Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra's Privacy Display finally gives the Ultra flagship a worthy update

There's a particular anxiety that settles in when you're using your phone in public—on a plane, in an airport, in a crowded hallway—the low-level dread that someone behind you is reading your screen. For weeks, I told myself it didn't bother me much. I save the serious stuff, the banking and passwords, for home. But the feeling was there, a quiet unease I'd stopped noticing until Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra gave me a way to make it disappear.

The phone's new Privacy Display is the reason. Using technology Samsung calls Flex Magic Pixel, it narrows the viewing angle of the screen when activated, making it nearly impossible for someone standing beside you to read what's on your display. I tested it everywhere—planes, airports, convention halls packed with people. The effect was real. A casual glance over my shoulder revealed nothing. Someone would have to work at it, crane their neck deliberately, to see anything at all. That knowledge alone was enough to change how I felt holding the phone in public.

The display dims slightly when Privacy Display is on, and the image flattens a bit. After a few moments, you stop noticing. You can apply it just to notification banners if you want—a strange, ghostly effect where alerts appear dim and gray—or engage it across the whole screen. Samsung offers a "maximum" privacy setting that makes the screen nearly unreadable from any angle other than straight-on, though it does reduce contrast more noticeably. The default setting is the sweet spot: effective without feeling like a compromise. At $1,300, the question becomes whether that peace of mind is worth the price. For sensitive information like passwords, the answer seems clear. For Wordle guesses, it's less obvious. But the feature works, and it works without serious drawbacks. That alone makes it worthy of the Ultra name, which has been searching for an identity for years.

Beyond the Privacy Display, Samsung has made real improvements to the camera hardware. The main 200-megapixel sensor now uses an f/1.4 lens instead of f/1.7, and the 5x telephoto jumped from f/3.4 to f/2.9. Wider apertures let in more light, which means the cameras can use lower ISOs or faster shutter speeds in dim conditions. In side-by-side testing with the S25 Ultra, the difference was measurable. The main camera consistently used lower ISO in low light. The telephoto, when shooting in very dim conditions, managed a 1/60th shutter speed compared to 1/30th on last year's model. Faster shutter speeds mean sharper images, less noise for the processor to smooth out afterward. These are not theoretical improvements—they're physics, and they work.

The rest of the phone feels familiar. The design is sleeker than the S25 Ultra, trading the boxy Note heritage for softer curves. The aluminum frame is smoother along the seams. The phone is still enormous at 6.9 inches, still expensive, and still lacks Qi2 magnets—a frustrating omission for anyone who doesn't use a case. Samsung has added new AI features, including a tool called Now Nudge that offers calendar suggestions based on text conversations, and Gemini task automation that can open apps and fill out orders if you ask it to. These feel incremental, borrowed from Google's Pixel line, and they work inconsistently. The generative photo-editing tools are stranger still. You can ask the phone to change your outfit, add makeup, remove clothing, or paste celebrities into your selfies. The results are unsettling—the phone will happily create fabricated images that look real. It's a feature that makes you question what you're seeing in a photo, and it's hard to feel good about it.

But the Privacy Display is the story. For years, the Ultra seemed to be losing its way, shedding features without gaining anything meaningful in return. This year is different. This phone does something no other phone does, and it does it well. The camera improvements are real. The design is more comfortable. The Privacy Display solves a problem I didn't fully recognize until I started using it—that low-level anxiety about being watched, dissolved by a simple toggle. For a self-selecting group of people who want everything a smartphone can offer, who don't mind the size or the price, the S26 Ultra finally delivers an update worthy of its name.