6.9 inch LTPO dynamic AMOLED, 2X at 120 Hertz to 2600 nits, not a lot to like write home about there, but it is this privacy display.
I don't know if you've seen this, but if you've been out and about, you can get screen protectors, most likely like Gorilla Glass-esque screen protectors that you put on your screen, which means that the FOV is intensely reduced, meaning that the angle with which the screen is readable becomes much smaller."
"The point would be that if someone is sitting right here next to you on a flight, on a bench, whatever the case might be, where people would be in close proximity to you, then your screen would be directly legible here, but the person sitting here would only see a black screen.
There are many like ways in order to achieve this effect, but Samsung has built it directly into the phone, meaning that you don't need to put on a third party screen protector in order to achieve that effect."
"So that's good for privacy, but it can also be used on specific parts of the phone.
Now, it's a bit too cumbersome to demonstrate right here, but the point would be that let's say that a notification would be popping up at the top of the screen right here.
So maybe the rest of the screen remains legible from your direct proximity, but maybe the nature of this notification would be blacked out."
"So it just means that you control more of your direct privacy with people that are around you that you perhaps don't want to show this stuff to, which I think is good.
More power to the consumer, all good.
Now, speaking of pill-shaped notifications coming in from above the display, there are still a bunch of AI features here, and we'll be running those in direct comparison in our full review."
"So stuff like Now Brief, Now Nudge, these small things that Samsung are dotting into their One UI, this is One UI 8.5, to give you a smarter smartphone experience.
Whether that is up to snuff, we'll have to see.
We will also be delving into what case you might be putting on it."
"This is one of Dbrand's, I believe this is a grip case that has just come out for the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, amongst a lot of other things, ready for whatever vinyl skin you might be wanting to put on there, in a whole host of different colors and shapes or whatever the case might be."
"Again, we'll delve into that in a future video.
So for much more on the Samsung S26 Ultra, stay tuned to Camera Actor.
Bye."
