introduction
At first glance, Samsung has been very tame with the updates to its Galaxy Watch6 series. But you could argue that there was very little wrong with the Galaxy Watch5 series, and that any updates we’ve gotten have been helpful or thoughtful.
The new watches use the new Exynos W930 chipset, which is nearly identical to last year’s W920. Both are made in a 5nm process and have dual-core Cortex-A55 processors, but the new chip has a higher clock speed of 1.4GHz, which Samsung says allows for an 18% speedup. The Watch6 series also boosts RAM up to 2GB.
Software-wise, the Galaxy Watch6 runs Google’s Wear OS 4 with Samsung’s OneUI 5 on top. The watch generally feels and looks the same as its predecessor, but there are some subtle changes to the design of the widgets and there are some new watch faces.
Build quality and design
Samsung has revived the Classic model with a physically rotating bezel, but has left the Vanilla model relatively unchanged. Look a little closer and you’ll notice that the Galaxy Watch6 pushes the bezels further, creating a slightly larger display in the same enclosure.
Technically speaking, we get the Galaxy Watch6 in the same 40mm and 44mm casing options as last year but the bezels have become smaller and the respective screen sizes are 1.3in and 1.5in – 0.1in larger than the Watch5 series. It’s a noticeable change when you put last year’s watches to this year’s.
The new watch is also slightly smaller than the Watch5, but weighs the same.
This review is of the 40mm Galaxy Watch6 in Gold. It ships in an eco-friendly box made from recycled paper, containing the watch and a wireless charger ending in a USB-C cable.
One of the changes this year is the new push button watch bands. They use a single button to detach and attach, instead of the typical spring bars. It’s a better way of doing things and makes swapping bands easier. However, if you already have a selection of 20mm bands with spring lugs, they will work just fine on your new watch.
Samsung’s new bands
The Galaxy Watch6 is built with identical materials to its predecessor, which isn’t bad. You get an aluminum casing and glass top and sapphire crystal bottom. This means that it is almost impossible to scratch or break the glass of the watch.
Unsurprisingly, then, our unit is intact after a week of vigorous testing, with no scratches or dings.
The watch is also IP68 rated for water and dust resistance, and complements that with a 5 ATM rating for 50m of worry-free diving.
There are two buttons on the side of the Galaxy Watch6: a Home button, highlighted in red, and a back button. The Home button can take you home with a single press, open Bixby with a long press, or take you to the last used app with a double press. You can customize these options to some extent, for example you can change the long press to wake up the Google Assistant or give you the Power off menu and double press to open any app, open an exercise or go to the accessibility options.
You can also play around with gestures — lower your wrist to end a call, raise it to answer a call, or open a chosen app with a fake double wrist pump — but we had a blast with those.
Fitness and health tracking
Samsung made health tracking improvements with software improvements to the infrared skin temperature sensor of the Galaxy Watch5 series last year. The watch will continue to use the sensor to track a woman’s menstrual cycle, ovulation cycle, and fertility windows, but will also use it for more detailed sleep tracking.
The Galaxy Watch6 will give you a breakdown of your sleep cycles: awake, REM sleep, light sleep and deep sleep, show you an overall assessment of your sleep and give you useful indications to improve in certain areas. Stopping looking at your phone before bed is one example. Samsung’s solution to this is to turn the phone screen black and white the moment you enable the watch to sleep mode.
Finally, after a few days of tracking your sleep, your watch will assign you a sleep pet. Sleep tracking is helpful once you’ve isolated certain patterns and started making small changes to correct bad habits. You’ll need to wear the watch every night, so the discreet 40mm Galaxy Watch6 is ideal.
Like its predecessors, the Galaxy Watch6 can measure your BMI using its BIA sensor. Short for Body Impedance Analysis, the sensor seeks to measure changes in your body’s skeletal muscle, water, and fat mass using electrical impulses.
We measured these readings against a Withings Smart Scale and got nearly identical readings, but the whole method of these measurements is somewhat iffy, and we wouldn’t trust their reported absolute values. They can be useful for tracking changes if you make sure you always take measurements with a similar hydration level.
Much more useful can be the Galaxy Watch6 drop detection. If your watch’s sensors detect a fall, you’ll have the option to call an emergency number or preset contact.
Of course, there’s also fitness tracking with over 90 workouts. Some modes support a dedicated trainer to give you guidance. You can even customize your workouts.
This reviewer does a combination of running, “other training” (weights and weight training), and hiking (it’s a little early for skiing unfortunately). He is also a veteran Galaxy Watch user. And I can tell you that the Galaxy Watch6 is a superb fitness tracker. He has never lost heart rate during a session or had any problems.
One serious annoyance I have is with Samsung Health, the core of Samsung’s smart wearables and its smartphones. I run on a weekly basis and have racked up some records for myself. The Galaxy Watch6 thought my first run with it was my first run ever, my first kilometer completed was my first ever, and so on. I had never tracked my full history at any point of using the Galaxy Watch6 which wasn’t ideal.
The training home screen is also quite limited. It can show three workouts and an extra tab – it looks like Samsung could easily squeeze in more.
Battery life
The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 40mm has a 300mAh battery, up from last year’s model’s 284mAh. The 44mm’s battery is 15mAh larger than the Watch5’s at 425mAh.
You can expect the same performance from last year’s model Galaxy Watch6 40mm/44mm. That means a full day of heavy use and a night of sleep tracking later, with always-on display enabled.
I wear the watch all day at work, then use it to work out a few days a week after work and then take it off until it’s time for bed around 11pm. I put it on to track my sleep and then it wakes me up at 9am. I arrive at the office around 10am with 30%-40% battery left.
I also did an extreme test with the Galaxy Watch6 40mm against the Galaxy Watch3 41mm and Galaxy Watch4 Classic 42mm – we did a 5:44 hour hike together – 12.5km, 1859m elevation gain. The Watch3 came out around 5 hours, the Galaxy Watch4 around 5.5 hours, while the Galaxy Watch6 completed the hike and ended up with 17%. A definite step up from before, and not bad for the smallest watch in the Samsung range.
On a less positive note, the Galaxy Watch6 claimed the distance was 12.5km, the Watch4 claimed it was 13.5km, while the Watch3 was 1km behind – all three used GPS to all the time – strange.
Conclusion
As always, the Galaxy Watch works best with a Galaxy phone and that’s the norm these days. Note that it won’t work with an iPhone at all, but what did you expect?
On the one hand, Samsung made a boring update to last year’s Galaxy Watch5 series. Objectively very little has changed, and what it has doesn’t warrant an upgrade if you’re a Watch5 series owner.
On the other hand, this is a smartwatch – the idea is to look good, be useful, track your movements, and add some fun to your day. The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 is excellent on all these fronts. There’s also the underrated benefit of being familiar to Galaxy Watch users—it felt like home on this reviewer’s wrist.
Whether you should buy one is a bit tricky to answer. There’s not enough new to warrant an upgrade from last year’s Galaxy Watch5 or even the Galaxy Watch4. All three have essentially the same chipset and health and fitness tracking. Samsung Galaxy Watch3 users will get a healthy boost in features by switching to Google’s operating system.
Android users not using a Galaxy smartphone should perhaps look elsewhere: Google has a Pixel Watch, and there are some excellent Wear OS options available for less money. Finally, there are those who just got their first Samsung phone and are looking for their first Samsung smartwatch – this is the best one yet, just decide if you need a physical frame or not.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch6 is available in graphite (both sizes), silver (44mm only), and gold (40mm only). Prices start at £289 / $299 and go up to £369 / $329 for the largest wearable that supports LTE.
Start a new Thread