This is the comparison Oppo has been waiting years to have. The Find X9 Ultra is the first Ultra-tier Find X to go on sale globally, and it arrives at exactly the same price as the most established Android flagship in the market – the Galaxy S26 Ultra. Samsung's latest S Series flagship builds on its history of being the best premium Android smartphone.
Both the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Find X9 Ultra run on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. Both are large, capable, and genuinely excellent in ways that justify the price. But they're built around fundamentally different priorities, and picking the wrong one for how you actually use a phone is easy to do.
Design and Build
The S26 Ultra is the more refined of the two in terms of form factor. Samsung has softened the corners compared to the S25 Ultra, moved from titanium to Armor Aluminum, and the result is a phone that feels slightly easier to hold for its size. It's 6.9 inches, though, which is large, however you dress it up.
The Find X9 Ultra at 6.82 inches is marginally smaller, and the vegan leather Tundra Umber finish gives it a warmth and grip that glass and metal phones rarely match. The Canyon Orange is the bolder option, and both colorways look premium, but the Tundra Umber is a classic finish. Samsung does offer more colorway options, but none are what you might call memorable.
On durability, Oppo wins on paper with IP66, IP68, and IP69 ratings, compared with Samsung's IP68. That means the Find X9 Ultra can handle high-pressure water jets in ways the S26 Ultra simply hasn't been rated for.
Display
Both displays are excellent, and most people would be happy with either. The S26 Ultra features a 6.9-inch Dynamic LTPO AMOLED 2X panel with a 1440×3120 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, and peak brightness of 2600 nits. The Find X9 Ultra is a 6.82-inch LTPO AMOLED at 3168×1440 with a 1-144Hz adaptive range, 3600 nits peak HDR, and 2160Hz PWM dimming.
Samsung's headline display feature this year is the Privacy Display, an anti-spy mode that makes the screen unreadable from the side. It's a genuinely useful addition for anyone who regularly works on sensitive content in public, and it's the kind of feature that sounds gimmicky until you actually want it. Oppo counters with higher peak brightness and the PWM dimming, which matters if you're sensitive to eye fatigue from standard OLED panels. On display quality alone, it's close. In terms of features, each has something the other doesn't.
Performance
Both phones run Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, but Samsung uses a custom, higher-clocked variant it brands as the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. In everyday use, the difference is imperceptible. Both phones are fast, handle multitasking without hesitation, and have no ceiling for gaming or video performance.
Samsung's thermal management has improved over previous Ultra models, with an upgraded vapor chamber helping sustain workloads without aggressive throttling. Oppo handles extended camera use without generating uncomfortable heat. Neither phone is going to frustrate you on performance grounds.
Battery and Charging
This is where the comparison becomes one-sided. The Find X9 Ultra ships with a 7,050mAh silicon-carbon battery. The S26 Ultra has 5,000mAh. That's a 40% capacity advantage in Oppo's favor, and you feel it in daily use. Heavy camera days, long travel, consistent productivity use — the Find X9 Ultra simply lasts longer, and it's not subtle.
Charging compounds the gap. Oppo supports 100W wired SUPERVOOC and 50W wireless AIRVOOC. Samsung has upgraded to 60W Super Fast Charging 3.0 this year, up from 45W and 25W wireless. Both are improvements, but the Find X9 Ultra gets from flat to full in a fraction of the time, and starts from a much larger tank to begin with. If battery life and charging speed matter to you, the S26 Ultra has no answer here.
Camera
The camera comparison is what's going to drive most buying decisions at this price point, and it's where Oppo makes its most compelling argument.
The S26 Ultra runs a quad-camera system headlined by a 200MP main sensor with a new f/1.4 aperture, a broader opening than last year that improves low-light performance. The telephoto system tops out at 5x optical. Samsung's processing and AI-assisted zoom remain genuinely impressive, and for most photography scenarios, the S26 Ultra takes very good photos. Where it falls short is at range. Digital zoom beyond 5x loses quality faster than Oppo's hardware.
The Find X9 Ultra has five cameras. The 200MP main sensor sits on a Sony LYT-901 at 1/1.12 inches, with an f/1.5 aperture, and Hasselblad color science underpins everything from white balance to film simulation. The 200MP 3x telephoto has a 1/1.28-inch sensor, making it physically larger than many phones' primary cameras, and the image quality at 70mm equivalent is simply the best available on any smartphone right now. The 10x periscope is an industry first at 50MP, with a 230mm equivalent focal length and sensor-shift stabilization that holds up significantly better in low light than any other ultra-telephoto phone implementation. A 3.2MP spectral sensor quietly runs in the background to maintain color accuracy across all lenses.
Hasselblad Master mode strips the more aggressive phone processing away and delivers images that feel closer to a real camera output, which sounds like a marketing claim until you compare the results side by side. For video, the Find X9 Ultra shoots 4K at 120 fps and 8K at 30 fps, supports Dolby Vision, and offers Log recording for color grading. It also supports an optional Hasselblad teleconverter, which extends the reach even further for anyone treating this as a serious creative tool. The camera is not close. Oppo wins.
Software and Longevity
Samsung commits to seven major Android version upgrades with the S26 Ultra, which means this phone will receive software support well into the 2030s. One UI 8.5 is mature, polished, and Galaxy AI continues to add genuinely useful tools rather than features for the press release. The preloaded app situation remains messy out of the box, but everything is removable.
ColorOS 16 is clean, fast, and significantly less bloated than Samsung's offering at first boot. Oppo's AI tools are more restrained, sitting in the background rather than asking for attention. In terms of software longevity, Samsung has the edge with its update commitment. In day-to-day software experience, the two are closer than they used to be.
S Pen
Worth a separate mention because it's a genuine differentiator. The S26 Ultra has a built-in S Pen. The Find X9 Ultra does not have this built in; however, you can buy an official case and stylus if you absolutely need them. If you use a stylus for note-taking, creative work, or productivity, Samsung's S26 Ultra is the winner, thanks to its mature software features.
Verdict
At the same price, these two phones are targeting different buyers, and choosing between them comes down to what you actually use a phone for.
Buy the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra if you use an S Pen, want the best software support timeline in Android, value the Privacy Display for daily use, or are already deep in the Samsung ecosystem. It's a polished, refined flagship that does everything well and will stay relevant for years.
Buy the Oppo Find X9 Ultra if photography and video are why you buy a phone. The camera hardware is ahead of anything Samsung is offering right now, the battery advantage is significant, charging is considerably faster, and the triple IP rating adds durability that Samsung doesn't match. For pure imaging performance, the Find X9 Ultra is the better phone, and the gap isn't marginal.
If you don't need an S Pen and you care about what your phone can capture, Oppo has just made the most compelling argument for its own flagship in the brand's history.
The Caveat
You knew there had to be one, and here it is. For the folks in the US, getting your hands on the Oppo Find X9 Ultra isn't as straightforward as it's not actually on sale in the country. Which means, you guessed it, in terms of actually getting your hands on a device, the Galaxy S26 Ultra wins by default.
For most of the rest of the world, there's no such problem, as the Find X9 Ultra is the first of Oppo's Ultra models to launch outside China.
