Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 – Galaxy Watch Ultra

The exact base Galaxy Watch design dates back a couple of years, at least since the Galaxy Watch 4, and you know what? I’m good with that. It was already a handsome wearable – good-looking but still functional – and Samsung has only refined the aesthetic since then. AMOLED panels have gotten larger, bezels have gotten slimmer, controls have gotten shaken up, but the Galaxy Watch 7 still feels immediately familiar once you strap it to your wrist – in fact, the last Samsung wearable I spent a significant amount of time with was the Galaxy Watch 4, and I didn’t really expect to feel so at home in this new model like no time had passed.

In a world of maximalist smartwatches (not least, Samsung’s own now, with the Ultra’s arrival), the Galaxy Watch 7’s low-profile, minimalist look feels, well, refreshing. Note that I’m part of the problem here: I’m still wearing something gigantic and do-it-all, by which I mean I’m wearing the bulky, dedicated GPS watch from Garmin most of the time – it’s light and the battery doesn’t matter because it’s never a charge goal, so I don’t even think about it. But I’m thrilled that Samsung – is, it seems – not making it just for guys like me. I’m not Entitled 2 Versa 3 whatever. But the switch from a truly big chunk, to this truly slim strip, is such a refreshing one. Wearing the Galaxy Watch 7 – now I’m imagining it the way I did, comfortably – feels like wearing something like, say, the Moto 360, but that wasn’t killed and instead was the last iteration of a Wear OS watch. Smooth, responsive, and just shaped like a watch.

I’m glad Samsung hasn’t moved away from its sleek, stylish, circular design.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t wear most of my GPS watches to a formal occasion, like a wedding — but I wouldn’t hesitate to slap on the Galaxy Watch 7 with the proper face on it. Samsung’s dedication to the round AMOLED panel is such that I’ve jumped right back in with a bunch of my old favourites. I’ll pop into the Endangered Animals one once in a while, or maybe I’ll roll with the Steps Challenge one (especially on my days when I’m running), but I’ve mainly been sporting Samsung’s Perpetual face. It’s… busy, to say the least, with the day and month crammed around the edges and the phase of the moon at its centre. Maybe the black background predominates to show off Samsung’s deep AMOLED blacks, but who cares — it works for me.

However, there’s one thing Samsung did change with the Galaxy Watch 7 design: The Digital Bezel is gone, and I’m sad. I’ve had this feature since the very first Galaxy Watch Active I owned, and now it’s dead. It was a little wonky on the Galaxy Watch 6 series, but I’d rather Samsung figure out how to fix it than quit altogether. You can’t have a rotating physical bezel on the Galaxy Watch 7; you have to go back to Galaxy Watch 6 and grab the Classic for that instead.

Instead, the Galaxy Watch 7 replaces it with a home and back button for tactile navigation and swiping through the display for everything else. The new control scheme works just fine – it is, after all, how most smartwatches operate – but there was something incredibly satisfying about whipping your finger around the periphery of the face to scroll forward and back.

Though it comes across as an unwanted Sequel No One Asked For, aspects hidden under the surface of the Galaxy Watch 7 confirm that it is not. Yes, Samsung talked about the Galaxy AI features and health updates while talking about the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone? The shiny new updates sound so much better on a shiny new watch than sprinkled on an already familiar form factor. But though Samsung didn’t mention its updates in connection with the Galaxy Watch 7, I am pleased to say that Galaxy AI is the meaningful update this wearable needs to stay frontline in serving as a fitness tracker.

Yes, it’s time to discuss Samsung’s new-and-improved approach to health tracking And to be fair, most of the generative AI features that have been added to flagship Android phones over the past year have been lacklustre additions. No amount of marketing is going to convince me that there’s enough polish on the Portrait Studio that I’ll use it … and while I will say that, given more time, Gemini could make Google Assistant’s presence on my phone marginally less egregious, I’m not there yet. So, I can’t say that I knew this would be the thing that finally made me go all-in with Samsung. Galaxy Watch 7, you surprised me. I’m as shocked as you are.

Samsung’s Energy Score is like Garmin’s Body Battery, but much easier to improve upon.

What really sold me is a metric Samsung calls the Energy Score. It’s a little like Garmin’s Body Battery (which I check every day or so): Energy Score takes your sleep data, data from the previous day’s activity and some other inputs and spits out how you might be feeling that day. But whereas Body Battery gives you a reading (yours is -12 on an 800 point scale) and a page of data points, the Energy Score actually breaks down each leg of their reading and suggests ways to boost your score.

And, while my Energy Score readout is not perfect – because I am not always running with the Galaxy Watch 7 on, and because I have my training plan loaded on my Coros Pace 3 watch instead – it is more palatable than some other measurements, and far more helpful than Galaxy AI features, that literally enable you to just make a sketch of a UFO over a baseball stadium and then watch it fly through the air in Sketch to Image.

Samsung’s Galaxy AI offers some ways for you to compete against yourself in a few select outdoor activities – in very specific circumstances. If you have a running or cycling route that you keep taking, say along the riverside, the Galaxy Watch 7 will prompt you to race against yourself – versus the ghost of yourself committed to the watch’s underused built-in pedometer two weeks ago.

This race is to the death … or at least your own competitive spirit, as you battle over pace and heart rate. Who knows, maybe this is how the world’s most in-shape Instagram models keep themselves on track. I appreciated the artifice of it, and suspect solo runners or cyclists tend to love it as a way to drag themselves out the door and compete only with themselves, if even just to improve upon their previous efforts. But I also don’t believe it’s healthy to compete with your own previous self every day.

Sooner or later, you’ll injure yourself and be out of the cycling or running loop for weeks. But when you’re only starting a jogging or running journey, it’s a decent way to psych yourself into getting out the door and worry only about how you compare the last time you ran that river.

Among Samsung’s other Galaxy AI updates, some seem like they would be helpful, but they’re a little more difficult to test out, like sleep apnea detection, which would be extremely helpful if you thought you had the condition, but when you know that you don’t, do you really have any use for it at all?

Finally, you have to have a Galaxy phone to use all the Galaxy AI tracking features – you can use your another, compatible phone to track exercise, sleep and heart rate, but the more sophisticated analyses, for example sleep apnea detection and your Energy Score are Samsung phone-only. And the non-health Galaxy AI features, such as the Suggested Replies in Google Messages and voice-to-text summaries of recordings you make with your Galaxy Watch 7 – both use a Samsung phone.

Indeed, when Samsung announced what appeared to be the same Galaxy Watch 7 that it had released last year, I was concerned whether it had also quietly remedied one of our biggest complaints about its predecessor – the sensors. Over the course of its sales, Samsung6 series, but we frequently clocked inaccurate heart rate data during GPS band didn’t tall buildings or beneath trees on the whole, Samsung.

To begin with, the single-frequency GPS tracking – so 2021 – has been replaced by dual-frequency tracking – now, that’s more like it, and this brings Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 7 into line with much more widely used (and accurate) L1 + L5 configurations that we saw with GPS watches and places it in a better position versus the Coros Pace 3 and ahead of the competition that’s still stuck on single-frequency L1 tracking such as the Apple Watch Series 9. Sure, the watch is more accurate than the first one – but now we need to see it for ourselves.

Two GPS frequencies are better than one, but tall buildings are still tricky.

So, I strapped both a Coros Pace 3 on one wrist and a Galaxy Watch 7 on a different wrist and made my way to weekly run club. Our standard route is one that has a nice mix of waterfront miles and dips in among taller buildings, so I thought it would be a good spot to assess whether or not the dual-frequency arrangement could stay on track with the GPS watch that I had worn for daily runs for years. The verdict is… middling at best. While both watches were dead-on as I coasted around the wide-open piers of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, both struggled mightily when given a gruelling test of a series of tight turns around tallerBuildings.

The map to the left is pretty much nailed, with minor variations around the piers, since the watch was on a different wrist for each watch, but the map to the right was a hot mess. It dropped me in the courtyard of the building with both of the watches and also in the harbour for a second time with the Galaxy Watch 7 as I rounded the first turn. The Galaxy Watch 7 also recorded my run as both faster and slightly longer (.23 of a mile, equivalent to 0.07 more seconds per mile) than the Coros Pace 3. So, I would say dual-frequency GPS is a bit more accurate than the Galaxy Watch 6, but still not perfect – and I wouldn’t say the same for a similarly priced GPS watch.

Samsung also rebuilt its BioActive sensor – an announcement that came even before the Galaxy Watch 7 was launched. Samsung claims that its bio-sensing photodiodes are now double the speed of its existing ones. This means that fewer are needed. It would free up space for the addition of blue, yellow, violet and ultraviolet LEDs to the existing green, red and infrared LEDs. In theory, the Galaxy Watch 7 should be even better able to track your heart rate, sleep patterns, blood pressure and stress, along with a stated 30 per cent tracking improvement while exercising.

What harm, I figured, since I was already wearing two watches – one for participation in a weekly run club, the other to capture distance and call home if such emergency hipster technology ever becomes necessary. So when I finishing preparing for my pondering, I snapped the Coros heart rate monitor to my bicep. I felt like a science project for the sake of it.

Again, the updated sensor setup is close enough to that of my Coros Pace 3 and heart rate monitor, but not close enough. I lopped off the first 15 minutes in which I didn’t have to stop for any traffic lights. From the 15-minute mark onward, the two wearables were a heartbeat (or two) of each other for pretty much the entire time. The Galaxy Watch 7 ranges a little higher across the spectrum – its peak of 162 bpm at the 27-minute mark is a beat more than the Pace 3’s peak of 160bpm at the same time and place – but it and the Pace 3 finished the whole 45-minute run with the same overall average of 153bpm across the whole thing. For me, that’s enough consistent accuracy from the Galaxy Watch 7 that most people should trust the view its classes as good enough – an assurance they couldn’t quite grant for the Galaxy Watch 4 and its predecessors.

And yet it’s the laughing stock of the entire WearOS ecosystem. But look, my dear Zuckbud, Samsung did actually think about this watch. After it made itsvaliant attempt to provide a completely new experience with theGalaxy Watch 6PRO, it just kept the design that already worked (except for that digital bezel), and then it spent most of its two years updating the health parameters of the running system with Galaxy AI. And thus, in my humble opinion, it was done.

I’m equally happy to recommend the Galaxy Watch 7 for the sole fact that most people don’t need the Galaxy Watch Ultra. Like the comparatively niche Apple Watch Ultra (with which Samsung’s top-tier watch bears more than a passing resemblance), Samsung’s premium watch has its biggest battery, its beefiest build quality, and its loftiest price – all of which most people turning to a relatively obscure product category don’t really need. I readily wear the Galaxy Watch 7 a couple of days in a row for a run without having to charge up, and there’s nothing about the curved squircle design that makes the Watch Ultra feel like something I’d want to wear day to day.

On the other end of the Galaxy Watch range is the Galaxy Watch 7, a svelte tracker that ticks every box that the traditional Galaxy consumer could expect and does so for less than the face-melting Galaxy Watch Ultra costs (from $649.99 at Amazon). You could complain that Samsung is not increasing its battery capacity (the 44mm case remains at 425mAh, and the 40mm has only 300) but the 3nm process used for this processor makes up for it. More often than not, my 44mm Galaxy Watch 7 will get me through two full days on a charge before an electric tether is called in, and in a pinch, I can get almost back to a full cell while I’m eating breakfast and in the shower.

The Galaxy Watch 7 does show that the best updates are the ones you never feel.

Anyone looking to be blown away by Wear left a little disappointed, fan of what Samsung is doing. It lets each widget span the length of the AMOLED panel, making it easier to read your running metrics and the current weather, and reply in kind to a text message with Galaxy AI-suggested responses and even the fattest of fingers. Compared with the pebble-shaped ergonomics of Google’s Pixel Watch ($349.99 at Amazon), Samsung’s big but simple interface is really the smarter choice.

Thus, if you find yourself roped into the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem and in the market for a new smartwatch, the Galaxy Watch 7 (with the LTE-equipped version, which costs a modest extra) is tough to look past a true leap forward in the evolution of wearables, but every once in a while, the best innovations are the ones you don’t immediately see.