- Someone has already seemingly bought a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
- They’ve shown off both the phone and its box
- We also get a look at the Privacy Display in action
We’re now only a couple of days from the February 25 launch of the Samsung Galaxy S26 series, but one store in Dubai seemingly didn’t get the memo, as it appears to already be selling the phones.
X user @KaroulSahil (via PhoneArena) claims to have purchased a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra in the country, and has shown the phone off on camera.
Across a few different posts you can see the phone’s retail box, a comparison with some other handsets, and its Privacy Display feature in action.
As far as the comparison goes, you can see above that it’s shown from the back alongside an iPhone 17 Pro Max and handsets from Vivo and Oppo. It looks to be a similar size to these phones, if perhaps slightly taller, and also looks very much like the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, except that there’s now a camera island.
What’s perhaps most interesting is the Privacy Display — a major feature that Samsung has already teased, but which we haven’t had a proper look at until now.
In a brief clip, you can see that when Privacy Display is enabled the screen becomes very dim when viewed from the sides, so that snoopers won’t easily be able to see what you’re doing on your phone.
There’s also a toggle for ‘Maximum privacy protection’, which based on previous leaks we suspect lowers the brightness of the screen even when viewed from the front, to make things even less visible from the sides, but that’s to be confirmed.
It’s not looking as clever as we hoped
However, while some leaks suggested that Privacy Display would be very customizable, with you for example able to have it automatically kick in during certain situations, such as when away from home, or only hide certain parts of the screen, this clip suggests that might not be the case, as there’s only those two toggles visible.
Of course, it’s possible there are other controls elsewhere, or that enabling the ‘Maximum privacy protection’ toggle reveals other options. Or perhaps this is running an early version of Samsung’s software. So we can’t be sure those options won’t be offered, but it’s not looking promising.
Still, even without them, Privacy Display looks like it could be a genuinely useful feature, and that’s good, because going by leaks there won’t be much in the way of other exciting upgrades here. We’ll find out for sure on February 25.
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