Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
wired.com53 points by joozio 5 days ago
53 points by joozio 5 days ago
> if you don't want any of these AI capabilities, you can spend a few minutes disabling and getting rid of most of them.
Why is this "a few minutes" and "most of them"? Why isn't it "a few seconds" and "all of them with a single toggle in Settings"?
Samsung has never respected the user. I remember having having a Galaxy S5 and every update it would reinstall all the bloatware like facebook and paypal. Everyone who cares about a platform that respects them and their time moved to iPhone long ago. Apple's AI features can be turned off with one global toggle, as well as more granular ones.
> Apple's AI features can be turned off with one global toggle, as well as more granular ones.
I’m an Apple user. Turn off Siri and CarPlay gets painful from memory, and my AirPods won’t translate without it turned on.
In terms of privacy, they are slipping. The dialogs ‘ask apps not to track’, and don’t appear to block them. Watching Tim surrender to authority at ever at every opportunity makes me sad.
I mean that's what you'd expect turning off the whole of siri. They provide granular options to turn off individual aspects like the listening for "hey siri" and such. If you wholesale disable the entirety of siri you are going to find it annoying if you use features provided by siri.
I don't know why you're downvoted. On a really old device I had from work they pushed out an update which introduced an overlay with ads at random places on the screen.
People use their phone today to: Manage 100k+,1M+ bank accounts, 2FA, secret messaging, sensitive media, medication, credentials and more. This privacy feature makes a lot of sense. Give it a couple of iterations and I think this will be the standard in business. It never made sense to me the trust that we put on no one looking at the contents of a display at the same time as us.
I'm much less concerned about a rando looking over my shoulder than I am the wealth of information the software hands out to its owners. It's like the difference between being seen in public by other pedestrians versus being captured by thousands of fixed surveillance cameras. Look all you want, so long as you're not wired into a database. Different threat models, I guess.
Or displaying your card out in the open, flashing it in front of everyone in the restaurant, grocery store, etc. With remote workers scanning through video feeds of people in public, it won't be long before they figure out the Meta glasses and similar cameras are high enough resolution to capture sensitive information, even if the actual user is 100% innocent and not doing anything wrong.
There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.
Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.
Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.
The world is so ridiculously insecure.
My card has 2fa. I can display it but it won't work to pay unless I stick it into a reader, type my PIN and copy a code.
The people who are genuinely concerned about shoulder surfing probably slapped on a privacy filter anyway. They're no different from a screen protector. What the S26 Ultra can do is cool and super useful for the few people who need it, but I'd bet that all the rest will just show it off as a cool party trick and nothing more.
I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter. They were nice but eventually the added cost, complexity, and lowered image quality didn't make them a popular choice even for enterprise users. I think only HP still offers them from the big brands, Dell and Lenovo don't do it anymore.
> The people who are genuinely concerned about shoulder surfing probably slapped on a privacy filter anyway.
So only the people concerned about it should get privacy?
> They're no different from a screen protector.
Privacy filters are way worse than screen protectors, they permanently degrade your display experience by a LOT, and you cant turn them off when you dont need them.
> I've seen this with laptops that came with integrated electronically controlled privacy filter.
Which are a completely different thing than this privacy display.
> lowered image quality
Exactly, these addon filters or layers degrade image quality, this new display doesnt. In normal mode its just a normal 2600 nits, HDR, 120hz, and whatnot OLED smartphone display.
> So only the people concerned about it should get privacy?
To call this an uncharitable interpretation would be an understatement. The phone has a feature that costs money and if you look around you’ll see most people don’t bother with this concern.
It has nothing to do with “should”. I have the same privacy now and for way less than the price of that phone. The solution for privacy exists already and the one Samsung offers was already “rejected” in the past because of the added cost most likely. Why do you think it comes on one of the most expensive phones on the market?
> these addon filters or layers degrade image quality
You didn’t read my comment carefully. I wrote specifically about integrated electronically controlled privacy filters on screen laptops which lowered image quality.
A phone at this price level already targets a tiny niche just because of affordability. A small part of that niche buys the phone because they want the privacy screen.
> it doesn't dramatically reduce screen brightness or image quality.
AFAIK it significantly decreases the brightness. Jerry Rig Everything demonstrates this here - https://youtu.be/TRW4W7KkJXs?t=32
significantly and dramatically are two different things. I was sceptic when buying it but have no problem using the display with privacy screen on, and dont see that much difference in brightness, even in direct sunlight, fwiw.
Bonus with it on you can stretch your battery life, only half the pixels actually active saves quite some battery, who knew!
You’re paying more for less brightness.
Only if you turn it on for the whole screen at all times, and you are still getting a privacy screen out of it so its not a loss with no benefits.
I'm posting this with my S26 Ultra.
Is it just a lame rehash of the same phone from the last 4 years with a faster CPU and a screen privacy feature? Yes. But man, the screen privacy feature is so good. I expect that everyone will copy it. Once you have it, it seems irresponsible to not have it. Having it auto-enabled on an app-by-app basis is so nice.
Also, yes, it is absurdly expensive. But whenever Samsung launches a new phone, they offer large preorder bonuses and generous trade-in rates for 2-3 year old phones. So don't believe the price. I think they have to do this to keep growth going, but you get them much cheaper than the stated price if you pre-order. I paid less than 50% of the list price after trading in my near identical S24 and got a free bump to the 512GB model.
This chip is faster in Geekbench than the Ryzen 3900X system I just upgraded. At the time, this was at the top-end for multithreading performance, with a 105W TDP. Now outclassed by a phone.
I just don't believe these geekbench numbers represent real world performance numbers. Like... Firefox compile times or late game civ 6 turn times or such things
yes because a phone cpu cannot cool itself to keep at peak performance like a desktop processor can
It's not clear the android geekbench scores are comparable to the desktop ones. They seem to run different tests and the score is very likely not comparable between the different tests.
But your Ryzen is more than just a toy. You can run a real OS on it, develop SW, have a real keyboard.
These phones have Dex.
I have multiple times in past used Samsung phones as my primary computer while the laptop was installing updates (thanks Microsoft) or when I simply forgot the laptop at home.
How's the dex? It's close to the only thing I miss from samsungs, which I used good 15 years I guess before hopping onto grapheneos.
Similar functionality also available for Pixel https://lifehacker.com/tech/android-16-desktop-mode-pixel
Still not great, I'm using it on my S23 and I would compare it to a 2010-era Linux WM.
It's good enough to use on the go I'd say but not beyond that.
This phone costs 1700 euros here... 1700 (Netherlands)! That is the price of a gaming laptop!
Everything has become so incredibly expensive it just isn't fun to buy anything anymore.
My iPhone 11's FaceID broke a few weeks ago and despite that I think I will just stick with it with today's phone prices.
> 1700 euros
Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it?
Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€
No one sane buys it for the list price. During launch there are always various discounts. I got S25U for 800 (without sending my old phone, just some coupons) with a 5eur/month contract last year at launch. If it really lasts 7 years it's not even that expensive.
It's market segmentation. Instead of charging what it's worth, maybe 700 EUR, they charge 1700 so they can get away with charging you 800 eur on "discount", dragging up the prices of the entire lineup below it.
It's a very impressive phone and will likely be the case that Apple and Samsung dominate western phone sales. But you can get way better phones from China right now with these new silicon carbide batteries which is just a game changer.
Yeah, watch out for those nosy people looking over your shoulder at your phone, they're spying on you.
Please ignore all the data mining we're doing on your phone and please don't make us continually harass you first thing in the morning every morning to accept new terms and conditions. (For what it's worth, my Fold 7 harasses me to accept two sets of updates to terms and conditions first thing in the morning every morning)
Remove your Samsung account.
It is needed for a bunch of things including all bixby stuff (which is admittedly starting to get useful) but those constant ToS updates can drive a man mad.
If any Samsung employees are reading this: whoever is pushing those ToS changes is probably a on Apples payroll ;)
I've had Samsung phones for years and never made a Samsung account. Every few weeks my phone suggests signing in or accepting new terms and conditions, and I refuse.
I know Google is mining my information, but I convince myself I'm "sticking it to the man" and taking at least one small stand...
If I sign out, samsung nukes step tracking and basically neuters my watch's health metrics.
There are a bunch of free or cheap alternative apps. Probably not as smoothly integrated, but years ago a change to Samsung's terms popped up in the health app; I saw it said they could do anything they want with my private health data, so I rejected the terms and stopped using it.
It blows my mind that Samsung has been sitting on a premium hardware gold mine for so long, but insists on these anti-features. I would be buying expensive premium samsung phones if they just offered something not so maddening. I was so hoping (but certainly not holding my breath) that Samsung was GrapheneOS's partner. Oh well, I guess S doesn't want my money, so I'll give it Moto.
I wouldn't call it a "Premium Hardware gold mine", apart from the screens, the battery, cameras, CPU/GPU, etc are all on par or surpassed by Apple and Google.
How do you think humans survived for millions of years without a Samsung account?
Does Live Caption Translate available? I think that feature is only available for Google Pixel which is unfortunate.
I was hoping, this being Wired, the article would have at least a surface-level technical description of how a software-defined privacy filter works, but alas.
How does it work? I'm guessing it's some kind of extension of the LCD polarizer, but all I can find online are explanations of the software like in the Wired article.
Its not a filter or layer, its the pixels themselves. Half are normal wide viewing angle pixels, the other half are pixels with a much more narrow viewing angle. When activated they just ... switch off the normal ones.
See for example:
https://gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s26_ultra-review-2939p3....
Or from the official Samsung presentation:
Basically half of the pixels have a narrow view angle, the others don't, when you activate the privacy mode, only the narrow pixels remain, so you can see the screen only looking straight.
I got this explanation for the mkbh video: https://youtu.be/nfHRMqqO578?t=141&si=iEhVrdCuLN0fkasd which illustrates it very well (2m24 if timestamp doesn't work)
Theyre not polarized, the pixels are recessed so that the light only goes forward
I wonder if this is how those privacy screen protectors work. Where it's just like looking at the screen through a cell structure with walls that prevent light coming out at an angle.
[dead]