ie a battery life of somewhere between one and two days. A realistic expectation is that you can have notifications, 60 minutes of daily GPS usage and be able to track your sleep before a morning re-charge. So if you are looking for 3-day battery life you can forget about it. I could easily use 20% of the battery with one hour of GPS-enabled running and with the brightness increased from the default. If you want to enable the always-on display and then crank up the brightness you will gobble through the battery. So Watch4 might have all the state-ot-the-art sensor types….but, so what? Can you actually use them all accurately? If we then turn to SpO2 you will find that to be useless unless you are ill and then the accuracy of the GPS is ‘meh’ and the accuracy of the heart rate during exercise is super-meh. HOWEVER the blood pressure and ECG don’t work on older Galaxy smartphones – they will only work with newer Galaxy smartphones. That sensor package matches or beats all other smartwatchesincluding the Apple Watch 6. Obviously, you get heart rate in your workouts…I mean…obviously! But you also get sensors for these measurements continuous stress via HRV, blood pressure, ECG/EKG, SpO2 blood oxygen, snoring, sleep, GPS/GNSS, a barometer and a compass.

The Galaxy Watch 4 gives you the choice of Samsung Pay or Google Pay which should accept any of your payment cards. But what there won’t be is Google Assistant at least for now (kinda), you will have to make do with Samsung’s inferior Bixby and that meant that I couldn’t always easily control my Google smart home devices.ĭuring Covid, those of us with smartwatches relished the ease of payment from the wrist which trumps paying by smartphone. From Strava, Runtastic and Nike Run Club through to Spotify, YouTube Music and Google Maps there will be an app for your heart’s every desire. Perhaps the biggest selling point is Google’s app store. The smaller, 40mm model fits comfily on my wrist but the strap is poor and cheap and the watch case design is so bland that it would look identical on a $40 Chinese rip-off.

Indeed, the touchscreen works very well despite a few minor annoyances. More than that, the individual screens are generally beautifully designed for every interaction.Īfter only a relatively small learning curve, you will be flicking from screen to screen with wanton abandon…Watch4 is intuitive and easy to use. You will quickly be wowed by the display on the Galaxy Watch 4 which is bright, colourful and vibrant – seriously impressive. The disappointing and clunky setup process is a one-off annoyance and soon forgotten if you are using Wear OS 3 for the first time.

Galaxy watch active timer