Samsung launched the Galaxy Watch Ultra, the company’s first Ultra series premium rugged sports watch, at the Galaxy Unpacked event in July. It has a large 47mm dial, rugged design with military-grade durability, 10ATM water resistance and a huge battery.
Is this the best premium sports watch? Let us dive into the review to find out.
Box contents
- Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra in Titanium Gray colour
- Charging connector
- User manual
Design and Build
The Galaxy Watch Ultra has a circular dial. It weighs 60.5 grams, since it has a large casing and a huge battery. It has a Titanium Grade 4 frame that looks and feels premium, and the matte finish doesn’t attract fingerprints. The smartwatch has 10ATM + IP68 water resistance, so you can even wear when swimming, and it also has MIL-STD-810G certification, making it durable.
On the back, there are heart rate sensors with glowing green LED lights when you are using it to measure heart rate, and the SpO2 sensor has glowing red lights when you start measuring. The Galaxy Watch Ultra has a sensor with 13 light-emitting diodes (LEDs) — nine more than its predecessor. There is Made in India branding on the back. Since it has wireless charging, you don’t see any contact points.
The smartwatch has Samsung BioActive Sensor (Optical Bio-signal Sensor + Electrical Heart Signal + Bioelectrical Impedance Analysis), Temperature Sensor, Accelerometer, Barometer, Gyro Sensor, Geomagnetic Sensor, and Light Sensor.
It uses Bluetooth 5.3 to connect to Android devices, and doesn’t work with iOS. There is LTE, 2.4+5GHz, NFC, GPS (L1+L5) /Glonass/Beidou/Galileo.
Coming to the strap, it is made of skin-friendly material that is designed for water swimming, and its titanium buckle is light and durable. There is a wide ripple design for easy water drainage and quick sweat drying. It uses a Dynamic Lug System, so it can be easily attached and swapped to suit different outdoor activities. There are Green, White and Orange colour options in addition to the Dark Gray.
Samsung also sells a Trail Band separately in Orange, Dark Gray and White Sand colours that has a lightweight fabric and triangle latch and hook for a comfortable fit. This offers a sleek look and a snug fit, especially during intense activities.
In addition to the Home and Back buttons that are usually present in all the Galaxy Watch models, there is a new Quick button, a customizable button designed for exercise, outdoor activities, and precise input. It also allows easy access 86-decibel Emergency Siren that can be heard up to 180 meters away by holding the button for five seconds. You can set the Quick button to perform various actions by configuring the options.
You find the microphones near the button, and the speaker is present on the other side. Furthermore, you can take calls directly from the watch when you connect it to the smartphone over Bluetooth. Since this has LTE, it also works as a standalone device to make and receive calls.
The watch is powered by an Exynos W1000 boasts a 5-core CPU with a Cortex-A78 core reaching 1.6GHz and four Cortex-A55 cores up to 1.5GHz. Samsung claims it delivers 2.7x faster app launches, 3.4x faster single-core performance, and 3.7x faster multi-core performance compared to the predecessor. This also offers a 30% improvement in power efficiency. There are no lags during the use of the smartwatch.
Display and features
Coming to the display, the Galaxy Watch Ultra has a large 1.5-inch (480×480 pixels) Super AMOLED colour touch screen display. You can set it to turn on when you lift your hand, and the screen turns off in a few seconds to save power.
It doesn’t attract fingerprints, but when the screen is off, it is reflective. The company says that it has Sapphire Crystal protection. I didn’t notice any scratches during my use. The touch screen is smooth to use, has good viewing angles, and the outdoor visibility is good as well. You can adjust the brightness from Settings → Display → Brightness or directly swipe down to access the brightness settings. You can adjust it from level 1 till level 6, but the ambient light sensor is helpful in settings up the brightness according to the condition.
The Galaxy Watch Ultra doesn’t feature a physical bezel, so you can’t rotate it. However, with the digital bezel, you need to lightly press and drag your finger clockwise or counterclockwise using the bezel on the edge of the screen to move through a list.
There is also an easy notification shade option when you swipe from the top. This has Mode, Power Saving, Settings, Power Saving, Always on Display, Sound / Vibration, Flashlight, Brightness toggle, DND, Volume, Wi-Fi, Water lock mode that lets you shake the watch to remove any water from the pressure sensor that is present on the back, Airplane mode, Bluetooth headset connection, Find my phone, GPS, NFC and Network toggle.
Software
The Galaxy Watch Ultra runs Wear OS Powered by Samsung (Wear OS 5). This brings performance improvements, battery life optimizations, enabling up to 20% less power consumption during activities like outdoor running. There are New Flavors for watch faces that lets you pick between different colors and complications for each watch face. Other features include Screenshot detection and updates to Health Services.
You can customize these using the Galaxy Wearable that needs to be downloaded from Google Play. The app also lets you customize watch faces. There are few built-in watch faces and several downloadable watch faces, and you can also get more watch faces using third-party apps from Google Play.
The app also allows you to manage app screen, tiles, quick panel, notification, customize action button, home button and back button, including gestures.
You can also install apps directly from Google Play in the Galaxy Watch. There is offline music playback support for both Spotify, YouTube Music and more to make use of 32GB internal storage.
Fitness tracking
The Samsung Health app needs to be downloaded to get more details about your activities, fitness, food and sleep tracking. The Watch Ultra has several sports modes, including a new Multi-Sports mode that can be launched from Multi-Sports tiles that allow you to customize workout combinations and measure the results of different workouts, including duathlons and triathlons.
Steps tracking is accurate compared to data from a phone. GPS tracking takes only a few seconds to lock for outdoor workouts and is accurate. GPS tracking doesn’t cut out if there are some intrusions like trees or bridges.
For running, it shows a lot of data such as pace, elevation, heart rate, Vo2 Max, advanced running metrics, and lots more. You can press the action button to pause a workout in the middle, and resume it or stop it. You can also compare these with recent runs. Samsung still doesn’t show running power that is available even in OnePlus Watch 2 and 2R, other than Garmin, Suunto, Polar and other high-end smartwatches. Considering the premium price, Samsung should have offered this feature.
There is a new Functional Threshold Power (FTP) for cycling, accurately measures maximum cycling power in just 4 minutes with AI-powered FTP metrics.
The Energy Score feature uses Galaxy AI that analyzes key indicators of your overall condition and gives you a daily score based on your sleep, heart rate and workout. There are fitness coaching videos in the app. Together feature lets you track daily step count of your friends.
You can share the workout data as an image, and there is Strava support and Technogram sync, which can be enabled from Settings and Selecting Services. There is also Health Connect sync.
Body composition and AGE
For the Body composition feature, you need to place middle and ring finger on the home and back buttons and keep still during measurement. This takes a few seconds to measure, and you need to enter the weight manually. Just like the digital weighing scales, this has sensors in the home and back buttons to send electrical signals into the body and receive it back to get back details such as body fat, skeletal muscle, body water, BMI and BMR. You can’t say this is 100% accurate, since there are slight changes between the data from this and the Mi Body Composition Scale.
For the first time, Galaxy Watch Ultra allows you to conveniently track advanced glycation end products (AGEs) right from your wrist with an AGEs Index. Strongly influenced by diet and lifestyle, AGEs reflect your overall biological aging process and provide an indication of metabolic health, says the company
Sleep tracking
Sleep tracking is accurate and there is also data for different stages such as REM, Light and Deep with a chart. It also shows when the blood oxygen went below 90%, skin temperature during sleep and respiratory rate. It also says the watch can detect Snoring when you place the phone near your face during sleep, but it didn’t work for me even when using the Galaxy Z Flip6 smartphone. Overall, the watch has the good fitness tracking and the best sleep tracking. Sleep Apnea feature is available in some countries, but it is not available in India yet.
Heart rate, SpO2, and Stress monitoring
The smartwatch uses LED lights and photo-diodes to illuminate the blood vessel for a while and monitors the heart rate via the change of green light absorbed. It stores the data with date and time. There is also resting heart rate data. Compared to pulse oximeter, this is almost accurate. It can also measure blood oxygen and stress 24 x 7.
IHRN, BP and ECG monitoring
You can also receive real-time readings and alerts for abnormally high or low heart rates with Heart Rate monitoring, detect irregular heart rhythms suggestive of atrial fibrillation (AFib) with IHRN (Irregular Heart Rhythm Notification), and get a deeper understanding of your heart health with Electrocardiogram (ECG) and Blood Pressure (BP) monitoring.
However, for BP tracking, you need an upper-arm, cuff-based blood pressure monitor for calibration, and you need to do it once every 28 days for accurate results.
Battery life
The Galaxy Watch Ultra has a huge 590mAh battery, and the company promises 80 hours or close to 4 days of battery life with typical use and AOD off, and 60 hours with AOD on. It can last for 100 hours even with work out tracking in Power saving mode, says the company.
I have been using it for a couple of weeks now. I get more than 2 days of battery life, which is almost 60 hours. I have not enabled notifications, but I have enabled call notifications, GPS for outdoor runs of 30 minutes a day, and 24 x 7 heart rate, SpO2, stress tracking and use it for sleep tracking as well.
Battery life might vary depending on frequent use of the display with increased brightness, use of GPS, heart rate monitor during workouts, Spo2 monitoring during sleep and all the notifications turned on.
The smartwatch uses WPC-based wireless charging that requires you to use the bundled charger, and doesn’t work with third-party wireless charging pads or non-Samsung smartphones that feature reverse wireless charging. With a 25W charger it took about 2 and half hours to charge the watch fully from 0% which is too much, even though the time shown when charging the watch is less.
Conclusion
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra ticks all the boxes for a rugged sports watch. The rugged design with a titanium body is good, the AMOLED screen is brilliant, a powerful processor and 32GB of storage and a lot of sensors offer a lot of data. Even though the battery life is better compared to the other Wear OS watches, the charging is super slow.
Pricing and availability
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is priced at Rs. 59,999, and is available from Samsung.com, and other online retailers such as Amazon.in as well as offline stores. It gets cheaper during sale, and there are bank offers on top of it.
Pros
- Brilliant AMOLED display with Sapphire Crystal protection
- Powerful Exynos W1000 3nm processor offers smooth performance
- Solid Titanium body
- Enhanced BioActive Sensor for metabolic health insights
- 10ATM + IP68 water and dust resistant
- Long battery life compared to other Wear OS smartwatches
Cons
- Takes over 2 hours to charge
- ECG, Irregular Heart Rhythm and Blood Pressure work only with Samsung phones
- No rotating bezel