Extremely Good, but Just Falls Short of Being Excellent – Instead of writing a review talking about the tech specs (which you can all easily find elsewhere), I shall try to give an overview of my experience in wearing the watch almost every day for the past 5 months. Also, just as a side note for a bit of context which may be referred to, my smartwatch before this was the Pebble Time.

Design/Interface:

One of the key reasons I bought the watch was due to the fact that it looked like a watch, and that I could realistically wear it in professional settings (something that was unfortunately not possible with my Pebble). On the wrist, assuming you get the size which best matches yours, the watch sits nicely and does not instantly look like a ‘gadget’. I have the watchface set to the always-on mode, which helps with this as well and is something I’d recommend as it does look admittedly odd if you leave it off since there is just a blank black screen visible until you lift your wrist. In my opinion, this aesthetic isn’t worth the extra day of battery life you may net. In terms of its general usability, the Galaxy Watch is extremely intuitive to use and I’ve yet to find myself mistakenly pressing the wrong button or selecting the wrong option. You may have heard about its rotating bezel, and its safe for me to say it lives up to the hype. One recommendation I would make though if you intend to wear the watch in professional environments is to buy a different strap, as the included silicon one feels a bit too ‘sporty’. I should note that it is extremely easy to change straps as the watch uses standard quick release pins so you shouldn’t be too worried about having issues there.

Battery:

Not much to say here, it performs almost exactly as advertised. The advertised battery life of 4 days from Samsung is while using the setting that keeps the screen off until you lift your wrist. I, however, use the always-on screen setting, and even then, still get 3 days of battery which I believe is quite acceptable considering just how good the display is and the power it would require to run. Charging the watch is quite simple as well, there is no port as it only charges wirelessly. I have the charger set up on my desk and simply drop it on that (it attaches to the charger magnetically and is quite secure) every few days.

Features:

I will be honest here, the only other reason I have a smartwatch is so that it can display notifications from my phone. As such, I’m in no position to talk about the health/fitness features, apart from the fact it seems to fairly accurately automatically track my walks from the train station to university. The watch runs Samsung’s own operating system (called Tizen), which is not to be confused with Android. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the OS – it does exactly what you need it to – there’s also not much to write home about. It has extremely limited app support, so much so that I haven’t found any app worth installing and as such am only running the default apps, most of which don’t see any use. In terms of how it handles notifications, the Galaxy Watch does the job. Using the rotating bezel (which has an extremely satisfying click to it), makes cycling through multiple app notifications a breeze. The watch allows you to send pre-written replies to messages (eg. Yes, ok, on my way, etc.), otherwise you can even type on the watch itself (which is cumbersome for long messages, but one can easily get used to it for writing <1 sentence responses).

Now as I mentioned earlier, this watch replaces my Pebble Time, and from my experience using that, I have a few slight nit-picks with the Galaxy Watch that unfortunately stop it from being a truly top-tier smartwatch, regardless of how it fares against its main competitors. Firstly, the watch handles multiple notifications from messaging apps poorly. For example, if you receive 1 message from a friend, the watch has no troubles displaying that message. However, if your friend then sends another message before you have checked the first one on the watch, the OS decides to bundle both together, meaning you are no longer able to view the full messages, and can only see a preview. This may not seem like something you would ever think about, however coming from a Pebble which would allow me to read each individual message in full, without having to take out my phone, I’d expect that as a minimum from a product that’s worth more than double that. As such, it can be quite frustrating to have to still take out my phone to read messages, when I would expect the key roles of a smartwatch is to allow me to avoid doing so. The second minor UI issue I’ve noticed is that notifications do not actually display on your screen unless you physically lift up your wrist. While this may not seem like a big deal, imagine you are in a meeting and feel your watch buzz. Naturally, you’d be seated, potentially with your arms folded or resting on the table, with either of these positions still giving you full view of your watch. The issue here is that even though you can see your watch, and even with the always-on setting enabled, the Galaxy Watch simply refuses to show you the notification unless you make the exaggerated motion of lifting your wrist up as if you were checking the time. This is also the case when walking, as the watch still doesn’t show the notification when I make the fairly natural reaction to simply glance at my watch which is by my side. Lastly, the only other slight niggle I will make note of is that there is a noticeable delay for the watch to show you the notification itself. For example, you feel a notification, you lift up your wrist to view it, but then have to wait a noticeable period of time for it to actually show it, as it spends the first second simply showing the name of the app it's coming from. I would like to point out though, that for all 3 of these points I’ve raised, I strongly believe that they can all be fixed via basic software tweaks, and are not a result of any hardware limitations. As such, I hope these are addressed, and would, in turn, make this already great smartwatch an excellent one.

Conclusion:

The biggest advantage the Samsung Galaxy Watch has over its competitors is to do what a smartwatch should do (ie. Display notifications) and look good while doing so. The Galaxy Watch certainly does that, and quite well. The lack of apps is a bit disappointing although there aren’t exactly many apps I can imagine I would want on a watch in the first place, due to how difficult it would be to use on a much smaller screen (this is also the case for the Apple Watch, which has a significant number of apps available). The only gripes I had with the watch were all things that I believe can easily be fixed with a few software tweaks, but overall, the Samsung Galaxy Watch is definitely the best smartwatch currently on the market for your Android device.