The Samsung Galaxy Watch feels like a conventional, circular wristwatch, but it finds a balance between a classic aesthetic and digital smarts due to navigation that smartly straddles the road between both worlds. It’s big and chunky, but also stylish and comes with lots of useful features and could be the premium smartwatch for Android users.
What We Like
- Premium look and feel
- Great battery life
- Large and beautiful AMOLED screen
- Attractive color options
- Has a premium look and feel
- Great rotating bezel approach
- Strong AMOLED screen
- Incredible battery life
- Speedy performance
What We Don’t Like
- Large and bulky
- Uncomfortable for smaller wrists
- Display is a little on the small side
- The 46mm model is very large
- Bixby is a spotty voice assistant
- Not most comfortable for all fitness
- Limited app ecosystem
Sizes and Style
Samsung Galaxy Watch Available in 42mm and 46mm sizes and its look stylish on the wrist with a more professional look than the sporty design you get with many fitness-oriented wearables, including the Gear Sport. Both sizes have a circular rotating bezel around a crisp 1.2- or 1.3-inch AMOLED screen.
The 46mm size of the larger version of the Samsung Galaxy Watch makes it ideal for men with large wrists. It’s sized well for giant wrists but will be uncomfortable for people with more petite appendages.
Both watches including a rotating bezel that you can spin to navigate through menus and certain features on the smartwatch. It’s a more tactile way to travel through the watch’s operating system and features.
Setup Process
Getting your Galaxy Watch up and running isn’t difficult. you’ll have your smartphone handy, whether it’s an Android phone or iPhone. Download the Galaxy Wearable app from the Play Store or Galaxy Apps on Android, or the Samsung Galaxy Watch app on iOS. From there, you’ll complete Bluetooth pairing to wirelessly connect the devices, then follow the on-screen prompts to finish the setup.
Plenty fast and responsive
Given the sizable price and premium styling, you’re right to expect a speedy, capable experience—and thankfully, the Galaxy Watch delivers. Running off Samsung’s own Exynos 9110 processor with 768MB RAM on the Bluetooth model and 1.5GB RAM within the LTE edition, the Galaxy Watch delivers a smooth experience throughout. We had no complaints when it came to launching apps or using features.
Samsung Pay
Samsung Galaxy Watch also features Samsung Pay – that’s a service that allows you to make mobile payments from your wrist very easily. You can add your credit, debit, gift, and membership cards to your devices. Samsung Pay has partnered with American Express®, Discover®, MasterCard®, and Visa® payment card networks in conjunction with top U.S. banks. You can also get extra rewards for the identical purchases you create on a daily basis. Samsung Rewards helps you to earn points for each purchase. Earn points from your purchases and by using Samsung apps, so redeem them toward Samsung products and more.
Battery Life
Samsung Galaxy has come with good battery life and it can last four-day. You won’t have to recharge this watch more than a few times every week and of course; you can make calls, receive texts and notifications using it. Need to keep in mind that using GPS for tracking your exercises will cause the battery to drain much faster.
Like Samsung’s previous watches, the Galaxy Watch sits on its side within the included wireless charging dock.
Apps
Samsung says there are over 70,000 Tizen apps, good luck finding anything from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Instagram or many, many others. that actually limits what you’ll do. For instance, while you’ll receive and reply to notifications from these apps, like Facebook Messenger or Twitter, you cannot initiate a message to a contact in this app.
Bixby
Every company wants its own personal assistant, but not all of them have put within the work to create a program worth using. Bixby, Samsung’s tackle voice assistants, is perhaps the smallest amount functional of all. On the Galaxy Watch, Bixby did work well for a few tasks, like calling and texting contacts, looking up the weather, and starting workouts. However, it failed at other basic questions. “Do the Yankees play tonight?”, “Get directions to the home,” and “Turn off my floor lamp” all returned the identical answer: “I couldn’t find the solution to your question.”
Fitness features & GPS
The Galaxy Watch introduced automatic exercise-tracking for 6 workouts, including running and cycling. If you enable location detection (GPS and wireless networks) within the watch’s settings menu, the watch is meant to record your route. However, this didn’t work for either folks over the course of several walks, runs and bike rides. Rather, the map view showed a general location of where we were, but the mileage recorded was pretty close.
When we manually started a workout, the watch’s GPS locked on within 30 seconds, whether we were within the city or within the suburbs, and it accurately tracked our movements. We also found that the watch was accurate when recording our heart rates, though it’d occasionally fail to look on the display.
iPhone compatibility
For the majority of this review, It was tested that the Galaxy Watch paired with a Samsung Galaxy S8, but one amongst the “benefits” of Tizen is that it works with iOS devices, too. You cannot say that about the Apple Watch.
However, like Wear OS, using Tizen with an iOS device isn’t an excellent experience. Interactions are way more limited. While you’ll view notifications from email, Facebook, and more, you cannot reply to them. you’ll reply to text messages, but not iMessages, and you cannot initiate text messages, either. Nor are you able to send an email.
Smart home integration
Samsung is slowly working its SmartThings smart-home capabilities into the company’s other products, from refrigerators to vacuums to routers. A SmartThings app for the Galaxy Watch also helps you to control smart home devices from your wrist. I found the app a small amount slow to load the status of all my smart home devices (of which there are dozens), but then, i used to be ready to turn lights off and on very quickly by pressing a button on the watch’s display.
You can use the watch status as an automation condition, but with some limitations. you’ll set connected devices to alter if the status of the watch indicates you’re awake, sleeping, figuring out or not understanding — so, if you’re figuring out, you’ll be able to have the lights activate and have a wise speaker play music.
Waterproof
Waterproof to 50 meters or 5 ATM (atmospheres): that is the same as the Gear Sport, but a welcome improvement over the Gear S3’s IP68 rating, which was merely “dunk-proof.” The new Galaxy Watch is specifically designed to be swim-proof, including for saltwater and chlorinated water. But you must rinse it afterward.
Full Specification
OS: Tizen OS
Compatibility: Android, iOS
Display: 1.2″ or 1.3″ 360 x 360 Super AMOLED, Corning Gorilla Glass DX
Processor: Dual-core 1.15GHz
Band sizes: 22mm or 20mm
Onboard storage: 4GB
Battery duration: 4 days on 46mm / less on 42mm
Charging method: Wireless
IP rating: 50m
Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS/GLONASS/Beidou 7, NFC
Waterproof: Yes
Ram: 768MB
Warranty: 1 year
UPC: 8801643392109
Software: Tizen OS 5.5
Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Barometer, Optical heart rate sensor, ECG, Ambient light sensor
Colors and materials: 45mm: Mystic Black (stainless steel or titanium), Mystic Silver (stainless steel)
41mm: Mystic Bronze (stainless steel), Mystic Silver (stainless steel)
Dimensions and weight: 45mm: 45 x 46.2 x 11.1mm, 53.8g (stainless steel), 43g (titanium)
41mm: 41 x 42.5 x 11.3mm, 49.2
Accessories
So, you’re looking to shop for a Samsung Galaxy Watch, but you’d wish to customize it with some accessories. Luckily, there are plenty of first- and third-party accessories to settle on from. Samsung sells leather, metal, and silicone watch straps on its website. Many of the first-party options on Samsung.com are listed for older Galaxy Watch devices, but they ought to work together with your new Galaxy Watch.
Conclusion
For its battery life alone, the Samsung Galaxy Watch is that the best smartwatch for Android users. having the ability to travel four days without a recharge is reason enough to choose up this device. We also adore the Tizen interface, which is intuitive and straightforward to navigate, whether you’re swiping across the screen or using the watch’s handy rotating bezel.
Having onboard music storage — essential for those that want to travel light when understanding — is additionally a key differentiator from smartwatches running Google’s software package. That said, there are far fewer apps for Tizen than there are for Wear OS, and Bixby is well behind Google Assistant.
iPhone owners should persist with the Apple Watch because the integration is way more robust and seamless. But until Google (and others) start off with Wear OS watches which will go the space with the Galaxy Watch, Samsung’s wearable is that the one to urge.
