Samsung Galaxy Watch4 review

Wear OS Powered by Samsung

A huge selling point for this year's line of Galaxy watches is the move to Google's Wear OS, which unlocks access to Google's catalog of apps, like Keep, Gmail, Maps and more. It also opens the world of Wear OS apps to the Galaxy Watch, which up until now had only a limited number of Tizen apps to work with.

The Galaxy Watch4 runs on Wear OS 3, Google's latest wearable OS, which is yet to make it to any other smartwatches. Part of this is the hardware requirements - unofficially, you need at least Qualcomm's latest 4100/4100+ platform and 1GB of RAM to run Wear OS 3.

Wear OS 3 brings many improvements, but none is bigger than the new Tiles to the left of the watch face. Think of these as widgets for specific apps, which show off app-specific information on your watch. Up until Wear OS 2, you'd need to scroll down a list of apps, choose the one you want and tap to see specifics.

Wear OS 3 allows manufacturers to customize the look of the interface, and Samsung has carried over its Tizen interface pretty much 1 to 1. The only difference, really, is the app drawer, accessible with a swipe from the bottom. It's very Apple Watch-esque, and it lists all of your apps as a honeycomb of little circular icons.

This is also where you can access your list of recent apps - from the topmost dual-apps icon, which is very unintuitive to the point where you're unlikely to ever see this screen.

Samsung has integrated Wear OS with its One UI very deeply. Many of your phone settings are mirrored on the watch - your Do Not Disturb schedule, your alarms, your Calendar. If you install an app on your phone that has a corresponding Wear OS app, your watch will automatically get the app as well.

You can change a lot of the Galaxy Watch4 settings from a Galaxy smartphone - the watch face, rearranging or adding new Tiles, etc.

Like before, you can use the watch as a remote viewfinder and shutter for your Galaxy smartphone's camera.

You can also take and make calls through the Galaxy Watch4 itself, using its very loud built-in speaker. The experience is great, especially when you're driving a car or walking on the street and can't easily reach your phone.

So by default, you get your watch face in the center, your notifications to the left and your tiles to the right.

Samsung has preloaded a number of its own Tizen-derived watch faces to the Galaxy Watch4 as well as a number of Wear OS ones. You can download hundreds of third-party watch faces from the Google Play store, but there aren't really good ones for free. There are apps with paid watch faces from designers and artists that you can buy better.

The preloaded watch faces can be customized. You can change what widgets a watch face shows as well the accent color of certain elements or the whole watch face.

A word on Google apps on the Galaxy Watch4. There's still no Google Assistant for the Galaxy Watch, although there's one in the works. For now, you get Bixby, which can be summoned with the voice command 'Hi, Bixby' or by a double-press on the home button. Bixby can do things like play your playlist or ring your phone or call a person from your contact list. But where Google's voice Assistant is better is understanding commands - Bixby would routinely miss a word or get it wrong.

Then there's Google Pay and Google Fit, which can't be set as the default apps for payments or fitness tracking over Samsung Pay and Samsung Health. Those functionalities are coming in the future, reportedly. Another issue is certain apps like Google Fit not recognizing the rotating (or in this case virtual) bezel and requiring you to swipe on the screen itself.

Notifications are a primary reason for buy a smartwatch and Wear OS is one of the best platforms in this regard. A swipe from the left brings up your notifications panel, and you can scroll between different apps and their notifications.

You can reply to texts with an emoji, handwriting, a voice memo or text to speech with Bixby. However, certain apps, like Viber, will show you images, while others, like Messenger, will tell you someone's sent you a photo but not show you.

There's one issue we have with notifications - when you have notifications from multiple apps, a swipe down would scroll through them, when you have notifications from a single app, that same swipe down deletes all notifications. Surely a side-swipe from the center or something similar would be a better way of clearing things.

Finally, there are a few issues with Wear OS on the Galaxy Watch4 that we'd like to address. For instance, you can't carry over your apps and watch faces from your Tizen Galaxy Watch.

Another, more serious issue is that the Galaxy Watch4 isn't compatible with iOS at the time of writing, which hasn't been the case with previous Wear OS and Tizen watches. Samsung Health is also available on the iPhone, so we expect that support for iOS will arrive at some point.

Samsung Health and fitness tracking

Probably the biggest selling point of the Galaxy Watch4 is the extensive fitness tracking ability. From workouts to health, this watch can track it all and can give you useful feedback and data.

A quick negative before we get to the many positives. The Galaxy Watch4 will work with any Android phone to monitor heart rate, body composition, blood oxygen levels as well as track sleep and stress - all you need is the free Samsung Health from the Play Store. But ECG and Blood Pressure tracking will work only with a Galaxy smartphone with the Health Monitor App installed from the Galaxy store. This is a bit of a letdown that could put off many buyers without a Galaxy phone.

But as you'd just spent over €260 on a Galaxy smartwatch, you're likely a Galaxy smartphone owner as well.

The Galaxy Watch4 uses Samsung Health to track a long list of workouts, including running, walking, cycling, hiking, rowing, swimming (indoor and out), treadmill and other. The watch would automatically detect when you've walked for a few minutes and start a workout and track your heart rate during the workout to measure whether you've been active and how much - don't want to go overboard with those anaerobic heart rates!

After a workout, you can look up parameters like your average heart rate, a breakdown of your heart rate zones (low intensity, weight control, aerobic, anaerobic, maximum).

Workout information

A hike would give you the pace of walking, the elevation data and your heart rate data, as well as a GPS track of your progress on a map.

Hiking information

Moving on to health tracking. The big novelty this year is BMI (Body mass index) monitoring, which breaks down your body's muscle, fat and metabolic rate and combines it into a neat rating. Normally a DEXA/DXA (bone densitometry) scanner would be fitted into a scale, taking in your weight and conducting small electro-charges through the soles of your feet to measure body composition.

Because the Galaxy Watch4 can only to the latter part it asks you for your weight every time it performs a reading. This is fine, but makes the reading inaccurate for people that don't have a scale at home and don't know what their current weight is.

Then there's the accuracy. Samsung claims 98% when compared to industry scanners, but we have no way of verifying this. A couple of us here at HQ gave the BMI reading a go. Samsung Health says we're a bit overweight and have too much fat mass and too much skeletal muscle, which can't be right! Right?

To conclude, BMI readings should be used to take a baseline from which you can observe changes over time - be active, enjoy a balanced diet and use changes in your data to better your health.

We performed an ECG through the Galaxy Watch4 and got a clean bill of health, well sort of. The Watch4 will only ever look for atrial fibrillation in your sinus rhythm, which we didn't have.

Sleep tracking is very advanced on the Galaxy Watch4. You get a total number of hours in bed, which the watch calls total sleep time, weirdly. Then a break down of the actual sleep time, broken down further into REM sleep, light sleep and deep sleep. The Galaxy Watch4 would monitor your blood oxygen levels while you're asleep and also estimate how many calories you've used.

There's snore detection which uses your phone in tandem with the watch - when the watch detects certain movement, the phone starts an audio recording to determine if you're snoring. We tested for it, but the watch reported no snoring.

You need to have a general idea of what you're looking for sleep readings, and Samsung Health will give you some guidelines and a score. From generalizations like 'most adults need 7 to 8 hours of sleep' to more insightful information about deep sleep accounting for physical recovery and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep taking care of mental recovery.

If you're willing to have a watch strapped to your wrist while you're sleeping, the Galaxy Watch4 can give you insights for your own consideration.