The new Galaxy S26 Ultra isn’t much to shout about

The company is losing the technological edge it built its reputation upon.

When you visit the Samsung booth this week at the Mobile World Congress 2026—which, as always, is being held at the Fira Gran Via convention center in Barcelona—you can make your way past the array of brand-new devices to find a timeline of old Galaxy S phones mounted to a wall.

It’s a neat piece of history, but I’m not sure it had the intended effect. Rather than demonstrating Samsung’s progress over the years, it highlights how the South Korean tech giant—still the No. 2 phone maker in the world, right behind Apple, according to data from Counterpoint—has been treading water at the top of its lineup.

This year’s Galaxy S26 Ultra, announced a few days before the Mobile World Congress kicked off, is an extraordinarily iterative update in what has become a line of near-identical flagships. The design is almost indistinguishable from the previous three years’ models, and there isn’t much to shout about on the inside either. 

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Multicore is about technology hardware and design. It's written from Tokyo by Sam Byford. To learn more visit multicore.blog

While the S26 Ultra does come with the expected upgrade to Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, it’s hard to find much else of note on the spec sheet. Samsung switched the frame from titanium to aluminum and shaved 0.3 millimeters off the thickness in the process. The screen is the same 6.9-inch 1440p OLED panel as before—that’s not a problem, since it’s still great. But the unchanged 5,000-milliampere-hour (mAh) battery is starting to fall behind, and an overdue boost to 60-watt wired charging speeds still leaves Samsung behind its Chinese competitors, most of which have adopted silicon-carbon technology and proprietary fast-charging systems. 

The camera system might be the most baffling example of inertia. All the sensors are the same except on the much-maligned 10-megapixel 3x telephoto camera, which has remained in place since 2002. Did Samsung finally swap it out for a better part? No—the S26 Ultra’s telephoto inexplicably uses an even smaller (1/3.94 inch) sensor. The main and 5x cameras did at least get slight bumps to their maximum apertures.

The biggest S26 Ultra feature this year, which I will say has actually gotten people talking about at the show, is the new Privacy Display mode. The screen essentially has two sets of pixels, with one reserved for rendering the image directly in front of the viewer—allowing parts of the panel to be switched off for anyone looking from an indirect angle. 

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