Samsung Galaxy Watch review

Tizen 4.0

Contrary to recent rumors that we could see Google's Wear OS make an appearance, the Galaxy Watch continues to use Tizen as its Operating System of choice now in its fourth iteration.

We're not going to cover old ground here as we've previously covered Tizen in our past reviews of the Gear S3 and Sport. What follows is a summary of the new features that we've discovered during our time testing the Galaxy Watch.

Watch faces - certain default watch faces now go the extra mile to further reinforce the feel of a real watch. The usual 3D effects are now supplemented by utilizing the onboard Gyro to provide real-time lighting effects that change when you move your wrist. Hold the Galaxy Watch up to your ear, and you can even hear a ticking sound. While not exactly life-changing features, they're a nice touch nonetheless.

A selection of Galaxy Watch default watch faces - Frontier, Fitness Centric and Rings

Goodnight mode - whose sole aim is to prevent disturbances while you're sleeping. Once activated, all alerts are muted excepted for alarms and system sounds, while 'Watch always on' is deactivated, as is the Wake-up gesture. This option should also prolong battery life.

While you can add Goodnight mode to your quick settings, you have to remember to turn this on and off manually. We'd like a way for this to activate automatically, either based on when your watch detects when you're asleep or using a schedule similar to 'do not disturb.'

Daily assistant - available for Android only, is Samsung's response to Apple's Siri watch face. Your Galaxy watch will now give you a morning briefing including the weather, your upcoming schedule for the day and reminders. While you'll receive another briefing just before bed, based on your sleep patterns, including remaining reminders and your health information for the day.

My Day watch face

My Day watch face - displays a summary of your schedule for the next 12 hours around the outside of the watch face with the next appointment in your calendar highlighted. Touching an appointment on the watch face pops up a little more information while rotating the bezel allows you to move between appointments. Finally, touching the pop-up shows you all the details regarding the appointment including notes.

This rapidly became one of our favorite watches faces and worked fine with iOS.

Read notifications aloud - employing text to speech to read out your notifications when connected via Bluetooth headphones. We actually found this useful during workouts when our weight training gloves covered the Galaxy Watch. A unique use case we agree, but useful nonetheless.

Bixby - activated by double pressing the 'home' key, requires either a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection to work with zero on-device capability when you have no connectivity, rendering it brain-dead if you're out running for example. The LTE versions will presumably work without a phone.

When paired with our iPhone, even with a network connection our hit rate was low and we were often told that an error had occurred and to try again later - could this be to the servers not being fully ready? In contrast, when we paired the Galaxy Watch with our Samsung S9+ Bixby behaved as expected, able to start specific workouts and respond to other basic requests. On our Bluetooth Galaxy Watch, we experienced about a second delay when using Bixby. If you decide Bixby isn't for you, the double press of the home key can be customized to perform another function.

Show last app - Within Settings>Display, the new 'Show last app' option allows you to specify the time to display a recently used app when the screen re-activated after timing out.

Our only criticism of Tizen isn't a fault of the software itself, but that developer support isn't as high as that of the Apple Watch. Therefore, if apps are essential to you check to see if it's available before taking the plunge.

You can check out our Gear S3 and Gear Sport reviews for additional details on previous iterations of Tizen.

Health & Fitness

We lambasted the Samsung Gear Sport for its Fitness tracking capabilities when we reviewed it last year. If Health and Fitness are a priority you should probably use a more fitness-focused device on your wrist, but has Samsung improved things enough for the majority of people to ensure that you keep the Galaxy Watch on your wrist during your workouts?

They're off to a good start, and in addition to the revised HRM module, Samsung has teamed up with the University of California to enhance the software and its supporting algorithms to interpret better the measurements and fluctuations in the heart rate data captured. This collaboration should also bear fruit downstream later in respects to longer-term health insights to better predict Atrial Fibrillation, Hypertension and Sleep Apnea.

Daily Activity Tracking & Health

The Galaxy Watch tracks your steps, floors, sleep and kcal burned throughout the day. Regarding accuracy, no two trackers are identical, but the measurements we obtained were well in the ball-park, and as such we have no qualms with the results.

With its excellent battery life, the 46mm Galaxy Watch is more effective at tracking the quality of your sleep, spending more time on your wrist as opposed to the charger overnight. The resulting log includes the 4 stages of sleep - deep, light, rem and awake. Again, in comparison to our test devices the sleep tracked was pretty much spot on.

Stress monitoring is all new. You can set the Galaxy Watch to measure your stress continuously, or you can choose when to measure your stress by selecting the measure option within the stress widget.

Once the Galaxy Watch has a baseline of your stress levels, it will offer up a breathing exercise if it determines that you're stressed. Additionally, you can choose to perform a breathing exercise to help you relax at any time.

Unfortunately, your stress data isn't transferred to the Samsung Health app on your phone if you're running iOS, so don't go looking for your stress levels there. Instead, you have to refer to the watch itself to see your stress history.

Finally, we come to 24x7 heart rate tracking and accuracy. We witnessed no issues with 24x7 HR recording and accuracy during our regular daily routines and sleep.

Sports & Fitness

The Galaxy watch will now automatically detect six types of activities when you exercise for around 10 minutes, covering walking, running, cycling, elliptical trainer, rowing machine and the ambiguously titled Dynamic workout which gives the impression that it will detect vigorous cardio style workouts.

In addition, the number of activities has been increased to 40 covering;

If you select one of the new weight training activities, you're presented with a quick animation on how to perform the exercise while during the exercise the watch will guide you through the motions and count your reps.

Beginners may find these useful, but in practice, you may soon tire of them. During our chest routine, we found that on a number of occasions our reps were not counted and you have no way to add the reps or skip the set manually. Additionally, not all exercise types are covered off in the above list. During our routine, no Chest Flyes are supported - resulting in you using the 'Other workout' routine as a catch-all.

Frustratingly, each exercise is captured as an individual workout resulting in you quickly filling up the Samsung Galaxy Health apps Me panel. A more structured and coherent approach would be to include the individual exercises within a single workout.

A welcome improvement, however, is that you can now go from one exercise to another without having to back out and start a new activity completely. Upon selecting 'FINISH' within your current workout, simply select ' NEXT WORKOUT,' choose an activity type, and you're good to go.

We'd still like to see the facility to string together multiple activities to enable true multi-sport activities, this way we can create our triathlon activity.

Before you start your training you can select a Training target. These are limited; no option to create you own HIT sessions, distance is only available if you're using GPS. Treadmill sessions for example only allow time and kcals as targets.

During workouts, the screens can be lightly customized to display the information that's important to you.

Fitness Testing

We set the bar high when testing the fitness and sports elements of smart watches by using a Garmin Fenix 5 paired with a Polar H10 ECG heart rate monitor, our gold standard for measuring heart rate. Optical heart rate accuracy also varies by individual, usually dependent on hair density, position and fit and the wrist and even skin color.

Our Polar HR10 used for heart rate comparison testing

To recap, with steady state activities a good OHM such as that employed by the Galaxy Watch shouldn't deviate too far from the ECG of our Polar H10. So let's put that to the test with our treadmill test.

Treadmill Run

In our 1.5k treadmill test the Galaxy Watch acquitted itself well pretty much matching the ECG of the Polar H10, a test we recall the Gear Sport didn't pass muster.

Treadmill run - select for larger view

Outside Run

Moving outside we set off for a 5K run, and again the Galaxy Watch performed admirably not deviating much from our ECG baseline.

We also used the outside run as a GPS test, with circa 50% of the run taking place under the canopy of trees. Firstly, the Galaxy Watch was quick to find a GPS lock ensuring that we could take off for our run without having to wait around.

5K run GPS testing - select for larger view

Overall, the Galaxy Watch was 200 meters behind the Fenix 5 when calculating the running distances. You have no control over the sampling rate of the Samsung Galaxy watch which could account for some corners (literally!) being cut.

The course we ran consisted of two main loops with a smaller loop used to complete the final distance. You can see on the Fenix 5 that the three times the 'main drag' was run down the plots are pretty close together with the Galaxy Watch have a greater deviation. Oddly, the plots that we received from the Galaxy Watch are incomplete - with the thick blue line showing the fastest part of our run.

Gym Session

Our next test recorded our gym session. It was back day, and we started with heavy deadlifts and moved on from there. The divide between the OHM of the Galaxy watch and the ECG of the Polar H10 was much broader - but again, but overall not as far off as some devices that have passed through our hands. This is to be expected due to the different technologies employed and is an issue with OHM's in general.

Gym session - select for larger view

In the weeks that followed we logged many hours in the gym and pounding the pavement, and overall the Galaxy Watch impressed and was on par with its competitors.