Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review: an incredible all-rounder, but some other gaming phones have it beat

It’s natural to consider a top-end phone like the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra as a gaming device, thanks to its top-end internals and lovely display. More so, given that Samsung has recently been pushing the gaming potential in its handsets, with the new phone’s chipset allowing for on-mobile ray tracing and immersive audio.

I’ve been using the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra for two weeks now, and can confidently say it’s a top pick. Not just for gamers, but for most buyers who can afford it – with a few noteworthy caveats.

This is no cheap phone. You’re paying $1,300 for its 256GB model, $1,500 for 512GB or $1,800 for its 1TB powerhouse – a pretty decent gaming set-up will cost you less than that, as will many of the best gaming phones.

Thanks to its incredible cameras, plentiful software tools and great-looking display, this is a top-tier jack-of-all-trades phone, and it’ll wow buyers with the funds to pick it up. But many of its features will be overkill to people looking for a pure gaming mobile – and some of the alternatives actually outclass the Galaxy for processing.

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Design

It’d be a little hard to pick the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra out of a line-up, because it looks like basically every other smartphone these days. The company has long since ditched the curvy edges of past generations, or patterned or textured backs of rival mobiles, for a pretty nondescript phone. It comes in black, white, pale blue, dark violet, silver or rose gold, and my model is the violet one.

There’s no getting around the fact that this is a giant device, but you’d be hard pressed to find a small gaming phone. It tips the scales to the tune of 214g, and measures 164 x 78 x 7.9mm, clad in a glass front and back and aluminum frame. The glass is Corning Gorilla Glass, designed to withstand bumps or scratches, and in two weeks of careless use my unit hasn’t picked up a single scuff.

The camera port on the back is quite large, and so you can’t put the device down flat on a table (unless you use it with a case).

The Galaxy S26 Ultra is IP68 protected, which means it’s fully protected from dust and is water resistant to a limited degree. There’s sadly no card slot for expandable memory, which is worth bearing in mind when you pick a storage configuration because downloading loads of games or shooting loads of videos can quickly eat up space.

As with most modern phones, there’s no 3.5mm jack for wired audio, so you’ll have to rely on the USB-C port for any physical connectors. I’d recommend doing so: the downward-firing speaker is easy to cover with your hand when you’re gaming, muffling audio.

Something that sets Samsung’s Ultra phones aside is their stylus, which you can pop out of the phone’s bottom edge. It’s useful for note-taking and a few specific other use cases, like as a remote camera shutter, but anecdotally I rarely see Ultra owners actually using them.

Display

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra has a beautiful display – the company provides its own-made panels to plenty of other phone brands, so that’s no surprise. It’s Dynamic LTPO Amoled 2X panel, which basically means it’s bright and beautiful. There’s support for HDR10+ and a high max brightness, of 2,600 nits.

It’s a big screen, clocking in at 6.9 inches diagonally. With a 3120 x 1440 resolution, it has more pixels than many rivals, which hits 500 pixels per inch.

Some gaming phone fans may malign the use of a 120Hz refresh rate, with some rivals hitting 144Hz or 165Hz. However very few mobile titles actually support these refresh rates, so it’s not a deal-breaker by any means – just something that specs hounds should know about. Filed under this category could also be its color depth, which is only 8-bit, not 10-bit like many rivals.

A new feature of the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is its Privacy, which is something you need to turn on yourself or assign to certain apps. This greatly reduces the viewing angles, so people around you can’t see what’s you’re doing, but to my eyes it knocked the vibrancy a little bit.

Cameras

One of the biggest draws of Samsung’s phones is their camera prowess, and that’s doubly so for the Ultra models.

The phone packs a 200MP main camera, 10MP telephoto for 3x zoom, 50MP telephoto for 5x zoom and 50MP ultra-wide on the back, and 12MP selfie camera on the front. Perhaps more importantly, it has some of the best-in-class post-processing software; tweaking and fine-tuning your photos to make them vibrant and punchy.

Thanks to those multiple zoom lenses, the phone is fantastic for portrait photography or pictures of closer items – telephotos create great-looking natural background blur and tight focus, so the variety of zoom ranges gives you plenty of tools to work with.

Dab photography hands will find plenty here to like, with Pro modes for photography and videography that let you tweak settings and output in a range of file formats. The photo also comes with an Expert Raw app with tools like zebra patterning, false colour shooting and dual exports in RAW and JPEG.

There are some tools for less experienced photographers too, with a new Super Steady mode using the phone’s gyrosphere and accelerometer to lock the horizon, and Food mode which lets you select a subject for the phone to work its magic on, and add bokeh and contrast. Samsung’s own Nightography reduces noise in dark or nighttime shots, and the camera app’s filter overlays are nuanced and effective.

Software

Samsung’s phones run its own Android fork, called One UI, and this time around it’s One UI 8.5 running on top Android 16. It’s one of the more distinctive-looking spins on the Google-made software, as you’ll probably notice from the pictures, and I’ll let you come to your own conclusion as to whether you’re a fan or not

When you boot it up, you’re faced with a truly eye-boggling number of the brand’s own apps, which may seem a bit overwhelming. But it has absolutely loads of unique features not available on rivals; highlights on the S26 Ultra include Audio Eraser, which can strip annoying background sounds like traffic, wind or crowds from videos on apps like Instagram and YouTube. I also quickly became reliant on Finder, a phone-wide search system which goes deeper than most phones’, looking through app data, files and even voice recording transcripts to find what you’re looking for.

AI is the name of the game for Samsung, with tools like Circle to Search which can identify elements on-screen to let you search them, and automated call screening with a chatbot answering your phone for you. For the most part, these aren’t generative AI, but in the Gallery app there’s a Generative Edit tool which can add or remove elements from your own pictures. Sometimes it can work well, but a lot of the time it can misunderstand your ask or create AI slop.

Samsung has promised that the Galaxy S26 Ultra will see seven years of Android updates – presumably to Android 23, if naming contentions stay true, and whatever One UI version that ends up being – and that same span of security patches. That’s a fairly competitive term, though bear in mind a phone will work just fine even if left behind in updates. Samsung often brings new Galaxy S features to older members of the line, so you could see some nice new features in that time.

Gaming

Thanks to its use of a top-end mobile chipset in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is a high-powered gaming beast. Just a note before we go further: I tested a model of the phone with 12GB RAM, but the priciest option offers 16GB.

Benchmark tests reveal one of the fastest phones I’ve ever tested, beaten only by a few finely-tuned gaming phones like the RedMagic 11 Pro, and recent iPhones, but trumping almost all rivals.

Playing games with the S26 Ultra, it tells. The phone easily handles the highest graphics options any game offers, without noticeable framerate drops or stuttering. I tested an array of games like Rainbow Six Mobile, Undawn and Call of Duty Mobile, hoping that any would show a chink in the phone’s armor, but this didn’t happen. Any performance divide between this and the highest-performing phones doesn’t show up in practice, and I imagine the Galaxy will continue to smash through new releases for years to come.

People who’ve used phones bearing Snapdragon chips in the past, may know they have a reputation for getting really hot when you’re gaming. This problem hasn’t been solved, but has been greatly reduced, in the S26 Ultra thanks to some thermal cooling chambers.

By default, when you download games, they’re not taken to your phone’s menu and can only be opened via Samsung’s Gaming Hub app. You can stop this from happening, via the app’s settings menu, but it’s worth noting for first-time users who might be confused where their downloads are going.

One useful tool is that the Galaxy lets you set up automated Modes, which quickly tweak myriad settings when toggled, and I set up a Game one to restrict background app use, silence notifications and tweak the display settings at the push of a button.

Battery

If I faced one issue with the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra during my testing, it was the battery life. With a 5,000mAh battery life, it was mostly fine on the average day: streaming music, social media, the odd call. I could get a full day of use on a single charge.

But when I used the Galaxy more intensively, it struggled. On days when I was looking at the device loads of navigation, taking plenty of pictures or playing lots of games, it could drop charge pretty quickly. Quite often, I’d have to give the handset a second charge through the day, a habit which just isn’t feasible for all buyers. I was caught out several times on an international trip when my picture-taking habits caused the charge to plummet when I was out and about.

At least charging is pretty fast: it hits 60W with a cable, which gets you a full charge in about 45 minutes or less. It’s not best-in-class, and gaming phone fans will undoubtedly have seen 100W and above devices, but it’s still pretty fast. There’s also 25W wireless charging. A neat feature of the phone is that it’ll always tell you how long it’ll be until the handset is fully charged.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra?

There’s no denying that the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is an all-around fantastic phone; the company is one of the best for display tech, camera prowess and software tools, and here you’re getting the complete package.

It’s certainly worth buying if you have the money to spend and need a phone with few compromises made. And as one of the highest-profile phones of 2026, it’s bound to see more deals and cell company order perks than most alternatives.

However if the only thing you care about is gaming prowess, there are other phones which will cater to your needs a little more. There are picks with even faster processing, 144Hz or 165Hz displays, better cooling and physical triggers, and many cost less than the Samsung.

How I tested the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra

I used the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra as my daily smartphone for two weeks to write this review, and downloaded a massive selection of games at the beginning of that period. I also conducted benchmark and battery tests from apps like 3D Mark and Geekbench. In the past I’ve tested gaming phones from every company making them, and other Android phones from almost every brand out there.

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