Samsung Galaxy Watch Review

The Galaxy Watch earned the top score overall, narrowly outperforming the Apple Watch Series 4 for the top spot and improving on the performance of the predecessors, the Samsung Gear Sport and the Gear S3. While the Apple Watch has a slightly more comprehensive set of smart functions — better music control and more standalone apps — the Galaxy has a far better battery life, giving it the overall edge. This superior battery life is also what gives it an edge over the S3 and the Sport, in addition to its stronger showing in our smart functions test than the Sport.

Ease of Use

The screen on this smartwatch is highly responsive. It immediately wakes and lights up when we raise our wrists, and the touchscreen responds to our taps or swipes with no noticeable delay. In addition to the touchscreen, this watch also has a rotating bezel that can be used as an input method, which we found to be quite handy

This watch securely sits in a cradle to recharge. It is quick and easy to get set up and is hard to misalign when placing it in the cradle. It is also very easy to swap wristbands out, using the standard watch strap release mechanism.

This watch is also rated to a depth of 50 meters or 5 ATM and makes it very easy to capture a screenshot of the display, in case you need to preserve anything shown on the display.

Smart Functions

This watch is great for replying to messages, with even messages from apps like Facebook Messenger showing up like standard SMS messages and allowing you to reply with a small library of responses. This watch does have a standalone Spotify and Uber app, but many users have complained about the Uber app being quite buggy. However, there aren't yet standalone versions of apps like Shazam, Strava, Evernote, IFTTT, Instagram, or Twitter (or Twitter clones) that other top-notch smartwatches have.

The Galaxy allows you to take calls right from your wrist with decent speaker and microphone quality. You also have a decent set of music controls, but we did miss the fact that you can't mark a song thumbs-up or thumbs-down when using streaming services like Pandora.

This watch can be configured with Samsung Pay and features its own GPS unit for standalone navigation or fitness tracking purposes. Additionally, there is also an LTE version of this watch — for an additional cost — that allows you to use cellular and data services without being tethered to your smartphone.

Display

The 1.3" 360x360 full-color AMOLED delivers an overall amazing picture, though we did find it just a tad inferior to the Retina displays of the Apple Watch. These specs are also for the larger 46mm version of the Galaxy, with the 42mm version delivering the same great picture, just a little bit smaller.

It's super easy to read this screen in both bright sunlight and in darker conditions. You also have the option of turning on an automatic backlight adjusting mode or an always-on mode, depending on what your personal preferences are or what activity you are doing.

Fitness Impact

This wearable did a stellar job at tracking our steps, showing a calculated count that was extremely close to the true count in each of our three one-mile tests. The largest difference was -25 steps, or about 1.2% under the true count and the best was -10 steps, or 0.05% under our manual count. We also found the heart rate sensor to be quite good, usually within 2 bpm of the number shown by our chest strap heart rate monitor, but it's a bit more accurate at resting heart rates than active heart rates while working out. You can set the watch to monitor your heart rate continuously, measure it every 10 minutes, or disable it entirely — the heart rate sensor can be a significant drain on the battery, so this is something to keep in mind if you need the maximum battery life possible.

This smartwatch can record data for 39 different workout modes. It will also automatically detect workouts rather than requiring you to manually start fitness tracking. It can detect if you change activities mid-workout, like going from running to push-ups, and can store up to 6 different activities in each workout session. It can also provide voice coaching for some activities, like cycling. It can also measure and estimate your stress level so you can track it throughout the day.

Unfortunately, this watch struggles to accurately track the flights of stairs climbed, missing several flights in our test.

Battery Life

With normal use, we were able to get almost 5 full days out of this watch, or 118 hours. However, this can decrease with heavy use or if you are using power-hungry sensors, like GPS, but you should still be able to get about 24 hours of use with the GPS on. We tested the 46mm version, which has slightly reduced battery life compared to the 42 mm version.

This watch takes a while to recharge, requiring about three hours to fully charge, and reaches the halfway mark after about 76 minutes on the charger.

Value

While this smartwatch is an all-around excellent product, there are definitely other products out there that are significantly cheaper and are a better bet if you are shopping on a tight budget.

Conclusion