The Galaxy S26 Ultra looks great, but not for S25 Ultra owners

At Galaxy Unpacked today, Samsung took the wraps off its latest Galaxy S phones. They are… a whole lot like its last Galaxy S phones. The high-end Galaxy S26 Ultra comes in at a starting price of $1,299.99 for the model with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, same as last year.

There are a couple of new features in this year’s Ultra phone, including novel Privacy Display tech, faster 60-watt charging, and camera improvements that should mean better low-light performance. It looks like a solid phone you could get quite a few years of use out of — but then, so was the S25 Ultra. If you bought that phone last year, Samsung’s not giving you much reason to spring for an upgrade this year.

It’s a better phone, but not by much

I haven’t had the chance to use the Galaxy S26 Ultra, but I have spent quite a bit of time with the previous-gen Galaxy S25 Ultra. I liked that phone just fine, and with a handful of nice-to-have improvements, the S26 Ultra is all the better a device. Privacy Display in particular is a unique perk: when the feature is turned on in the S26 Ultra’s software, electrical current activates special display layers that make it harder to see the display from the side (you can see it in action above). This makes it harder for people around you to read what’s on your screen, sort of like an on-demand, built-in privacy screen protector.

Privacy Display isn’t something you can get in other phones today, and it’s not available on the lesser S26 phones, either — it’s an S26 Ultra exclusive (at least for now).

In addition to enhanced privacy, the S26 Ultra’s display uses a 10-bit panel, which makes it capable of displaying more colors than last year’s S25 Ultra. That’s a cool upgrade on paper, but the effect won’t be very noticeable to most users most of the time — and whether it makes any difference at all depends on the content the S26 Ultra’s screen is showing at any given moment.

The Galaxy S26 Ultra’s cameras are all the same resolution as the S25 Ultra’s. Around back, there’s a 200-megapixel primary, 50-megapixel ultrawide, a 50-megapixel 10x telephoto, and a 10-megapixel 3x telephoto. The selfie shooter comes in at 12 megapixels.

There should be some improvement in low-light performance thanks to wider apertures on the primary and 10x cameras. The primary shooter’s got a f/1.4 aperture, up from f/1.7 on the S25 Ultra. The 10x is sporting a f/2.9 aperture compared to last year’s f/3.4. Taken with improvements in image processing, Samsung claims those wider apertures mean you can expect 47% brighter shots out of the primary camera and 37% brighter from the telephoto.

It seems to me like Samsung’s competitors have been taking the lead in low-light photography for years now, so it’s encouraging to hear the company is doing something about it with the S26 Ultra. Still, we’ll have to put the cameras through their paces before we can render judgment here.

The last noteworthy change year over year is charging: the S26 Ultra can pull 60 watts, going from dead to 70% in about half an hour with the right charger. The S25 Ultra peaked at 45 watts. The new phone also supports 25-watt wireless charging, up from 15 last year. Disappointingly, though, the phone doesn’t have the built-in magnets required to use magnetic Qi2 accessories.

There are other changes, too: the S26 Ultra looks a bit different than the S25 Ultra, with a redesigned camera bump, rounder corners, and a slightly slimmer build. The new phone uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy, which Samsung says facilitates about a 19% bump in CPU performance and 24% improvement in GPU performance. The new chipset is also apparently significantly better at on-device AI tasks.

Speaking of AI, the S26 Ultra comes with Gemini, Galaxy AI, and Perplexity. There’s a bevy of AI-powered features, like text prompt-based photo editing, AI screenshot categorization, and AI-generated stickers and wallpapers. In what seems like the most useful AI-branded addition, Samsung’s Audio Eraser feature can now try to isolate and increase the volume of voices in video content across apps.

If you have a Galaxy S25 Ultra, the S26 Ultra is not worth another $1,300

There are definitely some changes to like here. I’m excited at the prospect of Samsung improving its low-light photography, and Privacy Display is a genuine innovation — an increasingly rare thing in modern smartphone releases. Quicker charging is always nice, too.

But it’s hard for me to imagine a hypothetical Galaxy S25 Ultra owner who should be tempted to spring for the new Galaxy S26 Ultra. It’s very nearly the same phone: the S26 Ultra shares the S25 Ultra’s camera sensors; 6.9-inch, 1440p, 120Hz display; 12 gigs of RAM; and 5,000 mAh battery. There are naturally marginal improvements this year, but last year’s Ultra phone was very good and very expensive, and with a promised seven years of OS updates, it’ll be a viable option for years to come.

Year-over-year improvements have slowed way down since the turn of the decade; it hasn’t been easy to justify yearly smartphone upgrades for average users for quite some time now. Even for enthusiasts, the S25 Ultra offers a nearly identical experience to the newer S26 Ultra.

I’m not trying to paint the S26 Ultra as a bad phone by any means. In fact, I expect it’ll be one of the better phones released this year. But it’s hard to deny it’s just barely a better phone than the Galaxy S25 Ultra released just over a year ago. If you’ve got an S25 Ultra, S24 Ultra, or even S23 Ultra that’s still in decent condition, I can’t recommend buying a Galaxy S26 Ultra this year.