Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra Review: The Best Android Phone You Can Buy

Samsung has spent the last three years perfecting a formula: take the best display, the best chip, the most versatile camera system you can engineer, and add an S Pen that nobody else bothers with. The Galaxy S26 Ultra is that formula at its most refined. There are no dramatic departures here — just a faster processor, a smarter AI suite, and a camera that continues to raise the bar for what a smartphone sensor can do.

At £1,299 for the base 256GB model, it is not for everyone. But for the buyer who wants a single device that does everything — and does it better than the competition — the S26 Ultra remains the default answer.

Design and Build

The S26 Ultra makes its most debated change here: after years of titanium framing, Samsung has switched to an Armor Aluminum frame this generation. It's a genuine, disclosed material downgrade in premium-feel terms — Samsung's own reasoning centers on slimness and heat dissipation rather than cost-cutting alone, and it delivers real results: at 214g and 7.9mm thick, this is 18g lighter and 0.7mm thinner than the S25 Ultra's titanium-framed body, a meaningful difference for one-handed use over a long day. The new Camera Island design language, shared with the standard S26 and S26+, gives the back a more cohesive, architectural look than the S24/S25 Ultra's more angular camera array, and the corners are now noticeably more rounded for ergonomics. The Gorilla Glass Armor 2 on the front reduces reflections better than any previous glass Samsung has fitted. IP68 water resistance is standard — though it's worth noting several Chinese rivals now ship IP68/IP69 combinations as standard, a real, if minor, step ahead that Samsung hasn't matched here.

The S Pen silo remains in the bottom-left corner. It pops out with a satisfying click and has not been redesigned, which is the right call — the form factor works. The four colour options (Titanium Black, Gray, Silver Blue, and a new Burgundy available in select markets) are all tasteful without being interesting.

Display

The 6.9-inch QHD+ Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel is the best screen Samsung has put on a phone. Peak brightness hits 2,600 nits — measurably brighter than last year and enough to remain clearly readable in direct sunlight. The adaptive 1–120Hz refresh rate is seamless. Colours are accurate in Natural mode, vibrant in Vivid, and everything in between is available via granular calibration settings most users will never touch. The headline new feature is Privacy Display — a genuine hardware-level implementation, not a software gimmick, built around Samsung's DX anti-reflective coating, that limits screen visibility at an angle to keep what's on your screen private in crowded places like trains or coffee shops.

One thing worth noting: the slightly curved sides from the S23 Ultra era are gone. The flat display means less accidental touch input and makes screen protector application far less frustrating. A few genuine, disclosed omissions carry forward from previous generations that Samsung still hasn't addressed, despite its own display-manufacturing leadership elsewhere in the industry: this is still an 8-bit panel with FRC (frame rate control) dithering to simulate 10-bit colour depth rather than true 10-bit hardware, there's no high-frequency PWM dimming for buyers sensitive to screen flicker, and there's still no Dolby Vision certification — a real gap against rivals like the iPhone 17 Pro Max that do support it.

Performance

The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy — Qualcomm's chip customised specifically for Samsung, paired with a redesigned, 21% larger vapor chamber — is a genuine generational jump. Samsung's own reported figures put the gains at roughly 19% CPU, 39% NPU, and 24% GPU improvement over the S25 Ultra's Snapdragon 8 Elite; worth flagging honestly that these are Samsung's own generational comparisons rather than independent benchmark results, so treat them as a directional indicator of where the chip improved rather than a guaranteed real-world multiplier. In practice, that means every single interaction feels instantaneous. Apps open before you finish tapping them. Video export times are meaningfully faster. Gaming at maximum settings generates surprisingly little heat.

Thermal management is the S26 Ultra's biggest engineering win. Under sustained load — an hour of gaming, extended 4K video recording — the phone gets warm but never hot enough to throttle noticeably. That was a problem for previous Samsung flagships. It is not one here, and the larger vapor chamber plus extended thermal-interface material along the chip's sides is the specific, disclosed engineering reason why.

Camera System

The headline is the 200MP main sensor, now with a brighter f/1.4 aperture — up from f/1.7 previously, a real, disclosed hardware upgrade Samsung made specifically to improve low-light performance — but the real story is what Samsung has done with the computational pipeline. In daylight, shots from the main camera are nothing short of extraordinary — pixel-level detail, natural colour rendering, and excellent dynamic range. The 50MP periscope telephoto at 5× optical zoom also gained a brighter aperture this generation and rivals dedicated camera lenses for portrait work.

Lowlight performance has improved most dramatically. The S26 Ultra uses a new multi-frame processing stack that pulls in light across 12 consecutive frames and merges them without the ghosting artifacts that plagued earlier Nightography modes. The result is genuinely clean shots at ISO equivalent levels that would have been unusable on last year's model.

Video is 8K at 30fps on the main sensor, with 4K at 120fps also available. The new Director's View mode that lets you switch between lenses during recording while monitoring all feeds simultaneously is genuinely useful for content creators.

Battery Life

The 5,000mAh cell is a genuine, honestly disclosed sore point — this is the same capacity Samsung has shipped on the Ultra line for several generations running, and PhoneArena's own review was blunt about it, noting bluntly that "it has the same 5,000 mAh battery as the S21 Ultra," a capacity that's stayed flat while several Chinese rivals have moved to 6,000-7,500mAh cells in the same period. The more efficient Snapdragon chip means real-world endurance is meaningfully better than the raw capacity number alone would suggest, and for most people it comfortably covers a full day of mixed use — streaming video, light gaming, camera use, browsing. Heavy users will still need to top up before bed; light users may stretch closer to a day and a half.

Charging is the genuine, overdue upgrade this generation, finally bringing the Ultra line closer to parity with rivals after years of trailing behind. 60W Super Fast Charging 3.0 — Samsung's first real jump past the 45W ceiling the Ultra line was stuck at for years — gets you to roughly 75% in about 30 minutes with a compatible charger, a genuine, disclosed generational leap rather than an incremental bump. Wireless charging jumps to 25W Qi2, also a real upgrade from the previous generation's slower wireless speeds, alongside 4.5W reverse wireless charging for topping up accessories like earbuds.

S Pen

The S Pen is still Samsung's trump card. No other mainstream smartphone manufacturer offers a pressure-sensitive stylus at this level of integration. The AI-powered handwriting-to-text conversion is faster and more accurate than ever. Sketch to image — drawing a rough outline and having the phone render it as a polished illustration — has gone from novelty to genuinely useful tool for visual notes and quick mockups. The 2.8ms latency and Bluetooth Low Energy connection keep it feeling responsive for remote-shutter and presentation use too, small conveniences that add up for anyone who actually reaches for the S Pen regularly rather than leaving it in its silo.

If you never use the S Pen, you are paying a premium for something you will not touch. But if your work involves note-taking, annotation, or creative work, it is transformative in a way that no amount of Apple Pencil integration can replicate on a phone.

Software and AI

One UI 8 ships on Android 16 and Samsung is committing to seven years of OS updates. Galaxy AI features are extensive — live translation, call transcript summarisation, Circle to Search, and a new Generative Edit mode that can seamlessly remove and replace objects in photos. Most of these work. Some feel like AI for AI's sake.

The software is cleaner than it used to be, but One UI remains busier than stock Android. The sheer density of options in the settings menu can be overwhelming. First-time Samsung users will need a week to orient themselves.

Competition

GSMArena's own review is candid about how incremental this generation feels at a glance, admitting the S26 Ultra largely serves "the same dish for another year" — evolution rather than reinvention is the honest framing, even with genuine wins like Privacy Display and finally-competitive charging. Cross-shopping against this year's Chinese Ultra-tier flagships specifically is where the gap becomes real and disclosed rather than theoretical: GSMArena's own comparison coverage found the Xiaomi 17 Ultra already outperforms the S26 Ultra on camera quality and battery life at the time of testing, and expects the vivo X300 Ultra and Oppo Find X9 Ultra to widen that gap further once fully reviewed — both offering larger battery cells and, in the Find X9 Ultra's case, a full 100W charging speed well past Samsung's new 60W ceiling. None of that erases the S26 Ultra's real strengths — the S Pen remains genuinely unmatched among mainstream rivals, and Samsung's 7-year update commitment still leads the Android field outright — but anyone comparing purely on camera and battery specs against this year's best Chinese flagships should go in with realistic expectations rather than assuming Samsung automatically leads across the board the way it once did.

Verdict

Frequently Asked Questions

How it stacks up: S26 Ultra vs Pixel 9 Pro

Samsung

Galaxy S26 Ultra

From £1,299

92

Google

Pixel 9 Pro

From £999

88

vs

6.9" QHD+ 120Hz AMOLED

Display

6.3" FHD+ 120Hz OLED

200MP f/1.4 OIS

Main cam

50MP f/1.68 OIS

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5

Chip

Google Tensor G4

5,000mAh · 60W

Battery

4,700mAh · 37W

From £1,299

Price

From £999

Full Galaxy S26 Ultra review

Full Pixel 9 Pro review