Name: Samsung Galaxy S26/Ultra Impressions: 1 Crazy Display Feature!
Uploaded: 2026-02-25T21:31:55.000Z
Duration: 9 min 10 s
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MKBHD here and welcome to what was supposed to be your first look and hands on with the new Samsung phones this year.

Adverbs of degree

Unfortunately that is in California and it just snowed like two plus feet here and that shut down all the flights for like two days.

So I'm still here and that's still in California.

Thankfully Brandon from the team did actually get all the way out to California from a city that got way less snow.

And so he's seen the phones and he shot the footage of them.

I've got the spec sheets here so I'm gonna put it all together and we'll still take a first look together at what looks like a kind of interesting new set of phones from Samsung.

And so as expected, the designs, well they're pretty similar to last year with just some slightly new colors and a slightly different looking camera ring with this little extra plateau around them now.

But actually the first thing that stuck out to me is just the new prices.

Typically I'll just save that for the end because it's the the same as last year, but

This time the S26 is $900, the S26 plus is $1,100 and the S26 Ultra is $1,300.

So this comes with a bump up in base storage.

So if you remember Last year the S25 launched at 799 and was 128 gigs.

This year the S26 is 899 but it's also 256 gigs.

But then also the S26 plus is 256 gigs and it's 100 bucks more.

It's 1100 instead of 1000 and then the Ultra was 1300, it's 1300 again.

They've always come out with the fan edition later in the year as like the mid range priced version of the phone.

But it feels like they're making room for that now to be like an $800 phone.

So just a lot of price creep happening in this lineup.

So then if that's the context for these new phones, then what is actually new to justify this new price?

Well they all got the spec bump we expected.

We've seen this non galaxy version of the chip be excellent already.

And there's a lot of talk about NPU optimization for AI stuff on the Samsung.

One more on that in a minute but looks like a good chip.

And then the Ultra specifically is also slightly updated design so It's a little bit thinner now and a little bit less boxy and squared off.

It's also back to aluminum sides instead of titanium.

And they've redesigned the vapor chamber to fit in this thinner design.

And there's also now slightly faster charging across the lineup.

Now, Nothing dramatic, but 25 watts on the S25, 45 watts on the S26 plus, and

And then pretty much all the rest of the hardware changes are just on the Ultra, which now has slightly wider apertures on those otherwise unchanged primary and telephoto cameras just to let more light in.

So looks like we're going from F1.7 to 1.4 on the main and F3.4 to 2.4 on the 3X Pro.

Pretty modest hardware changes, I would say.

Still no magnets and still no silicon carbon batteries.

But there is one really cool feature to me, and

it's just in the Ultra phone and it's the new privacy screen feature.

I didn't want to look into it too much, but

now that it's real and I've seen this, at least the footage of it, it looks incredible.

So, you know those privacy screen protectors people put on their phones to kind of block others from seeing what's on their screen?

I've probably seen one on someone else's phone at some point.

So instead of that privacy screen protector, which is annoying and also always on, this is a hardware level control over the pixels on the display that can be turned on or off whenever and when you turn it on.

The display should look unchanged from straight on, but

as you get off axis, it actually fades to gray and almost black from both the horizontal axis and and vertical axis.

So you're still seeing a normal display from the straight on view, but

anyone trying to look over your shoulder or sitting next to you will see basically a blank screen.

And hey, I'm not gonna judge why you need this or what you're blocking on your screen, but

there is actually a pretty good amount of customization over how exactly this works or when you can use it.

So you can turn it on or off, obviously, which is already sick, but

you can also have it automatically enable in certain locations or for certain apps, like just for your banking app or just for your photos app.

So just for the password field, while you're filling in a password somewhere, it will just black out that or just for the top part of the screen where notifications come in.

This also, to me, if you think about it, is like the most Samsung thing ever.

Like Samsung for the past couple years as we know has been super conservative with these like flagship phones, especially with the design.

But they're also the same company that will try absolutely insane stuff like the Galaxy Note Edge back in the day where like one side of the display curved over the bezel for the first time and then that turned into the other Galaxy S edges where both sides melted over.

They did the Galaxy Note first, which is this huge display, and

then of course Galaxy Fold which is super early and risky.

And now they have a literal trifold, which is nuts.

And all of these things, all these crazy designs that they decide to try are all based around display innovations.

So curved screen, waterfall screen, folding screen, multiple folding screen, and now this privacy screen.

So like this feels like a very Samsung thing to try and I hope it catches on because I know if any other company was trying this, their fans would all be loving it too.

I just hope this finds some success in the Ultra and then starts making its way to other phones because it's sick.

So then most of the rest of what's new in this S26 lineup is.

I mean you're going to see commercials with it.

I'm guessing most of the keynote is going to have a lot of this.

It's AI features and they range from decently useful to full on slop like they're just trying a bunch of stuff.

They managed to clone over some of Google's biggest hits from the Pixel, like call screening, which is welcome.

They also added their own version of Magic Q which they're calling now Nudge, which basically lives in the keyboard and gives you suggestions of things to bring in from other apps.

It's context aware, it should be decently helpful.

And there's also some big claimed improvements with Bixby now being LLM powered.

We've seen some other companies struggle with that lately, but

you know, with some Gemini integrations and some new Perplexity integrations could be decent.

I mean, I'm not going to say anything until I try it, but

But then they also did something called Photo Assistant, which is essentially what Google did with Google Photos.

It's like AI photo editing but built into the gallery, which it's cool tech.

It'll probably be a software update for older phones, but they did that.

They also did Creative Studio, which is kind of the same thing as like Apple's Image Playground.

like I said, it feels like they're just throwing a bunch of stuff at the wall in the world of AI just to see what will stick, see what people will like.

They're actually calling it an AI phone in some of the press stuff that I've seen for it, which I don't love.

I feel like in an age where it's more important than ever to get real photos and videos from people's cell phones, the slippery slope of like all this AI stuff in our photos, it's weird.

I'm not sure I love how far down the slope we're going, but here we are anyway.

These all very much look and and feel like Samsung phones, where most of the differences are just like the small quality of life, things under the skin and subtle evolution over time.

My take is the Ultra feels like a little bit of a refresh and it's a cool place to try this privacy screen thing.

I'm very excited to see it in person and try it out.

The base phone's going up by a hundred bucks.

Seems like they didn't try a whole lot of other stuff with those phones and but let me know what else you want to see in the full reviews in the comments section below.

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Samsung Galaxy S26/Ultra Impressions: 1 Crazy Display Feature!

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