Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra review

One UI 8.5 and Android 16

The Galaxy S26 Ultra launches with One UI 8.5 out of the box, which is Samsung's proprietary overlay based on Android 16. It's not fundamentally different from the original One UI 8.0 introduced in mid-2025 alongside the Galaxy Z Fold7 and Flip7 devices, but it adds a handful of AI-powered features. That's to be expected given the incremental version change.

Samsung's current software support policy states that the Galaxy S lineup is entitled to 7 major OS upgrades and 7 years of security updates.

Now, let's dive into Galaxy AI, which once again encompasses the centerpiece features here.

For starters, the upgraded Galaxy AI now comes with a much-improved Bixby. Samsung's virtual assistant becomes not just smarter, but also more useful. It can understand context and natural language better and gains the ability to do relevant web searches. It can access live and up-to-date information from the web right in Bixby's interface.

Home screen • Quick toggles • Recent apps

What's more, Bixby can point you to relevant settings or system apps when you ask it for help. It won't just give you basic instructions. Bixby understands your query or problem and can point you to the specific setting you'll need to change. You don't even have to know the name of the setting or feature that you are looking for; you can just state your problem, and it will give you the solution. Users don't need to learn how device menus are structured or remember specific terms to get things done.

For instance, you can say to Bixby that the screen hurts your eyes, or ask it why the screen dims while you are using the device. Bixby will then point to the specific settings that would solve your issues.

Bixby

Samsung has recently introduced deeper integration with Perplexity AI as well. By saying "Hey, Plex", you can summon Perplexity and initiate a conversation or a quick search. Perplexity even has access to system and third-party apps and can initiate multi-step workflows.

In this case, we asked Perplexity to create a calendar event and send the details via email.

Perplexity AI

Remember the Now Brief that launched with One UI 8.0? Well, Samsung is making it a tad more useful as it now pulls more information from apps, which in turn means it will give you more contextual information.

Now Nudge is a new functionality that will offload some of the tedious tasks. It tracks your messages on the screen and suggests relevant actions. For instance, if you are chatting about plans with a friend, Now Nudge will offer to add the meeting to your calendar and maybe even suggest making a reservation at the place you and your friend agreed to. And if this sounds like privacy nightmare, it may very well be if you are not careful. Samsung claims "data for this feature is processed on your phone only unless you consent to share it with Samsung or its partners for better recommendations." So you'd better be careful about your consent clicks when using the feature.

At the moment, Now Nudge only works in supported messaging apps, which include Samsung Messages, Google Messages, Google Chat, WhatsApp, WhatsApp Business, KakaoTalk, LINE, Signal, Instagram(DM), Tango, NTT Docomo Messages, KDDI Messages.

Now Nudge

Circle to Search is not a Galaxy or Pixel-exclusive feature anymore, but these phones seem to be the first to get upgrades in the functionality.

At the S26 series launch, Samsung announced an upgraded Circle to Search that can recognize and search for multiple objects on your screen at once. Give it a photo containing a coat and a pair of shoes, and it will look for both of them on the web simultaneously. We suspect that the upgraded functionality will reach more Android devices in the near future.

The Photo Assist tool in the default Gallery app now works with natural language, so you can edit your photos by using simple words or short descriptions. It's even capable of more complex edits. For instance, you can take a photo of yourself, scroll through the Gallery and find a picture of a shirt that your friends sent you and ask Galaxy AI to swap out the two shirts and see how it would look on you. We had mixed experiences with this feature, though, as sometimes it worked pretty well and sometimes it failed to switch the clothing successfully.

Photo Assist

Another useful new Gallery app feature is the smarter Screenshot search. AI analyzes the contents of your screenshots, so you can initiate a search to find something specific. The search bar also gives you quick search tags for particular screenshots. No more endless scrolling for that one specific screenshot you took two months ago, and it's now buried deep in your photo library.

The Audio Eraser tool, which was initially a Camera-Gallery-specific feature, now works across other third-party apps as well. Instead of removing background noise only in videos that you've recorded with your Galaxy, it can now bring out people's voices in apps like Instagram, YouTube and Netflix. A wider support for more third-party apps is likely on the way.

Audio Eraser in YouTube

Last but not least, Samsung has now introduced the so-called Document Scanner, which is a productivity-oriented feature inside the Camera app. Once the Camera app detects a document in the viewfinder, it will suggest optimizing the photo by sharpening the text, increasing contrast and generally making the photo look more like a proper document scan. The AI can even remove fingers and iron out wrinkles on the sheet. The interface gives you the ability to attach pages to a single document and export it to a PDF file.

While all of those features sound amazing on paper, not everyone will be able to make the most of them. Since Galaxy AI works with only a handful of languages, your experience may vary, while other regions will likely see no benefit at all.

Benchmark performance

Like last year, the Galaxy S26 Ultra doesn't run on the regular flagship SoC from Qualcomm. It employs an overclocked version of the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, and Samsung calls it SD 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. For the time being, Samsung seems to have exclusivity on this chip outside of China.

In any case, the higher clocked chip carries a model name SM8850-AD as opposed to the standard chipet model name SM8850-5-AC. The "AD" suffix indicates that the main 2x Oryon V3 Phoenix L cores are clocked at 4.74 GHz instead of 4.6 GHz. The rest of the 6x Oryon V3 Phoenix M cores remain at 3.62 GHz. The slight bump in the clock speeds is reflected in the benchmark results below, showing a slightly higher multi-core and single-core performance from the Galaxy S26 Ultra.

The Adreno 840 GPU is also supposedly clocked higher. The AD version of the SoC should have its Adreno 840 clocked at 1300 MHz, as opposed to 1200 MHz on the vanilla AC version.

The available memory configurations are 12GB/256GB, 12GB/512GB and 16GB/1TB. The unit we tested is the base one with 256GB internal storage. The type of storage Samsung used is likely UFS 4.2, judging by the sequential write speed, but it could also be UFS 4.1. Either way, it's semantics as the performance difference between UFS 4.1 and 4.2 is negligible.

As initially expected, the S26 Ultra tops the charts in pretty much all scenarios - CPU, GPU and mixed. The two higher clocked main CPU cores and the slightly bumped GPU show a difference in the graphs in the synthetic benchmark tests. The S26 Ultra easily outperforms its peers, powered by the standard Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 or the DImensity 9500 chips. There's no room for comparison between the sluggish Tensor G5 and the "exclusive" SD 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC, either.

Having said that, we doubt this would bring any meaningful improvement in user experience as a whole.

Sustained performance

Samsung made a big deal out of the improved heat transfer system on the Galaxy S26 Ultra. It features a redesigned vapor chamber that also helps with cooling down the battery during fast charging, and the heatsink itself has grown larger.

CPU and GPU stress tests

However, we did not find any meaningful improvement in our CPU and GPU stress tests compared to the previous generation. Moreover, thermal throttling appears to be worse now with the CPU dipping below 50% of its max performance. Same thing with the GPU in the 20-minute-long 3DMark Wild Life Extreme Stress Test.