Pixel 11 Pro vs Galaxy S26 Ultra: Comparing their cameras, display, battery and specs

Google's most powerful flagships take aim at Samsung's crown.

Google announced its brand-new Pixel 11 smartphones today, kicking off the autumn tech season as we head toward the launch of the iPhone 18 lineup in September. But this year's elephant is already in the room, and the top-end Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL will face off against the extremely popular Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra . We'll need to do a full review of Google's new devices to see how they hold up with real world use, but the on-paper comparison is promising.

Google's smartphones may play a distant third in terms of sales to the twin goliaths of Apple and Samsung, but they serve a vital role in the Android ecosystem. When the company that maintains the most popular operating system in the world releases new hardware for that platform, it acts as a sort of road marker for the industry. These are the devices many third-party app developers will be working with, and they often come loaded with exclusive features which may or may not make their way to other brands in the future. In the current era of burgeoning AI, Google also loads the Pixel series with its custom Tensor silicon and uses the devices to showcase new Gemini capabilities.

But the Pixel series also competes against Samsung on its own terms, with its Pixel UI presenting a starkly different vision of what Android can look like compared to Samsung One UI. And whereas Samsung has traditionally focused on cutting-edge hardware, leaving Google to flex its software prowess, the tables have turned. The latest versions of One UI are as hyper-functional as ever, yet still attain an impressive level of visual polish, while Google keeps packing AI features into its Pixel software but lacks that sheer breadth of features. On the hardware front, the Pixel 11 Pro stacks up shockingly well against the S26 Ultra for the first time. So, let's break it all down to see which of 2026's most premium smartphones comes out on top, and which is best for you.

The Pixel 11 Pro XL marks a closer hardware match-up than ever against Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra. However, the smaller Pixel 11 Pro doesn't quite stack up.

Both the 11 Pro and Pro XL are powered by the Google Tensor G6 chip, which Google claims is 20 percent more power efficient and has 50 percent more TPU computer for AI tasks. We'll need to do our own testing to see how it stacks up against the absolute powerhouse processor packed into the Galaxy S26 Ultra  — Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Traditionally, Tensor chips have lagged Qualcomm's best mobile processors by a noticeable amount.

The inclusion of 12GB of RAM on the 256GB and 512GB storage configurations of both the Pixel 11 Pro and Pro XL is nice to see in a year where memory austerity has gripped the industry. Even better, the 1TB models will ship with a whopping 16GB of RAM. As for Samsung, it offers the exact same storage and memory configurations on the S26 Ultra.

Samsung is well known as one of the world's premiere display makers, and the S26 Ultra comes with a 6.9" LTPO AMOLED panel at a resolution of 1440 by 3,120, a refresh rate of up to 120Hz, and a 2,600 nit peak brightness level in HDR. The Pixel 11 Pro's display measures 6.3" at a resolution of 1,280 by 2,856, while Pro XL comes in at 6.8" and 1,344 by 2,992 pixels, but both have 120Hz LTPO OLED panels which get much brighter than the Samsung  — up to 3,600 nits at peak. Even so, the S26 Ultra's killer feature is the Privacy Display , which uses a set of narrow-angle pixels to hide what's on your screen when viewed off-axis. That feature prevents the screen from getting very bright, but it's quite the magic trick to behold.