Samsung introduced its newest flagship watch series, including the Galaxy Watch4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, earlier this month. For several years, I’ve been an avid collector of smartwatches, including Samsung Galaxy Watches and Apple Watches. Smartwatches have altered my relationship with my health. Every night, I wear a Smartwatch to track my sleep, assess my workout performance, and remind myself to breathe when I am stressed. I can honestly claim that wearing a smartwatch has made me more conscious of my health.
That being said, user experience and design are quite important in a smartwatch. We obtain more performant systems with new capabilities and features with each design iteration of Samsung’s Galaxy Watches. When Samsung handed me two loaner Galaxy watches to test, I was ecstatic to put the new Watch4 and Watch4 Classic through their paces. I spent many days using both Galaxy Watch4 systems and have provided my comments below.
Design
The Watch4 Series’ 1.4″ AMOLED screens are crisp. The display provides a variety of brightness options and is extremely sensitive and precise with touch. Samsung has recently done an excellent job of developing high-quality displays for its smartphones, and the Galaxy Watch4 appears to benefit from some of that technology.
The Watch4 replaces the Watch Active line with a more minimal and simple touchscreen interface and two buttons, one for the home and one for the back. The Watch4 Classic has the classic design of a Samsung Smartwatch, with 5-minute intervals around the bezel and the same two buttons on the side. It has the Galaxy Watch4 Classic’s characteristic rotating bezel for accessing the watch menu, which is my favorite feature. It enables me to go swiftly between all of my apps, begin a workout in seconds, and easily check my recorded sleep time.
User Experience
My first task after unboxing the Galaxy Watch4 was to turn it on and sync it with my Galaxy Flip3 5G. I upgraded my software version in the Galaxy Wearables app, like I always do. After that, I went to the Google Play Store and downloaded a few other apps, including Samsung Health and SmartThings. The updated Wear OS is one of the most significant enhancements to the Samsung Galaxy Watch4. The most recent version of the software was created as a result of a collaboration between Google and Samsung in order to produce a better watch operating system. You can anticipate a comparable appearance and feel from your smartphone to your watch with the Samsung One UI Watch. If you download a watch-compatible app to your smartphone, it will automatically install on your Watch4.
Samsung Health is by far my most utilized app. It helps me keep track of my calorie burn, food intake, active calories, steps, sleep, activity heart rate, stress, and other activities. I liked waking up and evaluating my REM sleep, light sleep, deep sleep, and the amount of time I was awake throughout the night. I appreciated how the watch calculated a sleep score based on data from the previous night. The Watch4 can also detect snoring throughout the night, and happily, I didn’t make any noises this time. On the fitness front, I utilized the Watch4 device to track a weightlifting session and many walks during the week. The Watch4 can monitor over 90 sports modes, so there is certainly something for everyone.
The new body composition measurement tool is a fantastic addition to the health feature set. You may measure your skeletal muscle, fat mass, basal metabolic rate, body water, and body fat by placing two fingers on the two exterior buttons. I used it and was reading in seconds. I’m not sure how precise this method is in comparison to a medical scan, but it’s still useful.
Specs
My Galaxy Watch4 devices both came with 1.4 “displays, 1.5GB of RAM, 16GB of storage internal, and a dual-core “5nm” processor Each model is also protected by Samsung Knox security. The Watch4’s smaller variants include the same hardware but just 1.2 inches “instead of displaying The entire experience is powered by Wear OS, which Samsung developed in collaboration with Google. It was disappointing to hear that Wear OS 3 devices could not be paired with iPhones. However, I am not aware of many iPhone users acquiring a Galaxy Watch.
The exterior case is made of Armor Aluminum and complements the Sport Band strap perfectly. The Watch4 weighs 30.3g, whereas the Watch4 Classic weighs 52g. I realize gram is a difficult number for an end user to evaluate, but the Watch4 Classic feels substantially heavier than the Watch4. Although there are numerous sizing and connection options, I see this strategy as Samsung covering all bases with a watch that is suitable for everyone’s needs. For an extra cost, each Galaxy Watch4 can support LTE, with AT&T and Verizon service.
Battery life
My Watch4 devices were both larger models with the larger 361mAh battery. I can’t speak to the battery life difference between the larger models with 361mAh batteries and the slightly smaller variants with 247mAh batteries, but I imagine similar battery life if Samsung considered the same battery life to display size ratios. Samsung said that each Galaxy Watch4 model would last approximately 40 hours.
Wrapping up
After extensive use with both the Galaxy Watch4 and the Galaxy Watch 4 Classic, I believe Samsung is doing an excellent job with its two flagship watches, mainly from the perspective of an Android user. I like how Samsung focused on luxury design, health and wellness features, performant hardware, and offering a variety of flavors of a similar design to accommodate the widest range of user tastes.
The looks aren’t ideal, but the user experience in the domain of Smart Watches is excellent, thanks to a collaborative software and hardware effort. Hopefully, we will continue to see Google and Samsung support for improving user experience with Wear OS 3 in the future, which I believe we will because Google has numerous developer resources at its disposal.
