Price when reviewed 229inc VAT
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active is Samsung’s slimmest, most stylish smartwatch yet
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch range is growing steadily. After the first Galaxy wearable appeared a couple of years back, Samsung added to it with the confusingly named Gear Sport last year and now it has launched the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.
The new smartwatch appeared alongside a host of new products at the Galaxy S10 launch event on Wednesday 20 February and it’s pretty much as all the rumours and leaks previously suggested.
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active: Specifications, price and release date
- 1.1in 360 x 360 AMOLED display, with Gorilla Glass 3
- Dual-core Exynos 9110 processor (2×1.15GHz)
- 768MB RAM
- 4GB internal storage
- Bluetooth 4.2
- 802.11n Wi-Fi
- NFC
- GPS/Glonass
- WPC wireless charging
- 39.5 x 10.5 x 39.5mm
- 25g
- 230mAh battery
- 20mm spring-bar compatible watch strap
- 5ATM, IP68 dust and water resistant, MIL-STD-810G tested
- Price: £229
- Release date: 8 March (US)
Samsung Galaxy Watch Active review: Key features, design and first impressions
The Galaxy Watch Active is, essentially, a more stylish, approachable version of Samsung’s rather more chunky, masculine Galaxy Watch and Gear Sport. It comes in a variety of colours – silver, black and rose gold – with matching wristbands and has a 1.1in 360 x 360 AMOLED display.
The watch case itself is fairly slim and minimalist. It’s significantly less bulky than its predecessors and eschews such trappings as knurled bezels and dive watch markings.
More significantly, though, given the design of the previous two Galaxy smartwatches, is that the Active has dropped the rotating bezel.
On its predecessors, this allowed users to select menu items by rotating the outer rim of the watch, thus avoiding touching the display. Here, everything is controlled via the touchscreen and a pair of low-profile buttons on the edge of the watch.
One benefit of the less bulky design is that the Galaxy Watch Active is a lot more comfortable to wear than previous models. I tried one on at the launch event and its lightweight and stretchy strap sat snugly on my wrist without pinching or digging in. Samsung has really moved things forward on this front.
It’s also nice that the strap allows the Watch Active to be laid flat on a surface, meaning you can use the watch’s wireless charging facility to top up the battery on any wireless charging pad. Indeed, it also means you can lay the watch on the rear of a Samsung Galaxy S10 and using its reverse wireless charging facility to recharge.
Samsung Galaxy Watch 46mm – UK Version – Silver
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Samsung Galaxy Sport features: What will it do?
The Galaxy Watch Active will monitor everything you’d expect of a modern fitness-orientated smartwatch. It will track your steps, calories, heart rate and sleep. It has built-in GPS for tracking your runs and bike rides without your smartphone and it’s 5ATM waterproof so you can use it to track your swims, too.
The Galaxy Watch Active will offer music playback controls via Spotify, smartphone notifications (naturally) and NFC for contactless payment. Samsung also says, there will be 60,000 different watch faces for owners to choose from, addressing the concerns of those coming from Wear OS, where the choice of third-party watch faces is, effectively, unlimited.
Perhaps most interestingly, however, is that the Galaxy Watch Active includes the facility to monitor stress levels and blood pressure. How accurate and useful this data will be, we can’t tell just yet.
We hope, however, that when we test it, the new wearable will fare better than the Samsung Gear Sport, which struggled with the basics, including GPS accuracy, especially getting a fast positional lock in built-up areas.
Battery life was also a bit of a letdown on the Gear Sport, with the watch lasting roughly two to three days between charges – a fairly poor effort compared to the Galaxy Watch’s much more impressive stamina.
Given that Samsung hasn’t done anything drastically different with the display or battery on the Active, though, it’s unlikely the Galaxy Watch Active will deliver significant improvements. The screen is a mere 0.1in smaller than the Gear Sport with the same 360 x 360-pixel resolution and the battery is 70mAh smaller at 230mAh. Only the Active’s new dual-core 1.1GHz processor gives any cause for hope.
Samsung Galaxy Sport: Early verdict
Overall, it’s a mixed outlook for the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active. On the one hand, it’s comfortable, attractively minimalist and has some genuinely useful-looking new features. But, at the same time, it drops what was possibly the best thing about the Gear Sport and the Galaxy Watch – the rotating bezel and it’s still pretty pricey, too.
I have my reservations about this change, not least because physical controls are always easier to use than a touchscreen, especially when your fingers become cold or sweaty during workouts. The new Galaxy Sport could still be a success, though, if it betters the Gear Sport in terms of GPS performance and battery life.
