Hands on: Samsung's Galaxy Watch 5

Above: The Galaxy Watch 5 and Watch 5 Pro. Photo courtesy Samsung.

BitDepth#1419 for August 14, 2023

Last month, Samsung announced a new version of their Galaxy smartwatch with availability from August 11.

The new Galaxy Watch 6 is available in two models, with a rotating bezel returning as a user interface option on the Watch 6 Classic.

Both are available in different watch face sizes. The Watch 6 is available in 40 and 44mm versions and the Classic model offers 43 and 47mm sizes.

After six months of testing the Watch 5, the larger watch face size is definitely the better option if you don’t have a small wrist.

After wearing the Watch 5 continuously since getting a review unit to try, the new user will need to confront the physicality of the device on your wrist.

A watch worn 24-7 isn’t necessarily uncomfortable (I don’t normally wear one), but being able to move it around in increments just seems more comfortable. The watchband that comes with the device is a standard latex band with belt-style notches, which didn’t suit me at all.

There’s a growing range of protective options and alternative watchbands for recent Galaxy watches, ranging from snap cases with bands and replaceable metal bands that make the digital device look more like a standard gear-driven timepiece. My preference was a woven nylon band with continuous adjustment options.

There is a growing range of watchbands and watchband and case combinations to style the Galaxy Watch series.

These bands have a bit of stretch and yield to firm pressure like the elastic stitching on a good sock, so it’s easy to move the watch up or down by an inch, swivel it to the inside of the wrist or slip the watch off entirely, which you’ll need to do to charge it.

The included charging cable is functional, but a bit fussy. It’s a charging disc at the end of a USB cable, but most users will find a dedicated charging stand to be a more useful option.

With extreme energy saving measures in place, the run time of a Watch 5 is around 30 hours from a full charge to warning notices. It takes about an hour to charge fully from a low battery warning.

Switching to low power mode deactivates the automatic activation of the watch when you raise your wrist, but you add more than eight hours to the battery life.

There are also protective cases for the device, but they are mostly decorative. Most cases just snap onto the watch and snap off just as easily.

If you are physically active while wearing the smartwatch, a protective face isn’t a bad idea for taking the brunt of the inevitable scrapes and dings that it will encounter. Most use a mild adhesive to hold them to the watch-face and can be removed easily.

So, you’re probably thinking a watch is for telling time. A growing selling point for these devices is their capacity to continuously monitor health indicators.

The tracking is also good for everyday exercising, keeping track of heart rate, number of steps taken during the day and most intriguingly for me, the quality of your sleep.

On the companion phone app, you can view basic health monitoring results going back to your first day with the smartwatch, but there’s no way to export the data that’s collected.

*Since the introduction of the Watch 5, Samsung has rolled out improved heart rhythm monitoring.*

Early concerns about water resistance proved to be misplaced. While Samsung is cautious about its claims for using the smartwatch in water, in practice the water lockdown mode proved effective. Turning it off vibrates any residual water out of the tiny speaker slot.

The Watch 5 will sense when you are swimming and begin timing, but I find lap sensing to be inferior to other devices that I’ve used. If you fail to set up a swimming cycle in the exercise app, monitoring is even more sketchy.

The selection of watch-faces remains largely unchanged since October 2022. I like information presentation watch-faces that offer configurable summary information and control shortcuts to frequently used features, but found only two free watch-faces that offer a readable design.

There are dozens of faces from independent creators, but many rely on software kludges to function that I found unnerving.

You can answer a call on the watch – though it doesn’t seem to work with calls placed via WhatsApp – but we’re still far from the Dick Tracy ideal of a wrist communicator. Yeah, I know you have no idea what I’m talking about.

If the phone isn’t in acceptable Bluetooth range, the connection is unusable but even on a good connection, it’s difficult to understand what’s being said or to make yourself heard properly.

The Watch 5 is, however, an excellent source of alerts. I turned off the ringtone on my phone 20 years ago, and a vibration on my wrist is a much better alert than sensing the phone vibrating in a pocket and works better for timers and alarms.

The improvements to software generally since Samsung adopted Google’s Wear OS are excellent and the general utility of the smartwatch and its monitoring capabilities make a strong case for this wearable.

Improvements to the way the Galaxy Watch monitors exercises, specifically swimming, more design thinking on simplifying information focused watch-faces and more native apps from third party developers made for the smartwatch would make the device even better.

Best of all, these are all software improvements that can readily be applied to the available hardware.