Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: The ultimate AI smartphone?

Motorsport is all about compound gains. You don’t win a race like the 24 hours of Le Mans with one brilliant move; you nail it with a thousand small improvements made consistently across the full day and night of the race and the 11 months of preparation before it. Individually, each gain might be invisible but put together and they’re the difference between a top 5 finish and overall victory.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 is a compound-gains phone. On paper, and tech journalists love specs almost as much as us car journos, it looks incremental. Same 6.9-inch QHD+ display, 5000mAh battery and four cameras on the back. You could call it a blink-and-you-will-miss-it facelift. But you’d be wrong.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra processor and Artificial Intelligence

Under the hood of the S26 Ultra, or whatever it is called in the phone world, there’s the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Qualcomm and Samsung have tuned this chip specifically for the S26 Ultra, like a factory homologation special to push out 19 per cent better CPU performance (over last year’s S25 Ultra), 24 per cent more on the GPU, 39 per cent higher on the NPU – the latter is the neural processing unit, the brain responsible for all the AI work. And AI is important because the story of the S26 isn’t really a camera story or a battery story. It’s an AI story. And to tell it properly, you need to understand what Samsung means when it says it’s moving toward Agentic AI.

Think of the difference between cruise control and a modern driver assistance system. Cruise control responds to a command you give it: set speed, hold speed. ADAS watches the road, the cars and bikes in front, reads lane markings, and slams the brakes on your behalf before you’ve even registered the danger. The first system is reactive. The second is proactive. Galaxy AI on the S26 is making the same leap towards pro-activeness.

A feature called Now Nudge, for instance, doesn’t wait for you to ask. When someone texts asking for photos from last weekend’s track day, the phone has already scanned the conversation context, gone into your gallery, found the relevant images, and surfaced them at the keyboard before you’ve started typing. When a message arrives about a meeting, it cross-references your calendar and flags a conflict. A caveat though, this will only work with messages, not WhatsApp.

Much of what Galaxy AI does on the S26 – personalisation, contextual awareness, even Photo Assist editing – runs on the device itself. Your data doesn’t take a round trip to a server farm (Samsung hasn't been clear where data of Indian users will be stored). It stays on the phone, is processed locally, and protected inside Knox Enhanced Encrypted Protection, which encrypts each app’s data separately.

The automotive parallel is apt here too. Early connected cars offloaded everything to the cloud and that’s why voice commands didn’t work most of the time. No signal meant no function. Modern cars process the critical stuff onboard while the cloud is for enhancement, not survival. Samsung has made the same architectural shift. The AI doesn’t go offline when you lose network.

The agentic AI push goes further. With Gemini or Perplexity set as your assistant the phone can execute multi-step tasks across apps without you switching between them. Ask it to book an Uber home, and it opens the app, fills in the destination, and presents you with a confirmation screen. This happens in the background while you’re using another app in the foreground.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra camera

Then the camera, the most important part of the Samsung S series phones. The 200MP main sensor now has an f/1.4 aperture. Samsung claims 47 per cent more light intake compared to the S25 Ultra’s f/1.7. On the 5x telephoto – 50MP, f/2.9 – the improvement is 37 per cent. More light through the aperture means cleaner shadows, more detail in low-lit roads and dimly-lit press conferences, and with Pro Scaler AI, better Nightography video. For the car photographers this is the phone that finally shoots a stationary car under tungsten workshop lights without the whole image turning to mush.

But the more interesting upgrade is invisible. The AI Image Signal Processor – the software layer between the sensor and the final photograph – has been extended to the selfie camera improving skin tones in mixed lighting. And embedded in the Snapdragon itself is something called mDNIe: Samsung’s mobile Digital Natural Image engine, now processing colour with four times the precision of the previous generation. The result is photographs that are more honest than vivid. The S26 Ultra is, increasingly, a camera that shows you what was there rather than what the algorithm thinks looked pretty.

The S26 Ultra is also the first Galaxy device to support APV, a professional-grade video codec that delivers visually lossless compression and stores it directly to an external SSD. We will be trying this out when we head into Ladakh next month.

The most theatrically impressive trick is Photo Assist where you can ask it to change to your photo in plain language. I was in San Franscico for the S26 launch at the same time the Mercedes CLA drives were happening in Bangalore and I asked it to insert a red CLA into a pic of me at the phone event. Which it did, expect it was the old CLA. Ultimately AI still needs us journalists to generate images and content which it can feed of. But the stuff it can do it impressive – like change a night shot to a day shot, or remove clutter from the launch image of a car, or even change your outfits in photographs. Edits are continuous and reversible, step by step, undoable at any point. It’s non-destructive editing baked into the camera roll, without needing Lightroom or Photoshop. For a journalist working at a press conference it speeds things up enormously.

Samsung Galaxy Ultra display and performance

The S26 Ultra’s marquee hardware feature is the world’s first built-in privacy display on a mobile phone. By controlling how each pixel disperses light, the display becomes optically narrow when activated – you see it perfectly from straight on, but anyone to your side sees only a dim, unreadable screen. Unlike the stick-on privacy films that have existed for years, this is hardware-deep. There’s no quality loss when it’s off, and the transition between portrait and landscape orientation is seamless. You can set it to trigger automatically when entering OTPs, when opening banking apps, or whenever a notification arrives. In a country where there’s no dearth of people this is more than a convenience feature, it’s a security tool.

As for the rest of the range, the standard S26 gets a 6.3-inch FHD+ display, 50MP wide camera at f/1.8, and 4,300mAh battery with 25W wired charging. The S26+ steps up with a 6.7-inch QHD+ screen, 4,900mAh battery and 45W charging. In India both get Samsung’s Exynos 2600, built on a 2-nanometer process with a strong AI focus.

While all three share the same Galaxy AI software stack the Privacy Display is Ultra-only, as is the 200MP sensor, 10x optical quality zoom, vapour chamber redesign, and super fast charging 3.0 (75 per cent in 30 minutes with the 60W adapter). In car terms it’s similar to how the range stretches from the NA petrol with a manual to the turbo-petrol with DCT and all-wheel-drive.

Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra price and verdict

The price band is similarly wide, starting at ₹87,999 for the 256GB S26 and going up to ₹1.9 lakh for the 1TB S26 Ultra. Pre-orders are open now with benefits of up to ₹20,000 on all versions. Keeping with the automotive analogy, the new phone is similar to a mid-cycle refresh on a 5-star crash-rated platform. The engineering base is solid – great display, excellent cameras and premium build – while the update spruces things up with a sleeker form factor, better cameras, faster charging, smarter AI, a genuinely novel privacy feature, and an AI architecture that lets the technology fade into the background and usefulness rise to the surface. Compound gains, for the win.