Samsung’s new Privacy Display may not be Ultra exclusive for long
Samsung had planned for Privacy Display to land on the S25 Ultra. Now it's here, further phones may be in line.
Samsung says the technology behind the Galaxy S26 Ultra’s new Privacy Display may not remain exclusive to its most premium smartphones. The new security feature works by shutting off part of the pixel grid making for much narrower viewing angles when typing in passwords or receiving previews of notifications. The idea is to stop prying eyes peering at your display.
It has impressed in early hands-on previews and Samsung is keen to bring the experience to phones farther down the trough once the technology has matured. It is also working on ensuring the feature can be applied across the Z Fold foldables that provided different aspect ratios and greater challenges in restricting viewing angles to the device owner looking right at it.
In a newsworthy interview with Bloomberg, Samsung Mobile Experience COO Won-Joon Choi said: “If we believe it’s time to propagate it to other models, we’ll consider doing so.”
In fact, Samsung had actually hoped to deliver the feature a year earlier with the executive adding: “Our goal was to have this, to be honest with you, on the S25 Ultra. We were almost there. But we had to kind of solve a couple of the last challenges. So we took another year to resolve those. It has been quite a journey.”
It’s refreshing to see Samsung hold off on launching the feature, rather than release it half-baked. A previous incarnation of Samsung might have sent it out into the wild and then spent months doing damage control, as it did with the first-generation Galaxy Z Fold.
Now Privacy Display is here, the feature might be the major selling point for an otherwise vanilla Galaxy S26 Ultra hardware update, especially for those who aren’t enthused by Samsung’s AI obsession on the software side.
Our own Tom Morgan-Freelander went hands on with the Galaxy S26 Ultra phone this week and commented: “It’s unique and worked brilliantly in my demo, making the display appear switched off as soon as I angled it away in any direction. You might not working on any secret government projects, but knowing your passwords and private emails aren’t being eyeballed while queueing for coffee or waiting for a bus gets a big thumbs up from me.”
Chris Smith
