Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra review

Hardware and sensors

While the Galaxy Watch Ultra uses the same 1.5-inch OLED display as last year's Watch6 Classic, the SoC is new, arguably one of the centerpiece features of the new watch. Maybe a larger display would have been more in line with the Ultra context.

In any case, the display is once again protected by sapphire glass, has 480 x 480px resolution and is bright enough for excellent outdoor legibility.

With the screen out of the way, let's take a closer look at the Exynos W1000. The chipset is completely different from the W920 and W930 SoCs from the last couple of generations as it employs five cores instead of two and is based on a more advanced 3nm manufacturing process.

It's a chip designed specifically for wearables and employs one big Cortex-A781 core running at 1.6 GHz and 4x low-power Cortex-A551 cores ticking at 1.5 GHz. The GPU on board is the Mali-G68 - the same one used for the previous W930 SoC.

The W1000 is paired with 2GB of RAM, again the same as before, but the built-in storage is now 32GB, so you can store more Spotify playlists for offline listening.

The new configuration is supposed to make the smartwatch snappier and more efficient. As the battery tests show, the Watch Ultra offers impressive battery life, especially considering it's a Wear OS-powered watch.

When it comes to performance, it's a noticeable step in the right direction. Not that the Watch6 series was laggy, but the Ultra definitely feels smoother and more responsive. The W1000 chip makes it enough to notice.

Sensors-wise, the watch is fully equipped by today's standards

• Accelerometer
• Barometer
• Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis Sensor
• Electrical Heart Sensor
• Gyro Sensor
• Geomagnetic Sensor
• Infrared Temperature Sensor
• Light Sensor
• Optical Heart Rate Sensor

The list is pretty much identical to the Watch6 Classic but skips the hall sensor, which is used for more accurate positioning detection.

Speaking of positioning, the Watch Ultra now incorporates L1+LG dual-frequency GPS instead of just L1 GPS. This improves tracking accuracy and solves issues for runners, who often see standard smartwatches as inferior to other outdoor wearables like Garmin's.

The marketed BioActive sensor is here to stay, which is just another name for the bioelectrical impedance analysis sensor. It measures water through impedance and assesses your body composition in terms of lean muscle mass, body fat percentage, water weight, BMI and even basal metabolic rate. It takes just 15 seconds to do 2,400 measurements to figure those out. We talk more about that on the following page.

Battery life

Battery life is marketed as one of the centerpiece features of this watch. The Galaxy Watch Ultra has improved its endurance, at least compared to the previous Galaxy Watch generation. But it's a minor step up from the Galaxy Watch5 Pro, for example, and still drags behind some competitors. Notably, most of these competitors don't run on a proper OS, though.

In any case, the Galaxy Watch Ultra is powered by a 590 mAh battery, just like the Galaxy Watch5 Pro from two years ago, and we squeezed out about 72 hours without the always-on display feature, but with raise-to-wake, HR measurements every 15 minutes while at rest, with a classic-style watch face and with some workouts, navigation, sleep tracking and a few walks in-between. Notifications were allowed, and the display was set to auto brightness.

We did a second run, but this time with always-on with the same settings, and we got 48 hours on the dot.

Samsung claims you can even go up to 48 hours of workout tracking in the dedicated exercise power-saving mode or up to 100 hours of normal usage with the power-saving mode turned on.

Charging is painfully slow and takes almost two hours to complete a charge from near 0%, using the bundled wireless charger. And you can't use any other charger too.

The watch doesn't work with third-party wireless charging pads or non-Samsung smartphones with reverse wireless charging.