Rating: 4/5
Samsung officially announced the Galaxy Watch along with Galaxy Note 9 at Galaxy Unpacked 2018 conference. Unlike many other smartwatches that we reviewed, this watch looks like a classic digital watch. But this watch has all the touch functionalities of a smartwatch, including smartphone app controls, fitness tracking, and many more. It comes in the premium smartwatch segment and competes with the likes of Apple and Garmin Vivoactive 3.
Key Features
- Touchscreen
- Scratch-resistant
- First-ever wearable to feature a gorilla glass DX+ (Improved optical clarity and toughness)
- Water-resistant with a rating of 5 ATM
- Built-in GPS
- Fitness tracking
- Up to 3 days of battery life with Bluetooth always on
Samsung Galaxy Watch: Design
Samsung won brownie points with its rock-solid stainless steel design for the Galaxy watch. The watch comes with a Scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass DX+, first of its kind among smartwatches at the time of release. Gorilla Glass DX+ gives improvised optical clarity and great toughness. So if you accidentally drop the watch (which I do frequently), don’t worry, the watch can withstand the impact. Moreover, as optical clarity is improved, you would see a slight improvement in battery life.
This watch looks like a classic digital watch. If you don’t want square faces or circular smartwatch dials that are seen quite often in the smartwatch market, then this one’s definitely for you. Also, the build of the watch makes it a solid dustproof watch.
Around the 46 mm AMOLED screen, there is a rotating circular bezel that helps you to navigate through the menu. It is not a compulsory feature but definitely a fancy one.
You have a lot of customization inside the Galaxy wearable app. You get to load a number of stylish watch faces, change display settings such as brightness, background styles, the sound of vibration, and many more. Samsung Galaxy Watch Review helps you to buy the right product.Â
The Samsung Galaxy Watch is water-resistant with a rating of 5 ATM. This means that the watch can survive up to 50 meters in depth. So carry your smartwatch comfortably to your swimming pool or to your shower.
Samsung Galaxy Watch: Smartphone features
There are a lot of exciting features. A premium watch has its own perks. The watch comes with 4 GB internal memory and 768 MB ram. That means it can do a lot. Let’s check out.
Operating system
Samsung Galaxy Watch comes with Tizen OS- a proprietary operating system directly from Samsung. This OS is compatible with both iOS and Android devices.
Third-party app integration
Galaxy watch has a good level of third-party app integration. You have all the necessary applications including Samsung Pay, Spotify, news apps, and Samsung Health apps. Even the popular fitness app Under Armour has a version for Tizen OS.
Fitness tracking
The Samsung Galaxy Watch comes with an accelerometer, an ambient light sensor, a barometer, a gyroscope, a heart rate monitor, NFC, and GPS. All these capabilities help your Galaxy watch to accurately track your fitness metrics, cardiac performance, sleep quality metrics, and stress or breathing metrics.
Notably, the Samsung Health app can track many exercises such as running, arm curls, arm extensions, bench press, deadlifts, lunges, stretching, yoga, etc. The app also added stress management and breath analysis- reminds you to take deep breaths and gives you a stress score.
Bixby Voice assistant
The Bixby voice assistant helps you to reply to messages directly from the smartwatch through voice commands. You can use the Galaxy Watch to issue voice commands such as ‘Play Music’, ‘Start workout’, ‘Setup Alarm’ etc. Bixby is a slightly disappointing voice assistant compared to the other assistants in the market such as Siri, Alexa, and Google. Sometimes, you need to repeat the voice commands for Bixby to pick up the message.
Comfort at your hand
Needless to say, you can schedule appointments, set up reminders, control your music applications (Play/pause/next). You can load the Spotify playlist to your watch (not something any other watch can do at this time). You can also find integration with the SmartThings Hub. That means you can get a notification from your security camera if the camera app is compatible with the SmartThings Hub.
Sleep tracking
There is more to sleep tracking than just tracking deep, light, and REM sleep modes. The app also displays metrics such as calories burned during your sleep time, how long you were in motion, and other nitty-gritty details. This watch is fun to have if you care about these metrics.
Battery
More brownie points here. It is hard to find a smartwatch with these many features that can survive for 3 days with Bluetooth always on. The survivability reduces to a greater extent if you switch on the in-built GPS. You only want to turn on the GPS if you are going outdoor for your fitness activities. Even in this case, if you don’t want to track physical location and map routes, switch off your GPS.
Final Verdict
The simplicity of navigation is better in the Samsung Galaxy watch compared to others. In Apple Watch, you have to do one additional step – scroll around and tap – before selecting an application. If you are not an iPhone user and are looking for an alternative to Apple Watch in the premium segment, then the Galaxy Watch is as close as it can get. We give brownie points for style, build, battery, rotating bezel, built-in GPS, and Samsung Health App. On the other side, the watch is expensive and the voice assistant Bixby is buggy. I prefer Google’s voice assistant.