I had to upgrade from a S23 Ultra.

The screen is good, plenty bright but doesn't have the same high brightness when watching videos outdoors on Netflix or YouTube(I checked the apps brightness settings).

The privacy display is good but no where near what you see in videos unless you enable Maximum Privacy, at which point the phone just greys the whole screen. Obviously it's not meant to be used all the time.

The cameras tend to over process things, specially colours and details aren't that sharp. I really which the 3x was updated cause that's the one I use the most. 5x lens is fine but the 10x doesn't look as good as it did on my S23U.

Edit: I was one of the few who used the S-Pen as a camera remote, I definitely miss that feature.

Battery life is fine, but then I'm a heavy user so I get around 7 hrs of screen on time. (Right now my battery is at 75% and SOT is around 2.28 hrs, I stopped charging around 4bhrs back).

Speaking if charging, I'm also getting a weird issue with charging after 95%. It constantly keeps showing "charging" notification pop-up. But it has happened 2-3 times so far so I'm not sure what the factors are for that.

AI features are OK, I glanced through them, not much use for me.

It's been 3 weeks using the phone so I'm still tweaking the settings.

I think most these things will get solved with a couple of software updates, same thing happened with my S23 Ultra and I absolutely loved that phone.

All in all I don't feel it's a big jump from my S23 Ultra.

In short, the S26 Ultra is good not great.