Samsung S26 Ultra Review - Breaking Point.

The Samsung S26 Ultra is the most conflicted I have ever felt about a phone. It feels like a breaking point. Cuz on one hand, I'm peed off. They've not changed the cameras again. They've not changed the battery again. In fact, do you want to know one of the best things about this phone? It's the fact that it's made of aluminium again after just a 2-year detour as titanium. Samsung is just making tiny little tweaks while other companies are making leaps. Okay, calm yourself. What companies? What brand that you can actually feasibly buy in most countries is more well-rounded than this? Besides, what about the hundreds of AI features? Who's even close to Samsung? Oh, yippee. More AI features cuz my life was in shambles before I could rewrite my shopping list as an 18th century pirate. Besides, I'm one man. Like, how many do you think I could use? And then are you trying to say that just because other brands like OPPO and Xiaomi and Vivo are not globally available that Samsung just gets a pass for making a worse product? But it's not a worse product for an average user. The battery is already more than enough to last a day. We just confirmed that in our test. Remember, people love Samsung cameras and no one's out here zooming 800% into their photos to compare micro details. Like, you just got to understand that Samsung isn't chasing numbers anymore. They're focusing on new ways to add value because they've already covered the basics. That's why we're now getting this completely world exclusive privacy display feature. This is James Bond level tech. Do I look like James Bond to you? Do you think I've been waiting my entire life so that finally the stranger sitting next to me on the bus won't be able to see me trying to figure out which Shrek character are you? It's donkey. By the way, that's it. I'm taking this. I want to show you exactly how with cameras. For example, Samsung is falling behind. We were in the gym the other day. Do you remember? Hit that PB. Thought we looked pretty spicy. So, we called in Brusha to take that photo and she got this on Samsung in isolation. A pretty balanced photo. You wouldn't feel like you had anything to complain about. But then she took that same shot on a Chinese flagship, the Xiaomi 17 Ultra. And it's only when you do that that you realize what you're missing. Can't you see how the Xiaomi has more depth because of its larger sensor and just so much more real detail on the face, which looks a whole lot better than the oversharpening that Samsung's tried to replace it with. Same thing is true when you shoot portraits. It really puts into perspective how while Samsung and even Apple, they're improving each generation, these other companies are doing it faster, and it's particularly noticeable when you're in low light. And this isn't to say that everyone should suddenly rush out and buy a Xiaomi. I'm just trying to show you what's out there so that you get me when I say that this by comparison, the ultimate Samsung experience that we're stuck with till 2027, feels like such a bummer to me. Give me that. Look, I get it. It's not a camera phone, but not everyone wants a camera phone. It's actually nice to hold a device that doesn't have a bump large enough to eat dinner off of. It's slim. It's comfy. It's balanced, as all things should be. And frankly, to an untrained eye, Samsung's images really do look just as good. What most people want is a phone that takes bright, well-exposed photos that make them look good. And the way that Samsung subtly facet tunes and evens out the lighting actually, if anything, makes it better for that. Not to mention, you now have more AI power than any other Android and infinitely more than Apple to improve your photos after shooting them. Did you see that guy on X who within just a 36-second clip took this beautiful shot of fog rolling over buildings, added a one-s sentence command to remove that fog, and suddenly the shot was sunny. All the reflections are changed and you can even see buildings in the background that you could barely see before. Very quickly, it started to feel like your imagination is the limit. Like Trisha took this photo of us the other day and I can just right change my outfit to traditional Indian blue and gold. Seriously, look at that. Not only is the clothing spoton, but if you look close, it's even changed what I'm wearing in that vague off angled reflection in a way that subtly perfectly blends in. or this is very similar to an example that Samsung demoed on stage. Let's say you took the perfect photo of yourselves, but then realize it's missing your favorite cat. It's insane to me that you can now just pull up any other image of this cat and the AI will just merge him into that original photo, even changing the positions of your limbs to make it make sense. Oh, you want to do this, do you? Fine. Let me ask you, what will you do with this never actually happened cat photo? Send it to your parents. Pretend you took him on a day trip. Reminisce about all those times that you did not have together. If the reason that your cat is not in your photo is that he doesn't live with you, then move on with your life. Technically, I haven't moved. Just he didn't move with me. Maybe like one time a year, I could see the perfect opportunity for a tool like this. Someone says something inflammatory about Pokémon in the group chat. So, within a minute, you rustle up a suitable punishment image using their likeness. Does that count as cyber bullying? Gray area. and changing that fog photo to sun. Oh, yes. That's why I woke up at 5:00 a.m. in the morning to capture this beautiful miracle of nature. Should I put it as my wallpaper just to remind me of that time that the lighting just hit different? That's harsh. I mean, I get your point that merging real shots with AI is not useful, per se, but harsh. It's a bit of fun. You can't take it too seriously. And there are some legitimately useful outcomes that you can get from this tech that are not just slop. Like, look at this. our wallpaper. I had the idea of a handdrawn image of me and Disha floating around together in space. How crazy is it that all that needs now is 10 seconds of finding any photo of us and a one-s sentence prompt? Even the generations themselves barely take any time anymore. This S26 Ultra is so fast. Or like in a few weeks time, I'm planning an evening with my friends. So, all I need to do is invite friends to sophisticated dinner. Natural History Museum London 7:00 p.m. formal attire. And then we enter the date. March 15th. It cooked. Look at this. It's even got little dinosaur skeletons in the background. Read it. And we are we seeing the same image. If you actually sent me this as an invitation, I'd think you were a What time? Where am I meeting you? Are you expecting me to just deduce from the photo? Why don't we ask the all knowing Mother Bixby? Where am I meant to meet the person who sent this invitation? One minute later. God, I love Bixby. I couldn't find any data to search for. How do you think I feel? Not to mention, what kind of invitation doesn't tell me what I'm invited to? Look, the way I see it, there are two kinds of smartphone AI tools. One is AI that makes what you already do quicker, easier, better. Things like the automatic translation of incoming messages. Things like how these assistants are starting to get better at understanding natural language. Well, in theory, and this now nudge feature, which let's say someone asks you where you are, should be able to pull up where you are so that you can send it to them quickly. This kind of automatic AI is very useful, but it's just no phone right now is doing it well enough that it actually changes how you use your phone. You don't want to rely on it. Like the more you use this new Bixby Assistant, the more you realize the annoying weird limitations of it. Like when I ask it how well reviewed this London restaurant is, it answers telling me about a restaurant on the other side of the world in North Carolina. And now Nudge needs well far too many nudges to actually get you to where you need. The amount of time I have spent trying to get this feature to be useful. Honestly, I don't even want to talk about it. The second kind of smartphone AI is all of this stuff that you have to go out of your way to use. That's things like the image editing, things like the writing tools to change the style of your messages. And the problem with these is if you actually care enough to want to use them, then there will always be better tools out there. So, you generated us this wallpaper, right? You know what? Well done. Great looking image. But did you check the resolution? Uh, no, but I can check now. Well, I did. It's a 1024x 1024 1 megapixel square, meaning that this just launched Samsung feature specifically made for this Samsung phone doesn't generate images in the right aspect ratio or resolution for this Samsung screen. How sloppy is that? This ability to make invitations. I've tried it again and again and again. And frankly, if you actually want to invite someone to an event that you know they'll be able to find, you really should just use Canva. Every time that you AIedit or merge two photos on this, you lose 30% of the resolution. That's enough of a quality hit that you might as well have just bought a Galaxy S10 to take the photo and then use the money you saved to buy yourself a real cat, which will only produce slop on occasion. Samsung's really trying to push this now brief feature as a way to stay up to date on everything. It tells you the weather, what's coming up in your calendar. It'll recommend you YouTube videos. But why do I want this? If I want to watch YouTube, I will go to YouTube and I will rely on the extremely powerful, sophisticated algorithm that it uses to make sure that just the right videos end up on my homepage, as opposed to however Samsung's decided that these three things are what I need to see right now. One of which being my own video, or how they show me my special moments from the day before, featuring a 100 times long range zoom shot right into Disha's eyeball. Yes, I love looking into her eyes, but not like this. The problem comes from the fact that if you're using AI that is on device, then it's not very capable because this is a tiny little computer that can't run the most powerful models. And then if you're using cloud-based AI features, then they're going to be heavily limited because they cost these tech companies money and no one's charging for smartphone AI yet. So you end up in this situation where all you're actually getting on phones are toys. The AI features here are nothing more than the little free trial game CDs that you used to get with magazines back in the day. But I want to be clear. My problem with this phone is not that it has these features, cuz it's not perfect, but it's still a lot more than the rest are doing. My problem is why are we getting what feels like a software update instead of better hardware? Why didn't they improve the signal quality to keep up with the latest iPhones? I'm on literally zero bars right now. Are they not seeing all these other companies running circles around their cameras? Did they just forget that they're actually allowed to change their batteries? Did you watch the battery test we did? Were you even there? Cuz I was for over 14 hours, by the way. And honestly, even though the battery size didn't go up, this phone lasted a very long time thanks to a more efficient chip and a more efficient display. It beat out last year's Samsung. It beat out the iPhone. It beat out Xiaomi's top-end device while being one of the coolest phones in the thermal testing. I mean, the charging speed is catching up now at up to 60 W of power. It's actually starting to feel like real fast charging. And this is the only phone where you can have all of that while them also somehow managing to fit the S Pen inside. This right here is the greatest writing implement in the world. It's literally the only pen that is always with you because you can't forget it, that's always charged and always ready to write. I think it's simple. Samsung has the most complete hardware and software experience that you can find on Android. They give you 7 years of software updates versus four to five on most others. Their 1 UI software skin is so stable. while being so customizable, it makes every other brand look like a prude. Yesterday, I made my S Pen pointer into a Pokeball. Because I wanted to, I can make holding down the button and tapping twice take me straight to my Slack messages. I can turn my volume controls into a metallic violet animated gradient to match the color of the phone I got. It honestly goes on forever. And Samsung is always cooking up something new, like horizontal lock. This is like the next era of super steady video cuz now your phone is not just stable but also completely flat. There's a reason that everyone online is talking about it or this privacy display. Look, I get it. I'm not an undercover MI6 agent. No one's learning state secrets by side eyeing my phone, but this is still such a great way to give you peace of mind. The ability to just black out those little notification bubbles as they come in. And also, I've set mine up so that a quick double tap like this is all I need to turn on the feature for the whole screen. So, even when I'm just on Instagram, it actually does make me feel a little less self-conscious in public. Cuz I don't want some rando judging me just because I've niched down into a feed that's almost 30% close-up shark encounter content right now. Hate to be that guy, but horizontal lock, that was a feature on Vivo phones back in 2022. Even Motorola's done this before and those guys aren't exactly cleaning up at the smartphone camera's choice awards. Literally, the only reason people are talking about it now is because it's Samsung. It's mainstream and privacy display. Funny story about that. You know that first hands-on video we made of this phone? Well, in that video, we accidentally leaked someone's phone number while we were shooting at a steep angle while privacy display was on. That person got about 100 text messages in 2 hours. I think the concept of this feature is incredible and is definitely not a gimmick, but you turning that on and suddenly thinking that no one's going to see what you're up to is just wrong. Unless you're keeping your phone on maximum protection mode, which you don't want to do because it makes everything look very strange to you. Then I can still see your shark videos, still see your shark videos, still see your shark videos, still see your shark videos, still see your shark videos, still see your shark videos, and really it's about there at which point I can't clearly make out what you're watching. So whether I'm behind you on the bus or next to you on the bus, your screen is darker, but it's still readable. Not to mention that I'm bummed that in the process of implementing privacy display, Samsung has reduced the effectiveness of their anti-reflective coating. They took the best, most unique thing about Samsung phones displays and silently nerfed it to make room for this feature that I would argue is going to be useful to fewer people. Okay, yes, there are compromises, but surely you can see that there is use for this. And we have to commend Samsung for being the first to do it because someone's got to start. Innovation is good for the customer and frankly why do I care if Vivo had a feature in 2022? The point is horizontal lock is here now on Samsung and the idea of creating something with that is exciting to me. Remember we actually took this to football practice the other day. What a sick way to be able to capture action without worrying about keeping the phone upright the whole time. But if you did want to go just full-on cinematic masterpiece, then I've also been using this phone with the Insta3 Flow 2 Pro, our sponsor. And that lets you have stabilization while filming in 8K quality. Plus, this has a built-in selfie stick for super wide shots. A built-in tripod so you can stop precariously balancing your phone on the nearest bench. The ability to track onto you and follow you around using the full quality of any camera on your Android phone. Plus, it's a mirror and it's a power bank, so you can even charge your device back up again. Does it give you a better sense of humor? Wow, incredible. Really? So, link below to get one with a free AI tracker worth $40, which lets you track in native and even third party camera apps. Okay, very smooth sponsor integration. And fine, I don't completely agree with you, but I get your base point. As much as I'd like some big juicy camera sensors and a huge battery, I can admit that there is innovation happening here in other ways. It just makes me wonder how incredible a Samsung phone could be if they pushed on all those fronts, too. That's fair, but you might be waiting a while. For a company as broad as this, you got to remember that they're never going to cater to niche preferences like yours. They're never going to have the biggest cameras. They're never going to have the biggest batteries because there's always a trade-off for someone else. But that's not a bad thing. In fact, that's how you make the best allrounder for most people. So if I want to maximize for any one thing in particular, then there will always be a better choice than this. But assuming I fall into the main bucket of people who aren't leaning in any particular direction, then maybe it is quite nice to have a phone that occupies that safe choice medium. Yes. Although I will stand firm that 90% of these AI features are never getting touched after the first week. I think they know that. But it's a new era. We don't know what features will end up sticking. So all they can do is to keep trying things and that they are doing. So do we agree the S26 Ultra is actually pretty great? Fine. It was a weird