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Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
- malfist 8mo agoYeah, 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)
- throwaway270925 8mo agoTwo problems can be concerning at the same time!
- throwa356262 8mo agoRemove 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 ;)
- malfist 8mo agoIf I sign out, samsung nukes step tracking and basically neuters my watch's health metrics.
- zugi 8mo agoThere 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.
- freedomben 8mo agoIt 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.
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- zugi 8mo agoI'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...
- TrainedMonkey 8mo ago> 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 https://youtu.be/TRW4W7KkJXs?t=32
- throwaway270925 8mo agosignificantly 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!
- aucisson_masque 8mo agoYou’re paying more for less brightness.
- samtheDamned 8mo agoOnly 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.
- mosselman 8mo agoThis 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.
- throwaway270925 8mo ago> 1700 euros Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it? Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€
- yread 8mo agoNo 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.
- abluentalpaca 8mo agoThis 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.
- automatic6131 8mo agoI 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
- ariwilson 8mo agoyes because a phone cpu cannot cool itself to keep at peak performance like a desktop processor can
- SchemaLoad 8mo agoIt'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.
- hulitu 8mo agoBut your Ryzen is more than just a toy. You can run a real OS on it, develop SW, have a real keyboard.
- throwa356262 8mo agoThese 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.
- mortenjorck 8mo agoI 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.
- TheRoque 8mo agoBasically 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 https://youtu.be/nfHRMqqO578?t=141&si=iEhVrdCuLN0fkasd which illustrates it very well (2m24 if timestamp doesn't work)
- eigenspace 8mo agoTheyre not polarized, the pixels are recessed so that the light only goes forward
- TheRoque 8mo agoRight ! My bad
- SchemaLoad 8mo agoI 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.
- throwaway270925 8mo agoIts 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.php https://gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s26_ultra-review-2939p3.... Or from the official Samsung presentation: https://youtube.com/shorts/qnUVGPkeCCc https://youtube.com/shorts/qnUVGPkeCCc
- broadsidepicnic 8mo agoHow'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.
- xnx 8mo agoSimilar functionality also available for Pixel https://lifehacker.com/tech/android-16-desktop-mode-pixel https://lifehacker.com/tech/android-16-desktop-mode-pixel
- realusername 8mo agoStill 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.
- josalhor 8mo agoPeople 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.
- idle_zealot 8mo agoI'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.
- observationist 8mo agoOr 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.
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- Trung0246 8mo agoDoes Live Caption Translate available? I think that feature is only available for Google Pixel which is unfortunate.
- AntonyVo87 8mo ago[dead]
- rchard2scout 8mo 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"?
- SchemaLoad 8mo agoSamsung 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.
- lostlogin 8mo ago> 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.
- SchemaLoad 8mo agoI 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.
- LtWorf 7mo agoI 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.
- Synaesthesia 8mo agoIt'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.
- ageitgey 8mo agoI'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.