Ever since the Galaxy S22 Ultra, Samsung’s Ultra phones have had the same design for their cameras on the back – individual circle-islands for each sensor. This, however, may change next year.
According to a new report from Samsung’s home of Korea, the upcoming Galaxy S26 Ultra may adopt a monolithic camera island once more, last seen on the Galaxy S21 Ultra from 2021.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
The reason for this change is all about being able to fit better cameras into the body of the phone, apparently. And yet, we can’t help but wonder whether the Korean company is once again being ‘inspired’ by an Apple design – the iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max will adopt a huge island themselves, and this has been rumored for many months now.
Perhaps 2026 will be the year when a humongous camera island is used by non-Chinese brands to communicate camera prowess. We say “non-Chinese brands” because big camera islands have been a lot more prevalent in recent years when it comes to Chinese flagships – the Xiaomi Ultra series, vivo’s X series, Oppo’s Find family, and so on.
The Korean report claims the growth of the S26 Ultra’s camera island is actually an inevitability, “due to the performance upgrade of the main camera and telephoto camera” (machine translated from Korean). The S26 Ultra is also expected to sport even rounder corners than its predecessor which for the first time gave up on the right angle for its corners.
The S26 Ultra has previously been rumored to come with a new main camera, using Sony’s upcoming 1/1.1″ type sensor with 200 MP resolution.
Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra
Source (in Korean)