This 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.
> 1700 euros Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it? Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€
Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#22Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#23I 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.
I got this explanation for the mkbh video: https://youtu.be/nfHRMqqO578?t=141&si=iEhVrdCuLN0fkasd which illustrates it very well (2m24 if timestamp doesn't work)
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#24I 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.
See for example:
https://gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s26_ultra-review-2939p3....
Or from the official Samsung presentation:
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#25How'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.
It's good enough to use on the go I'd say but not beyond that.
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1700 euros Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it? Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€
Still a phone for over 1000€ is crazy. Iphone 17 is much cheaper, and iphones are supposed to be the most expensive smartphones in my book.
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#27People 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.
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#28This 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.
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#29People 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.
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.
Re: Review: Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra
#30This 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.
What gaming laptop?