Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra vs Galaxy S25 Ultra: what’s changed and why it matters

TL;DR: This year, the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra got some big boosts, including the all-new Privacy Display system, improved cameras, a vapour chamber for cooling and the truly crazy Super Steady with Horizontal Lock feature for ultra-stable video. It’s a banner year for upgrades.

The Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra is here, and what a beauty it is, too. It refines the formula that Samsung has been working on for years now, ensuring that anyone who buys it will be getting their hands on one of the most powerful phones ever released, and an automatic contender for awards and adulation from testers, including from T3.

This year, the design of the Galaxy S26 Ultra has been carefully tweaked to make it even more comfortable to use, but it still might leave you wondering what’s changed compared to last year, since it doesn’t rip up the rulebook visually. If you want to know what the biggest additions and upgrades are this year, keep reading.

Comprehensive camera updates make for ideal shooting

If you’re in the market for a top-end phone, there’s a very good chance that you want to make sure that the photos and videos that you take during your everyday life or on once-in-a-lifetime trips are as good as they can be. The S26 Ultra is basically perfect on that front, since it packs in some fairly stunning cameras, and brings some welcome upgrades on last year’s phone.

For one thing, two of its lenses are upgraded – with a new 200MP ultrawide lens and 50MP telephoto lens. These are so adaptable and ensure that you get ultra-high-resolution photos with amazing detail, whether you’re massively zoomed in or taking a wide-angle look at everything around you.

Plus, low-light performance is better than ever thanks to the extra light taken in by those next-gen sensors. You’ll get stunningly bright and clear images even in challenging situations.

For those who want a helping hand, Photo Assist¹ is a terrific example of how to do AI features right. It lets you make edits to your photos with prompts and simple tools, putting the power in your hands and letting you edit so quickly.

Finally, for video enthusiasts, there’s nothing else quite like Horizontal Lock on the market. It gives you some of the most stable video capture you’ll ever see, and can even remain locked if you rotate your phone completely – once you start using it, your creative juices are almost guaranteed to start flowing.

While the S25 Ultra, last year’s phone, has some stunning cameras, the clear winner from a photography point of view is the upgraded S26 Ultra.

A vapour chamber keeps your phone cool under pressure

Sometimes the biggest upgrades made to a phone aren’t the obvious ones – and in the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s case, there’s a new design under the hood that makes a massive difference. Samsung has implemented a big vapour chamber in the phone’s design that circulates air over its components for much-improved cooling.

This means the phone stays noticeably cooler while gaming, streaming or doing the heaviest multitasking, and that coolness means you don’t get performance throttling. It’s a dream addition for those who want their pro phone to perform at a pro level – and will continue to pay dividends for years to come.

The S25 Ultra was far from being a phone that ran hot, but if you’re looking to push a handset to its maximum, the vapour chamber added to the S26 Ultra makes it a no-brainer to pick the newer device.

ProScaler is a leap forward for mobile displays, unlocking stunning sharpness

Speaking of gaming and streaming, those with high-end gaming PCs or consoles know the power of upscaling by now, but it’s a rarity in the phone world. That makes Samsung’s decision to bring in ProScaler all the more impressive. This genius feature effectively upscales lower-resolution content on your phone screen automatically, potentially making games but also vidoes way sharper without any uncanny warping or issues.

This can make basically anything you do on your phone more immersive and fresher-looking, potentially revitalising older games. It’s another feather in the cap of this ultra-powerful phone, but that’s not where the display tech ends.

Samsung has also added the Privacy Display² feature, which you can toggle on to make your display way harder to read from side angles. It’s amazing for privacy while working or reading sensitive documents in public, and it’s not something that many phones can match.

Neither ProScaler or Privacy Display can be used on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, so this is another area where the S26 Ultra has to take the crown.

AI features that you’ll use day in and day out

ProScaler isn’t the only genius AI feature that Samsung has added to the Galaxy S26 Ultra, though, and there are so many clever little options that it would take far too long to list even most of them, let alone all of them.

Still, we’ll shout out one in particular – Call Assist, which now has live translation. Not only can you screen your incoming calls with AI, you can now use Call Assist to get extra tools while calling, from live transcription to live translation, instantly translating text, voices or images to make for seamless communication between languages, even over the phone.

Once you try this feature, you’ll pretty quickly start to see how it could change your whole way of travelling around the world, and make misunderstandings and awkward impasses a thing of the past.

The good news is that these calling features do work on the Galaxy S25 Ultra, as well, so this an area where the phones come out pretty evenly – although the S26 Ultra does have more Galaxy AI³ features overall.

Overall verdict

So, which phone should you buy? Well, we might be a little biased, but we’re always taken with the newest of the new, and the Galaxy S26 Ultra is clearly a great step up from the S25 Ultra, which remains a stunning bit of hardware. The new additions take it up another level, making it an absolute champion of high-end phone design.

If these upgrades have left you interested in finding out more about the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, you should definitely head to Samsung’s official website, which has loads more details about its many features, including where to buy the phone for the best deal right now.