Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra: New design and Exynos 2600?
According to a new leak about the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, the Korean company’s next flagship will be both thinner and lighter, along with significant improvements to the display, cameras, and charging speed. The new report comes from UniverseIce, a tipster with long experience in the Samsung space. We also get a render of the device. Ice predicts that the S26 Ultra will be less than 8 mm thick. For comparison: The Galaxy S25 Ultra is 8.2 mm thick.
Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra: Thinner, lighter, and Z Fold7 camera island
However, the upcoming Ultra will be slightly wider and taller than its predecessor (162.8 x 77.6 mm), but will still weigh less than the current Ultra’s 218 grams. The tipster shared a rendering of what the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra might look like. The most striking feature in the image is the updated camera island, which houses three of the four camera modules and looks exactly like the new Samsung Galaxy Z Fold7.
This would be a major change for the Galaxy S Ultra series, as the last four models all featured camera cutouts instead of camera islands. UniverseIce, by the way, expects the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra to feature an updated 200 MP main sensor with a larger aperture, as well as a new 3x telephoto lens. The 5x periscope camera is said to have a larger aperture.
Samsung is also expected to unveil a new 6.9-inch AMOLED display with a color-on-emitter (CoE) depolarizer layer. This is said to offer improved color accuracy and brightness while consuming less power. CoE OLED panels integrate the color filter directly into the light-emitting layer. The new leak also suggests that the Galaxy S26 Ultra will receive an improved third-generation anti-reflective glass coating.
The other major upgrade is said to be faster wired charging. The new report suggests a speed of 60 watts, which is a modest but welcome upgrade from the 45 watts of the Galaxy S25 Ultra and its predecessors. Unfortunately, the battery capacity is expected to remain at 5,000 mAh.
Samsung Exynos 2600 is expected to run cooler
There’s still a big question mark surrounding the chipset in the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. Samsung is currently diligently developing its own flagship Exynos 2600. And with every successful, high-performance benchmark test, the chances that the 2600 could actually end up in the S26 Ultra increase. And just last week, there were already two of these, namely in Geekbench and in 3DMark, in various Samsung phones. According to reports from Korea, these successes are no coincidence. According to reports, Samsung has developed a new cooling technology for this chip – a Heat Pass Block (HPB), which is designed to cool the application processor (AP) better than previous approaches.
A chipset typically consists of several chips arranged in a package-on-package structure. The RAM sits on top of the application processor, which contains the silicon die, CPU, GPU, NPU, and other components. The heat pass block adds another layer to this stack—a copper heat sink. This resembles the heat spreaders commonly found in modern designs. However, heat spreaders are added after the package-on-package structure is assembled. The advantage of the HPB is that it is located much closer to the heat source, allowing it to dissipate heat more efficiently.
The Exynos 2600 is manufactured using Samsung’s 2 nm Gate All-Around (GAA) process and is expected to debut with the Galaxy S26 series. The most likely candidates would be the Galaxy S26 and the S26 Edge. However, if performance is truly competitive, a global distribution for the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra, as was recently the case with the Galaxy S22 Ultra, is conceivable. This had received the Exynos 2200 chip in Europe and Asia, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 in the US and Japan.
Samsung is likely still in the quality testing phase of the Exynos 2600. Mass production will then begin, so the chipset could be released around the same time as the Galaxy S26 series, in late January or early February.
