Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 review:

Five years after the first Apple Watch and seven years after Samsung's Galaxy Gear, we know what a smartwatch is. every other day, and its best features are fitness tracking and seeing notifications when your phone isn't in your hand.

Samsung's latest smartwatch, the $399+ Galaxy Watch 3, does nothing to change those expectations. In fact, there's not much difference between the Galaxy Watch 3 and any smartwatch out there. over the past few years, at least in terms of basic functionality. If you've managed to ignore or avoid smartwatches over the past half-decade, the Watch 3 isn't going to change your mind or to convince.

None of this is to say that the Galaxy Watch 3 is a bad smartwatch or even a bad product. On the contrary, the Watch 3 perfectly meets the definition and expectations that we have accepted for smartwatches. It does what we've come to expect from a smartwatch - tracking your activity and providing quick access to notifications - great. And if you're an Android phone owner (or even better a Samsung) looking for a new smartwatch, the Galaxy Watch 3 is a good choice.

Our opinion on

Samsung Galaxy Watch 3

Edge score

7.5

out of 10

Good product

Easy to use interface

Rotating bezel control is a delight

Fairly fast performance

Large display

Bad things

Bixby remains the worst voice assistant

App selection is still dire

Fitness tracking features are hit or miss

The "slimmer" design is still tall and chunky

Buy for $399.99

from BestBuy

Buy for $399.99

by Samsung

Buy for $399.99

from Amazon

The Galaxy Watch 3 is thinner and lighter than its predecessor, but it still looks like a chunky watch.

Design and material

The Galaxy Watch 3 follows Samsung's tradition of making a smartwatch look like a traditional watch, with a round dial. In fact, the design is almost identical to the

Gear S3 Classic from 2016

: a round face with two round pushers on the side.Compared to the

Galaxy watch

, its closest predecessor, the Watch 3 has a less sporty, dressier design that seems to be aimed at more everyday use as opposed to a dedicated running watch.

Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 Specifications

Size: 45mm (45 x 46.2 x 11.1mm, 53.8g) or 41mm (41 x 42.5 x 11.3mm, 48.2g)

Band size: 22mm (45mm) / 20mm (41mm)

Material: Stainless Steel, Gorilla Glass DX

Screen: 1.4 inch (45 mm) / 1.2 inch (41 mm) OLED 360 x 360 pixels with always-on color function

Battery: 340mAh (45mm) / 247mAh (41mm)

Processor: Samsung Exynos 9110 dual-core 1.15 GHz

RAM: 1GB

Storage: 8GB

Wireless: Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi, NFC, GPS / Glonass / Beidou / Galileo, LTE (optional)

Color: "mystic bronze" (41mm), "mystic black" (45mm), "mystic silver" (41mm and 45mm)

Compatible with Android 5.0 and above / iOS 9.0 and above

Price: $399+

The Watch 3 is also slightly smaller and lighter than the Galaxy Watch. But make no mistake, it's not a small watch. I tested the larger 45mm variant, and it's big and chunky. on my average sized wrists. Those with small wrists will also probably find the 41mm version too big to wear. If you like big watches you'll be happy here, but if you're looking for something sleeker and smaller , the

Galaxy Watch Active 2

is a better choice.

Samsung has increased the screen size on the 45mm version to 1.4 inches, which is actually quite large and makes the watch even larger on the wrist. (The 41mm version has the same 1.2 screen inches than the 40mm Watch Active 2 and 42mm Galaxy Watch.) It's a bright, colorful display with a crisp resolution that's easy to see indoors and out. My only issue is that it can be difficult to see the screen through polarized sunglasses, requiring me to awkwardly twist my arm or lift my sunglasses to check the time. It also has a color always-on feature so you can read the time without touching the watch or waving your arm, like all smartwatches should.

You can get either watch size in Bluetooth-only or LTE versions for a reasonable $50 more; I tested the Bluetooth model and had no major issues staying connected to my Galaxy S20.

Perhaps the Watch 3's best advantage over the Active range is its rotating bezel, which you can use to scroll through the interface. It's extremely satisfying and easy to use, and it's the best way to navigate on a smartwatch I've tried. I much prefer it to the touch bezel of the Active and Active 2.

However, the face of the watch is not flush like on the Active models. Its bezel is raised, which makes it more difficult to easily swipe through the on-screen interface. It offers a bit of shock protection and knocks on the screen, but it also makes the watch feel thicker overall.

The rotating bezel isn't aligned with the Watch 3's screen, making the watch look thicker overall.

The stainless steel body and metal pushers are an improvement over the Active models.

As Samsung's most expensive smartwatch, the Watch 3 has nicer materials and build quality than the Active line. It's made of stainless steel instead of aluminum, metal pushers instead of plastic, of Gorilla Glass DX on the top of the screen, a durability rating of 810G mil, and water resistance of 5ATM. Tolerances are tight, the buttons are satisfactory, and the overall construction suits the price plus high of the Watch 3.An even more expensive titanium model will also be available in the future.

In the box is a leather strap instead of the usual rubber options, which further indicates that this watch is more for everyday use than for the gym. high quality, but it is comfortable to wear. You can easily replace it with a rubber one (20 mm for the smallest version, 22 mm for the largest model) for more active uses.

One area Samsung could definitely improve is the vibration engine. Unlike the Apple Watch's informative clicks and taps, the Watch 3's vibrations are buzzy and annoying, with little variance to differentiate a new message from an incoming call. or an hourly chime. Samsung phones have gotten much better haptics in recent years; it should bring this system to wearable devices as well.

You can customize the display of information on certain watch faces.

Performance

Like the latest generations of Samsung smartwatches, the Galaxy Watch 3 has a fast interface that is easy to navigate or scroll quickly. The Watch 3 has the same processor as the Active 2, but the RAM has been increased slightly to achieve 1GB in total. It also has twice the storage (8GB) for saving music playlists directly to the watch.

Compared to a Wear OS watch, the Galaxy Watch 3 is much faster and easier to use, with performance comparable to recent Apple Watch models. Launching a third-party app may still take a while (which you probably won't do that often; more on that later), but Samsung's own apps and widgets load quickly and provide most of the information you're likely to need.

Samsung claims "up to two days" of battery life, but in my testing it was around a day and a half, sooner if it was a particularly active day with tracking workout. You can extend battery life by turning off always-on display and enabling battery-saving modes that reduce functionality, but that also defeats the purpose of wearing a smart watch.

All in all, this is a watch that you will still be charging every day. This makes it difficult to use for sleep tracking, as the most convenient time to charge it is when you sleep. the watch is also still a slow process, taking up to two hours to fully fill the battery. Fast charging has been a game-changing feature on smartphones for years, but it hasn't come to smartwatches yet. .

Most of the time, you'll use Samsung's pre-installed apps, as third-party options are lackluster.

Software

Samsung's watches all use its in-house Tizen operating system, which hasn't changed much in recent years. It's not really necessary - its design works well on the limited size of a smartwatch screen, and Widget and notification layout is easy to scan. The messaging app will now show images and emoji as well as chat history on incoming messages. There are also a few new gesture controls: turn off alarms or calls incoming calls by shaking the wrist or opening and closing the fist to answer a call. Both worked in my tests, surprisingly.

Accept to continue: Samsung Galaxy Watch 3

Every smart device now requires you to agree to a series of terms and conditions before you can use it - contracts that no one actually reads. It's impossible for us to read and analyze each of these agreements. But we'll start counting exactly how many times you have to click 'agree' to use devices when we review them, because these are agreements that most people don't read and certainly can't negotiate.

While what you need to accept may vary depending on the type of phone you set it up with, the Samsung Galaxy Watch 3 requires you to accept:

Samsung's Privacy Policy

A Samsung End User License Agreement

You also need to give the Samsung Wearable app on your phone access to location, storage, phone, contacts, SMS, calendar, call logs, and other permissions for the watch is working properly.

These agreements are non-negotiable; you cannot use the watch at all if you do not agree to them.

There are many other optional agreements. Some of them, like agreements for health tracking and voice services, are optional, but they will stop the watch from doing the essential things you bought it for, like step tracking or voice search.

Samsung Voice Services Privacy Policy

Recognition of Find My Watch and Find My Phone location services

Map Terms of Use HERE

HERE Mapping Privacy Policy

Diagnostic Information Consent Report

Marketing Information Consent

Samsung Health Terms and Conditions

Samsung Health Privacy Policy

Final tally: two required agreements, eight optional agreements. (Full disclosure: there may be more, but as a Samsung user, I already had a Samsung account and all the agreements needed to set it up.)

Where Samsung continues to struggle is in app support. There's no native mapping app on the Watch 3, and the options available in Samsung's app store are terrible. If you don't If you don't keep all your tasks in Samsung's Reminders app and use another service instead, you probably won't find an app to manage them on the Watch 3. I could go on, but the point is, if you If you look for a specific app, chances are you won't find it for the Watch 3 and you'll spend most of your time using the apps preloaded on the watch.

On the plus side, these apps are mostly comprehensive (aside from the lack of a mapping app, as mentioned). There's calendar, weather, Outlook for email, messages, Spotify ( including the ability to download offline playlists), Samsung Health for fitness tracking, timer, stopwatch, alarms, world clock, voice recorder, Samsung Pay for mobile payments, etc

If you're using a Samsung phone, you probably have all the phone apps you need to get the Watch 3 working right away. If you're using another Android phone, be prepared to install about half a dozen apps and services to use all the features of the Watch 3, including fitness tracking and mobile payments. That's a deal breaker, and Samsung really should consolidate them into one app. (If you're hoping to use the Watch 3 with an iPhone, My suggestion is: don't. The messaging experience is poor and the watch will just do less than when connected to an Android device. Just get an Apple Watch.)

In terms of watch face options, Samsung does a number of things well and fails in others. There are some good options on the Watch 3 out of the box, including new riffs on the Infograph face of Apple that lets you customize an analog or digital face with a bunch of informational complications, and there's a new animated weather face that automatically updates based on the time and your location. The Galaxy Apps store offers also thousands of third-party watch faces that you can download and install.

But the vast majority of these third-party watch faces are of poor quality – I spent the better part of an hour scrolling through the store options to find something that suited my tastes – and the customization options on the own watch faces. from Samsung are limited to predetermined complications. Inexplicably, some faces give you more complication options than others, and there's no support for third-party complications, so it's hard to find an option that matches both your aesthetic preferences and the information you want to display.

Finally, while both Google's Wear OS and the Apple Watch feature relatively quick and capable voice assistants that are useful for transcribing messages, setting timers, controlling smart home gadgets, and more. without having to touch the watch, the Galaxy Watch 3 relies on Samsung's Bixby assistant. Bixby, in case you haven't heard, is terrible, with slow, inconsistent responses and limited capabilities. example: I often use voice commands to set timers on my smartwatch when cooking, but when I ask Bixby to set a two-minute timer, it often takes 20 seconds to process the request and start the timer, which Which doesn't help when I need precise timing. It's often quicker and easier to completely ignore the Watch 3's voice commands.

The Watch 3 has new fitness tracking features.

fitness tracking

Although the Watch 3 is clearly designed for more everyday use as opposed to the fitness-focused Active line, it still comes with a handful of new fitness tracking features. In addition to the usual activity tracking , automatic workout detection and heart rate monitoring, the Watch 3 now has improved sleep tracking, blood oxygen (SpO2) monitoring and VO2 Max reports. It also has a feature to automatically call an emergency contact when a fall is detected, like the Apple Watch.

I'm not a fitness guru, so I'm not the best judge of the reliability of Samsung's fitness tracker, but previous models have been

widely criticized for inaccurate reporting

.I had trouble getting the blood oxygen monitoring feature to work - it failed to get a reading of my SpO2 levels about 50% of the time - and the step count was consistently 20-25% lower than the Fitbit Inspire HR I wore at the same time.

The back of the Watch 3 has a heart rate sensor.

Updated sleep tracking features were also less than helpful Samsung now tries to provide a 'score' to better judge your sleep efficiency, based on how long it detects you were at each stage sleep. In my tests, it did a good job of automatically determining when I fell asleep and when I woke up, but my sleep quality never rated above 50, despite the Inspire HR which I wore on the opposite wrist consistently marking my sleep in the high 80s. Sleep tracking is far from an exact science, and wearables like this lack much of the necessary context for what impacts the quality of your sleep, which means they shouldn't really be used for serious diagnosis. And finally, the Watch 3 is just too big and bulky for me to sleep comfortably with. A few people will agree, but I much prefer a smaller bracelet or ring for this purpose.

One of the watch faces pre-installed on the Galaxy Watch 3.

If I feel like I've spent the majority of this review comparing how the Galaxy Watch 3 is different or the same as previous watches, that's because there really isn't much new to be covered here. Samsung has refined some aspects of its smartwatches, and the Watch 3 is more wearable and a better device than the Galaxy Watch it replaces. But that's still lacking in a handful of areas and not really changing. the smartwatch experience. This is by no means a generational leap.

The other thing you need to consider is the price: at $399 to start, the Watch 3 is $150 more than the Active 2 for roughly the same features. It has the steel body stainless steel and rotating bezels, but these may or may not be worth the extra expense to you.

Hopefully Samsung's next watch will provide a more substantial improvement over what we're currently experiencing, whether that's through significantly better battery life, additional capabilities, or something else I haven't even thought of. But until that happens, Samsung makes good smartwatches, and the Galaxy Watch 3 is the best of them all.

Photograph by Dan Seifert/The Verge