They Didn't Mention This... - S26 Ultra Durability Test

[00:00] People, prepare. Today we present Samsung's  pristine and premium S26 Ultra—a polished,   pocketized powerhouse packed with  potent processing, privacy pixels,   and plenty of prestige. It'll presently  be pressured with painstaking poking,  

[00:16] prodding, prying, and un poquito of peeling  to see if the polished paint on this pricey   piece of personal preference prevails. Perhaps  parts pop, or perhaps portions persevere. So,  

[00:28] prepare your popcorn as we pontificate on its  performance. The punishment procedure proceeds. The coolest part of this S26 Ultra is probably  the privacy screen. I personally probably  

[00:40] wouldn't use it a whole lot since it does dim the  screen considerably, as you'll see in a second.   But first, I noticed that instead of a similarly  colored piece of glass around the camera plateau,   Samsung has stuck a milky clear glass under the  circles instead. You can see the way the plateau  

[00:56] glows and illuminates as I shine my flashlight  into it. And we can also see there's still a   tiny gap between the lens and the translucent  portion. I imagine this means the circular lenses   are removable. We'll have to find out here  for sure in just a second, as we always do.

[01:12] It would be epic of Samsung if they could turn  this translucent plateau into a notification of   some kind, like how the smartphone brand Nothing  does. I don't know if an internally glowing camera   island would help justify the $1,300 price point  or not, but it would still look pretty cool.

[01:27] The part that bothers me the most about  the privacy display is how dim it gets   when maximum privacy protection is turned  on. I mean, it works for sure—100%. I have   an angle finder here that can tell the  exact angle at which a person might be  

[01:41] able to still see your screen. And with max  privacy mode enabled, it's basically a 45°   window of visibility from the side. Without  privacy mode, anyone standing within an 80°   radius can basically see your screen. Privacy  mode cuts the viewing angle visibility in half.

[01:57] If I were to get an S26 Ultra, which I probably  won't, I would probably just turn on the privacy   notifications. This is where a text or email comes  in, and the only portion of the screen that gets   dimmed or blacked out is the notification  text itself. Really incredible isolation.  

[02:13] iPhone users are going to be ecstatic  when Apple invents this in a few years. Busting out the microscope, you can see that  Samsung basically has two types of pixels:   narrow pixels and wide-angle pixels. Normally  all of them are turned on and working together  

[02:27] for the full 1440p screen resolution.  But as soon as privacy mode is enabled,   we lose about half the pixels—all  the wide-angled ones—leaving just   the narrow beams of light meant for your  eyes only. Now, this shouldn't affect  

[02:40] the scratch resistance of the screen, but  there's only one way to find out for sure. Pulling out the S Pen—this guy is about the same  length as last year, but it's definitely a lot   thinner this time around. The shape of the back  end is also curved, so it does matter which way it  

[02:54] goes into the phone. But it is nice knowing that  it does not get stuck if it goes in backwards like   it used to on the original Samsung Note 5, which  came out about 10 years ago. If you remember that   phone, I do promise that stretching at night  will help your lower back not hurt so much.

[03:09] The cool thing about the S Pen is that it has  a roll of copper coils in the tip. These help   the digitizer behind the phone screen better  triangulate its position. It makes the stylus   more exact. About two or three years ago with  the S24 Ultra, the S Pen had a capacitor inside  

[03:25] that would wirelessly charge off the copper  coils, but that capacitor and the capacity to   charge has since been eliminated. There are no  more Bluetooth functionalities with the S Pen   this year either—just a little spring in the top  that lets the pen click in and out of the phone.

[03:40] Back to the scratch test. Samsung is using  Corning Gorilla Armor 2 on the S26 Ultra.   Plastic would normally scratch at a level two  or three, but tempered glass like we see here  

[03:54] scratches at a level six with deeper grooves at  a level seven. But for some reason, that doesn't   appear to be the case this time around. It is  the same piece of branded glass as last year,  

[04:06] but this year the level six scratches are  extremely difficult to find. They are there,   but barely. We're almost getting to  the point where we can't say the thing. One mistake that I'll never make again, though,  is not having a screen protector on my phone. I  

[04:20] cracked the glass on my S24 Ultra a few months  ago and ended up spending nearly $300 to get a   genuine AMOLED screen replacement reinstalled on  my phone, and that was doing it myself. A screen  

[04:32] protector would have saved me. So, not having  a screen protector is a very expensive mistake   that I won't be making again. I'll just pop  the S Pen back into the slot where it belongs. sponsors—is that it even works with privacy  mode. They come two to a box and are foolproof  

[04:51] to install. And of course, they are made with  real glass. Link is down in the description. It's also interesting to find out that  Samsung ditched titanium this year.   We're back to using armor aluminum, which  I'm actually okay with. The buttons are  

[05:06] still removable. Titanium is cool and all,  but aluminum gets the job done just fine,   and it's easier to work with and easier  to recycle at the end of its life. Now,   the entire phone frame is made with just one  metal and not two separate metals glued together.

[05:22] The bottom of the phone has our 60W  USB-C port as well as our SIM card tray,   and it has a gray rubber ring to help with the  IP68 waterproof rating. There's no expandable   really long time but also doesn't like to  delete stuff. The logo on the back glass  

[05:40] looks impressively etched. Apple could learn  a few things about glass etching from Samsung. And moving up to the camera plateau, we have  our top 50-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera   protected with glass. Then our 200-megapixel  camera, also with glass. And at the bottom,  

[05:56] our 50-megapixel five-times telephoto camera  that we took apart during the teardown. If you   want to see Samsung's new 37% improved ALOP design  that they didn't tell anyone about, feel free to  

[06:09] watch the teardown video after this one. Then we  have the 10-megapixel 3x telephoto and the laser   autofocus on the side. The single-tone  LED flash is also protected with glass. I know I gave Samsung some grief about the  lenses popping off on last year's phone,  

[06:24] but this year I think they fixed it. Yeah,  they still come off, but this time around   it's almost like they're supposed to. The  rings come off with the glass still intact,   which means if you were to crack the  glass on one of your camera lenses,  

[06:37] it might just be a $10 fix that still keeps your  IP rating intact, especially since the lenses   just click right back into place. I'm impressed.  Samsung took a flaw and turned it into a feature.   Huge thumbs up from me, but let me know  what you think down in the comments.

[06:52] The screen itself has basically remained  the same as last year. Still 1440p if you   don't have privacy mode engaged, still 2600  nits if you don't have privacy mode engaged,   and still 120 hertz. It lasts for about  20 seconds under the heat from my lighter  

[07:07] without any major damage to the pixels. Samsung  has continued with the under-display ultrasonic   fingerprint scanner, but again, for some  reason, my level seven deeper grooves   just ain't slapping like they used to. I  imagine Corning tweaked something in the  

[07:20] glass recipe since last year because it's  holding its own against my picks quite a   bit better. The ultrasonic scanner still  works even with the level seven scratches. Finally, the bend test. The only Samsung to ever  fail this test, of course, is the Samsung Trifold,  

[07:35] which is to be expected. And this S26 Ultra,  even with the switch back to aluminum,   is still a rock-solid beast of a smartphone  with zero flex when bent from the front or   when bent from the back. The only thing  that will ever break this phone is a drop.

[07:51] And you might be like, "Hey, wow, that is the most  manliestly, rugged case I've ever seen." And yeah,   Dbrand took some creative liberties with the  ultra-rugged Tank case. It's got more than a dozen   little Easter eggs built in, from GPS coordinates  of Area 51 to Braille and Morse code. Fingers  

[08:07] crossed nobody steals these Easter eggs. If you  know, you know. It even has built-in magnets. Speaking of which, Dbrand's Totally Clear Zero  Yellowing Ghost case also has magnets built   into it. If Samsung isn't going to innovate,  then Dbrand sure will. We even put magnets  

[08:24] on my favorite case, the Grip case, with my  teardown skin installed. Magnets for days.   at your local Best Buy if you ever, you know, go  outside—because protection is always a good thing.

[08:38] Thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.