GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over a decade of experience writing about consumer tech. She has a special interest in mobile photography and telecom. Previously, she worked at DPReview.
“Someone might be watching everything I’m doing on my screen,” I tell myself in public. Even when I’m doing nothing of consequence — just making my little Wordle guesses — there’s a sense of unease that stays with me.
It’s never bothered me too much, and I generally save the sensitive stuff like banking for when I’m home, but I realize it’s a feeling I’ve internalized whenever I’m on my phone in a crowded place. Using Samsung’s Galaxy S26 Ultra for the past couple of weeks has offered some relief from that particular worry simmering in the back of my mind; it solves a problem I didn’t even fully recognize until I started using it in my daily life.
I used the S26 Ultra in a lot of places where people could have been looking over my shoulder. Planes, airports, crowded convention halls… wherever I was, the phone’s new Privacy Display really did relieve that feeling of discomfort. It’s not totally bulletproof — I’m sure someone could have made out my Wordle guesses if they were trying pretty hard to look at the dimmed screen — but just the knowledge that a casual glance wouldn’t reveal the way I’d missed the obvious solution four guesses in a row was enough. And the fact that I can turn it off when I’m back at home? That rules.
The question is, how much is that peace of mind worth? And how confident can you be in the display’s ability to keep prying eyes away from real stuff like passwords, not just puzzle games? Those are the $1,300 questions.
I tend to think of the S26 Ultra as existing in a class by itself. Can you think of another phone with four rear cameras? A built-in stylus? Performance specs up the wazoo? It attracts a particular kind of fan. So I think your interest in the S26 Ultra as a whole package should be your guiding star if you’re interested in the Privacy Display but unsure about the rest. It is a phone person’s phone — big, expensive, wonderful — with one especially cool new feature we haven’t seen anywhere else. I can even see a world where this display tech is slowly adopted by other phone makers until it’s something we take for granted. That’s a feature worthy of the Ultra’s lofty title.
Elsewhere, the S26 Ultra is more familiar. It offers a versatile camera, an all-day battery, and Samsung’s mixed bag of Galaxy AI features. This time, Samsung implemented a couple of smart AI tools that seem to borrow from Google’s Pixel phones, which aren’t tremendously useful now but are generally heading in the right direction. Now Nudge, modeled on Magic Cue, offers contextual suggestions based on what’s being said in a text conversation. I’m miserable at adding things to my calendar, and I find this extra bit of help genuinely useful. Now Nudge seems to work only in some narrowly defined use cases within the messaging app, and I only saw it pop up a couple of times. Still, on one occasion it helped me check my calendar and schedule an event.
Just as I was preparing to publish this review, another AI feature appeared on the S26 Ultra by way of a software update: Gemini task automation. It’s limited to ordering food and rideshare apps right now, but the idea is that you give Gemini a simple prompt, like “Get me an Uber to the airport,” it opens the app in a virtual window, and it goes about using the app to fulfill your request. In some quick preliminary tests this has worked as advertised so far; crucially, Gemini stops before the final step so you can review and submit your order yourself. This, I think, is a good idea and certainly makes me feel better about using it. There are all kinds of ways to feel about this concept of computers using computers, and I have much more testing to do, but if it works consistently then this seems like a pretty significant step toward AI assistants that can actually do useful things for us.
You can change your outfit, add makeup to your face, and generally mess with your photos until they no longer even resemble anything that actually happened
Over in the gallery app, things are a little weirder. Samsung has built in some generative AI capabilities designed to help you reimagine your photos in fun ways, but for me they were unsettling. The company seems intent on zipping right past “Photos are memories” and into “Photos are whatever the hell you want them to be.” With the S26 series, you can tell the phone how you want to edit the photo with natural language prompts, like you can in Google Photos. You can change your outfit, add makeup to your face, and generally mess with your photos until they no longer even resemble anything that actually happened. It’s bananas.
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