Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra review: a surprising success | Digital Trends

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra

MSRP $650.00

“The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is one of the most eye-catching smartwatches available in 2024, and it’s a joy to use.”

Pros

• Bold, unique design
• Surprisingly comfortable
• Quick button is great
• Big and bright display
• Excellent activity/sleep tracking
• Sleep apnea feature works well
• Two-day battery life

Cons

• No rotating bezel or crown
• Limited use for water activities
• Slow, slow, slow charging
• Very expensive

Is the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra a shameless Apple Watch Ultra clone? Is it nothing more than a copycat without any original ideas? Those were the initial thoughts going through my head when I first saw it, and I think it’s what a lot of people’s first reaction to the watch is, too.

For its part, Samsung is leaning heavily into the similarities. Between the similar watch band styles, the “Ultra” naming, and even the Night Mode option that turns some watch faces red and black, it’s impossible not to draw Apple Watch Ultra comparisons.

But here’s the thing. After using the Galaxy Watch Ultra for this review, I don’t see it as an Apple Watch Ultra clone at all. Instead, I think it’s one of the most original and unique Android smartwatches you can buy in 2024 — as imperfect as it may be.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: design

Upon first seeing the Galaxy Watch Ultra, I hated how it looked. The circle display and bezel on top of the square body? It’s a jarring, polarizing aesthetic that I didn’t think I could get behind. However, after wearing the Galaxy Watch Ultra for over a week, I love it.

For all the comparisons people want to draw to the other Ultra smartwatch, the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s design is wholly and unabashedly unique — and it’s a big reason why I’ve enjoyed wearing it so much. There’s a real sense of character with this design. It looks unlike any other smartwatch on the market today, and that’s not something I get to say very often.

With a 47mm titanium case, the Galaxy Watch Ultra is quite large, but even this hasn’t bothered me. The titanium design keeps the watch lightweight and comfortable (slightly lighter than the Apple Watch Ultra 2), and I’ve even found it comfy enough to sleep with. That certainly won’t be the case for everyone, but as someone with very tiny wrists, I was pleasantly surprised with how accessible I found the Ultra. The new watch band system is great, too. It’s a proprietary design, similar to the Apple Watch, and it’s incredibly easy to pop watch bands on and off.

I also quite like all of the buttons. In addition to the usual Home and Back buttons, there’s a new Quick button in between them. By default, the Quick button opens the Exercise page in Samsung Health. You can customize it to perform another action in Samsung Health (such as starting a specific exercise type), start a stopwatch, turn on the flashlight, or enable the water lock mode before you go swimming. Pressing the button during a workout pauses/resumes it, double pressing while running or biking records a lap, and holding it during an exercise ends it.

Similar to other Samsung smartwatches, you can also customize the Home and Back buttons to open specific apps, prompt a virtual assistant (Bixby or Google Assistant), and more. It means you can do a lot on the Watch Ultra without ever using the touchscreen, and I love it.

What I don’t love, though, is the absence of a physically rotating bezel or crown. Considering the importance of the crown on the Apple Watch Ultra — and even Samsung’s own expertise here on watches like the Galaxy Watch 6 Classic — not offering this type of navigation is a huge miss. You can move your finger along the edge of the screen to use the “digital bezel” to more quickly navigate through screens/menus, but it’s not the same.

As annoying as the crown/bezel situation is, it’s also my only real bone to pick with the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s design. It’s unique, eye-catching, comfortable, and incredibly functional. Samsung really won me over here, and I did not see that coming.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: durability

As the Ultra name implies, this is a smartwatch designed for people with “ultra” lifestyles. And by almost every account, the Galaxy Watch Ultra can accommodate those lifestyles. Here are the main things to note:

• The Galaxy Watch Ultra can operate between temperatures of -4 and 131 degrees Fahrenheit.
• It has an altitude resistance of up to 29,527 feet.
• It has 10 ATM and IP68 dust/water resistance.
• It has MIL-STD 810H military standard durability.

These are all great traits to have, and they mean the Galaxy Watch Ultra is ready to withstand harsh environments better than non-Ultra smartwatches. However, there’s one important thing to note here.

Although the 10 ATM water resistance is double that of the 5 ATM rating for the Galaxy Watch 7, Samsung’s fine print clearly states that the Galaxy Watch Ultra isn’t suitable for “ultra” water activities.

Here are Samsung’s own words: “It [the Galaxy Watch Ultra] is not suitable for high-pressure water activities and diving. It may be used for shallow-water activities like swimming in a pool or ocean.” By comparison, the Apple Watch Ultra is a great diving smartwatch and can effectively be turned into a full-fledged dive computer with the Oceanic+ app.

While this doesn’t affect me personally (I’ve never been diving a day in my life), it does feel disingenuous to market the Galaxy Watch Ultra as an “ultra” wearable, yet omit a feature like this — especially when it’s one of the Apple Watch Ultra’s most unique qualities. This may not matter for many of you reading this, but for others, it’ll be a deal breaker.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: screen, performance, battery life

What about the screen, performance, and battery life? They’re all great. The Galaxy Watch Ultra has a 1.5-inch AMOLED panel with a 480 x 480 resolution. It’s the same size and resolution as the panel on the 44mm Galaxy Watch 7, and while I would have liked a slightly larger screen to accompany the bigger size of the Ultra, the screen itself is great. It’s sharp, colorful, and plenty bright, with up to 3,000 nits of maximum brightness.

Performance has been top-notch, too. Inside the Galaxy Watch Ultra is the Exynos W1000 — Samsung’s first 3nm smartwatch chip. Navigating the Watch Ultra’s interface is buttery smooth, apps open quickly, and I’ve not noticed any delays with receiving notifications from my phone (which included a Galaxy Z Flip 6 and a Galaxy Z Fold 6 during my testing).

Along with better performance, the new chip is also more efficient than previous ones. Combine that with a 590mAh battery — the largest battery ever in a Galaxy Watch — and the Galaxy Watch Ultra delivers very good battery life.

Even with the always-on display enabled, receiving lots of notifications, and plenty of activity and sleep tracking, the Galaxy Watch Ultra gets very close to two days of use per charge. As an example of its longevity, I started one Monday with 100% battery at 5:30 a.m. After tracking three workouts (a treadmill run, circuit training, and an outdoor walk) and a little under six hours of sleep tracking, I had 43% battery remaining at around 7 a.m. the next day. At 7:20 p.m. that evening, I had 8% left in the tank.

This isn’t the very best battery life you can get on a Wear OS smartwatch, but it is very good. What’s not so good, however, is the Watch Ultra’s charging speed. Using the included charging puck and plugged into a charger capable of 10 watts or more (what Samsung recommends), the Galaxy Watch Ultra takes over 90 minutes to go from 10% to 100%. This is fine if you’re charging the smartwatch overnight or if you aren’t in a rush, but if you need a lot of juice in a short amount of time, you won’t get that here.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: fitness and health features

The Galaxy Watch Ultra introduces a few new health features, my favorite of which is Energy Score. At the start of each day, the Galaxy Watch Ultra gives you a score on a scale of 1 to 100 to determine your energy/readiness for the day. This is based on various factors, including your sleep time consistency, bed/wake timing, the previous day’s activity, sleeping HRV, and more. Your score is also accompanied by a few sentences explaining it, offering personalized context about the score you receive each day.

Similar to the Readiness Score you get on the Oura Ring, I really like the addition of the Energy Score to the Watch Ultra. It’s a helpful metric to work with, and I’ve found the scoring accurate to how I actually feel. After a restful day with a lot of sleep, my score the next day was 87. After a night out accompanied by a few alcoholic drinks, my score dipped to 44 the next day.

The other two new health features are sleep apnea monitoring and an AGEs index. The former is pretty straightforward. After you set it up in the Samsung Health Monitor app and wear the Watch Ultra for two nights of sleep tracking, from that point forward, you’ll be alerted each morning if the watch detects signs of moderate to severe sleep apnea. The feature has appeared to work as advertised (as I suspected, I’ve not had any warnings of sleep apnea), and it’s an impressive feature to have on a smartwatch in 2024.

Comparatively, I’ve found the AGEs index less impressive. AGEs (advanced glycation end products) are compounds that form in your body when sugar molecules oxidize fat and protein molecules. Essentially, a healthy diet and lifestyle generally result in a lower AGEs index, while the opposite can lead to a higher index. So, the lower AGEs index you have, the better.

It’s certainly an interesting metric, but it’s also a confusing one. My AGEs index is trending toward the higher end of the scale, which I find questionable given my generally healthy diet, regular exercise, weight, and most recent bloodwork. Similarly, Samsung advises you not to look at your AGEs index every day, yet it’s presented in the Samsung Health app front and center as if you should. And with diabetic and nondiabetic Galaxy Watch 7/Ultra owners reporting similar results for each other, I’m not sure I’ll be putting much weight behind my AGEs index anytime soon.

What about the rest of the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s health/fitness suite? It’s fantastic. Like the Apple Watch, your activity is tracked by three easily obtainable goals: Motion, Time, and Calories. You can customize these pretty extensively, and they provide a clear, understandable goal to work toward each day.

Samsung’s exercise library is also wonderfully exhaustive, featuring options for running, walking, swimming, cycling, hiking, treadmills, ellipticals, and much more. New this year is a Multisport mode, which enables you to create a workout routine for a triathlon, duathlon, or your own custom one.

Similarly, the quality of the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s exercise tracking is superb. Wearing both the Galaxy Watch Ultra and the Apple Watch Ultra 2 for a two-mile run, Samsung’s numbers lined up almost exactly with the data from Apple’s wearable. My heart rate was often within 1 to 2 beats per minute between the two watches, my cadence was within 2 steps per minute, and the GPS and distance data were almost identical, too. The Apple Watch Ultra 2 is one of the best in the business in this regard, and the Galaxy Watch Ultra is every bit as good.

Sleep tracking is great, too. Samsung provides a lot of data here, including your sleep stages, sleep time restfulness, blood oxygen while sleeping, skin temperature, and more. All of this (and other factors) are taken into consideration to give you a sleep score each night.

Furthermore, after seven nights of tracked sleep, you can follow a three-week sleep coaching plan with tips to improve your sleep quality. Samsung has long offered one of the more impressive sleep-tracking systems on a smartwatch, and that hasn’t changed with the Galaxy Watch Ultra.

And that’s not even everything! Through the Samsung Health app, you can also monitor your stress throughout the day, track your water and food intake, measure your body composition, follow guided workout routines, and more. Best of all, all of this is offered for free with no subscription.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: software and updates

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is one of the first smartwatches to ship with Wear OS 5 and Samsung’s One UI 6 Watch interface. It looks and feels virtually identical to previous Samsung smartwatches, though there’s a sense of added polish throughout. The UI feels a bit snappier, notifications are delivered reliably, and everything just seems to run a little smoother than before.

The big new feature this year is “Double Pinch.” Totally not inspired by Double Tap on last year’s Apple Watches, Double Pinch allows you to tap your index finger and thumb together to control certain aspects of the Watch Ultra. Right now, that includes answering calls, dismissing alarms, controlling music playback, and taking photos with your paired Samsung phone.

It works well enough, though it’s not quite as responsive as Apple’s implementation. Samsung does helpfully show an icon on the screen if you’re in an app that can use the gesture, but similar to the Apple Watch, it feels pretty underutilized and limited in its scope.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra also comes with a few new watch faces to try: Ultra Analog, Simple Ultra, Spatial Number, Simple Digital, and Ultra Info Board. As someone who typically doesn’t like Samsung’s watch faces, these all look pretty good! The Ultra ones, specifically, complement the Galaxy Watch Ultra’s design nicely and are the ones I’ve stuck with.

Thankfully, if Samsung improves Double Pinch or adds other new features, the Galaxy Watch Ultra will receive those updates for a while to come. The Galaxy Watch Ultra will receive four years of updates, meaning you’ll keep getting the latest software through July 2028.

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: price and availability

The Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is available to buy now from Samsung’s website, Amazon, Best Buy, and other major retailers. It comes in one size (47mm), includes optional LTE connectivity by default, and costs $650.

The Galaxy Watch Ultra is available in three colors: Titanium Gray (with an orange band), Titanium White (with a white band), and Titanium Silver (with a black band).

Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra: verdict

So, where does that leave us? The Galaxy Watch Ultra has an original and comfortable design, a lovely screen, fast performance, reliable battery life, and a fantastic health and fitness tracking suite. It’s a mighty impressive package.

But as impressive as the Galaxy Watch Ultra is, as I alluded to at the beginning of this review, it’s not perfect. The lack of an interactive crown or bezel is a huge swing and a miss, especially given Samsung’s expertise in this department. Combined with the limited ability to use the Watch Ultra in the water, its slow charge speeds, and the confusing AGEs index, it’s a lot weighing on the $650 price tag.

Making things more complicated is the fact that the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 starts at just $300 and offers an almost identical experience. It has the same chip, the same display (on the 44mm model), the same amount of RAM and storage (2GB and 32GB, respectively), the same software features, and identical health sensors. And if you look outside of what Samsung offers, other watches like the OnePlus Watch 2, Google Pixel Watch 2, and TicWatch Pro 5 all deliver commendable smartwatch experiences at similarly lower prices.

But even considering all of that, I can’t help but still think there’s something special about the Galaxy Watch Ultra. It’s not the most sensible or practical choice, but neither is the Apple Watch Ultra. Instead, it’s something special. Samsung’s first Ultra wearable isn’t quite as successful as Apple’s version, but it’s also quite different — and it’s off to a really impressive start. With a couple of smart tweaks for the next generation, it might be unstoppable. But even for this first, imperfect attempt, the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra is well worth your attention.