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 keeps the squared-off titanium chassis introduced in the S24 series, but Samsung has shaved 4g off the weight, bringing it to 228g — still substantial, but noticeably less fatiguing over a long day. The Gorilla Glass Armor 2 on the front reduces reflections better than any previous glass I have tested. IP68 water resistance is standard.

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.

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.

Performance

The Snapdragon 8 Elite 2 is a generational jump. In benchmarks, it scores roughly 30% higher in CPU tasks and 40% higher in GPU tasks compared to last year's chip. In practice, that means every single interaction feels instantaneous. Apps open before you finish tapping them. Video export times are halved. 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.

Camera System

The headline is the 200MP main sensor, 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 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 5,500mAh cell is the same capacity as the S25 Ultra, but the more efficient Snapdragon chip means real-world endurance is meaningfully better. In my standard test — streaming video, light gaming, camera use, browsing — the S26 Ultra consistently reaches around 7 hours of screen-on time. Heavy users will still need to top up before bed. Light users may stretch to two days.

65W wired charging fills the battery from flat in around 65 minutes. 15W Qi2 wireless charging is present, as is reverse wireless charging for accessories. There is still no 25W wireless, which competitors have offered for two generations.

S Pen

The S Pen is still Samsung's trump card. No other mainstream smartphone manufacturer offers a pressure-sensitive stylus. 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.

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.

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/1.7 OIS

Main cam

50MP f/1.68 OIS

Snapdragon 8 Elite 2

Chip

Google Tensor G4

5,500mAh · 65W

Battery

4,700mAh · 37W

From £1,299

Price

From £999

Full Galaxy S26 Ultra review

Full Pixel 9 Pro review