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There’s no doubt that the most attention-grabbing moment at Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event last week in San Francisco was when it unveiled the View privacy on S26 Ultra.
This innovative new technology provides pixel-level protection against surfers, preventing anyone who might be nearby from seeing your screen. It’s a Really cool featureAnd you’ve already seen what might be next. I’ll explain, but first a little recap.
A privacy display differs from a privacy screen protector in a few different ways. First, it works whether your phone is in portrait or landscape mode, providing complete 360-degree protection. It can also be turned on and off easily and quickly from Settings, and applied either to your entire screen or to small areas where you might enter your PIN or password.
These small areas are very small indeed. They’re actually just fragments of the screen. But big plans are underway to make these areas even bigger. At the Samsung show booth in Mobile World Congress In Barcelona, the company showcased its progress so far in developing and deploying the Privacy Display, but also the work already underway to improve the technology.
Behind the transparent plexiglass were two phones with an “under development” note written underneath them. The first phone showed the privacy screen running on the entire bottom half of the screen, while the second phone showed it running on a panel that extends along one side of the screen.
The hope is that you’ll eventually be able to hide any part of the screen you want.
These demos show how Samsung Display is experimenting with Privacy Display on larger portions of the screen, a booth representative told me. Obviously, this is more of a challenge than making it work on the entire screen or on very small sections. The idea is that you can eventually choose specific areas of the screen that you might want to hide from view.
Obviously this is still a work in progress for a Samsung display. The demos I saw at Samsung Display’s booth were effective, but they weren’t quite as successful at hiding what was on the screen as the Privacy Show when the technology is in use on the S26 Ultra.
There’s no guarantee that Samsung Electronics, an entirely separate company, will choose to integrate this into the next-gen Galaxy S series (S27 Ultra?) when it launches next year.
However, companies tend to be keen on repeating year after year. With the Privacy Screen receiving such a warm welcome, it would be surprising if Samsung didn’t incorporate the latest advances in this technology into its phones, let alone tablets and laptops.
So, if we see this feature arriving in Unpacked 2027, remember you saw it here first.