The new Galaxy S26 Ultra isn’t much to shout about

When you visit the Samsung booth this week at the Mobile World Congress 2026—which, as always, is being held at the Fira Gran Via convention center in Barcelona—you can make your way past the array of brand-new devices to find a timeline of old Galaxy S phones mounted to a wall.

It’s a neat piece of history, but I’m not sure it had the intended effect. Rather than demonstrating Samsung’s progress over the years, it highlights how the South Korean tech giant—still the No. 2 phone maker in the world, right behind Apple, according to data from Counterpoint—has been treading water at the top of its lineup.

This year’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, announced a few days before the Mobile World Congress kicked off, is an extraordinarily iterative update in what has become a line of near-identical flagships. The design is almost indistinguishable from the previous three years’ models, and there isn’t much to shout about on the inside either. 

Nothing of note

While the S26 Ultra does come with the expected upgrade to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, it’s hard to find much else of note on the spec sheet. Samsung switched the frame from titanium to aluminum and shaved 0.3 millimeters off the thickness in the process. The screen is the same 6.9-inch 1440p OLED panel as before—that’s not a problem, since it’s still great. But the unchanged 5,000-milliampere-hour (mAh) battery is starting to fall behind, and an overdue boost to 60-watt wired charging speeds still leaves Samsung behind its Chinese competitors, most of which have adopted silicon-carbon technology and proprietary fast-charging systems. 

The camera system might be the most baffling example of inertia. All the sensors are the same except on the much-maligned 10-megapixel 3x telephoto camera, which has remained in place since 2002. Did Samsung finally swap it out for a better part? No—the S26 Ultra’s telephoto inexplicably uses an even smaller (1/3.94 inch) sensor. The main and 5x cameras did at least get slight bumps to their maximum apertures.

Privacy update

The biggest S26 Ultra feature this year, which I will say has actually gotten people talking about at the show, is the new Privacy Display mode. The screen essentially has two sets of pixels, with one reserved for rendering the image directly in front of the viewer—allowing parts of the panel to be switched off for anyone looking from an indirect angle. 

The implementation is clever, particularly in how the privacy masking can be applied to individual areas of the panel. But the basic concept isn’t new—built-in privacy screens have been commonplace in Japan ever since the days of flip phones. Samsung’s take might be more technically advanced, but the idea has been sitting there for a while.

It never used to be difficult to point out what was new about a flagship Samsung phone. For better or worse, the company developed a reputation for putting out ideas just to see what might stick. The Galaxy Note line was probably the best example of that—what initially seemed like a gratuitously large design eventually became normalized to the point where the series has been absorbed into the regular Galaxy S lineup, stylus and all.

And Samsung continues to innovate on the supply chain side, particularly with screen panels. Its Samsung Display subsidiary is known for producing breakthrough technology like flexible OLED screens, which led to the parent company inventing genuinely new form factors with the Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip series. That unit is also responsible for neat new features like the Privacy Display.

Losing its edge

But in other areas, Samsung is losing its edge or falling far behind. Chinese display makers are quickly catching up to Samsung’s OLED manufacturing prowess. And when it comes to camera specs, there isn’t even a comparison. While Samsung chose to downgrade its telephoto lens this year, Xiaomi stole the show at MWC with its Leica-branded 200-megapixel 3.2x-4.3x zoom. 

Although it came out in the U.S. back in January, perhaps the biggest draw in Samsung’s MWC booth was the Z TriFold. This is a $2,900 double-hinged phone that folds out into a 10-inch wide-screen tablet. It’s the first device of its kind to be in the U.S. and does indeed have that typical gadgety Samsung appeal, albeit slightly diminished by the fact that Huawei did the same thing with the Mate XT in 2024 and is already on its second iteration. 

That might not be relevant to American shoppers, since Huawei phones generally aren’t available outside China. But it’s worth noting that Huawei had to completely rebuild its consumer business and supply chain after it got blitzed by U.S. sanctions, and it still managed to beat Samsung to market on this new form factor.

None of this is to say that there’s no reason to go with Samsung if you want an Android phone and you live in the U.S. It’s a trusted brand that offers good local support and customer service, and its One UI software has matured to the point that it’s as usable as anything else out there.

But Samsung is only holding onto an entrenched position in the U.S. market due to carrier support and a lack of competition. When looking at what’s available around the rest of the world, it’s clear that the company is rapidly losing the technological edge it built its reputation upon. Chinese companies would face stiff barriers to enter the U.S. market even if they wanted to, but it’s worth imagining what the landscape might look like if they did.