While Smartwatches seem somewhat redundant, considering your smartphone already does everything and much more, it becomes even more brutal when those same smartwatches cost $500. At $200, however, a smartwatch is much more tempting. Samsung’s latest Galaxy Watch Active is a smaller version of last year’s Galaxy Watch, and it won’t break the bank.
It doesn’t have the long battery life of the Galaxy Watch, and its screen isn’t as big, but you’re getting many of the same great features. The compromises Samsung made to cut the price from $350 to $200 aren’t deal breakers, and you’ll find the Galaxy Watch Active still offers everything you’d need out of a smartwatch.
Features
Samsung’s “sportier” watches have always been nice looking. The 2017 Gear Sport had a beautiful, minimal design. The same rings true with the Galaxy Watch Active. It’s free of visual distractions, looks simple and clean, and the compact size is very nice.
The Galaxy Watch Active scratches the rotating bezel for a lower price tag, but the Active feels much like Wear OS. You’ll tap and swipe a lot. The edges of the watch are a little rounded, and any touch on the watch’s screen feels smooth. You’ll find two buttons on the right side to aid navigation. The top is a back button and pressing and holding it can take you straight to Samsung Pay. The bottom is a home button, and pressing and holding it will take you to the power off menu. Double tap it, and you can access Bixby, Samsung’s virtual assistant. The buttons are clicky and responsive, and they have a slim profile.
The 40mm aluminum case is light. It doesn’t look small on large wrists, or large on small wrists. It’s also easy to forget this watch is sitting on your wrist, which makes sleeping with it quite comfortable (it can track your sleep). It’s thin and will never really get caught on shirt cuffs. The 20mm straps are interchangeable, and the default silicone strap, which feels quite nice, comes with two sizes in the box.
There’s a thick bezel around the 1.1-inch OLED screen, and the screen is a little small, but it’s still great to glance at data on it. The screen quality is gorgeous. Colors are well saturated, blacks are so deep that the screen blends in with the bezel around it, and text is sharp thanks to a 360 x 360 resolution. It can become bright enough to see in direct sunlight.
Performance
The Galaxy Watch Active is powered by a dual-core Samsung Exynos 9110 processor with 750MB of RAM, and performance is fast. Opening and interacting with apps is speedy, and it runs Samsung’s Tizen operating system, not Android or Wear OS. It works with all smartphones but does work best with Samsung’s phones. On other Android phones, you’ll need to download various plugins to ensure a smooth experience, but you get most of the promised features. On iOS, however, you’ll find some features won’t work. For example, you can’t respond to messages when the watch is paired with an iPhone. Samsung Pay and SOS alerts don’t work at all.
You can get all your notifications from your smartphone to show up on the watch, and if you don’t want to be bombarded on the wrist, you can toggle off apps you don’t want to see. Notifications arrive almost at the same time as they do on the connected phone, and they’re easy to read. Responding to notifications is a little clunky, which is the case for all smartwatches, but you can use your voice, a cramped keyboard, preset responses, or you can scribble letters to write out short messages.
The experience is much better if you use Samsung’s apps, as they’re all accessible on the watch. That means you can jump into the Messages or Email app to see texts or emails and continue conversations from the watch itself. If you use apps like Android Messages or Gmail, you can only respond to notifications, as those apps aren’t available on Tizen.
There’s a decent selection of apps in the Galaxy Store, and Spotify is available and lets you download music for offline playback. Bixby is also onboard, and it requires a double press on the bottom button to ask it questions.
Samsung Pay is present, but unlike Samsung phones, it doesn’t work at every store that accepts a credit card (there’s no Magnetic Secure Transmission technology, or MST). It only has a near-field communication chip, so you’ll have to stick to stores that accept contactless payments, which means anywhere that supports Google Pay or Apple Pay.
Fitness
The Galaxy Watch Active lives up to its name, accurately measuring a lot of fitness functions, including distance, step count and heart rate. Speaking of heart rate, it measures it constantly so you can get a better picture of how it fluctuates throughout the day. There are also recommendations to do torso twists when it detects you’ve been sedentary for a while, and it can alert you when your heart rate goes past a customizable threshold. All this data resides in the Samsung Health app. There’s sleep tracking as well, and built-in GPS if you want to track your runs, but the marquee feature is blood pressure monitoring. This feature requires a separate app you need to download — My BP Lab 2.0 — albeit it’s still in beta, so it has some work needed before it will be a truly functional feature.
Battery
Battery life isn’t the Galaxy Watch Active’s forte, but it’s better than most smartwatches than run Google’s Wear OS operating system. Wear it to bed, and it will be able to track your sleep and get through half of the next day before needing a charge. It also has a power saving mode to get a grayscale home screen that turns off many functions. There’s another mode called “Watch Only,” and this can give you days of battery if you won’t be near a charger for a while.
The 230mAh battery charges via a tiny puck wirelessly, and you can even use the back of Samsung’s latest Galaxy S10 smartphones to charge up the watch in a pinch. It doesn’t charge on third-party Qi wireless chargers, but it will work with Samsung’s own Wireless Charger Duo.
Bottom Line
Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active ($200) pairs sleek and compact design with fitness smarts and a robust notification system. It doesn’t have the best battery life, but it’s enough to get by. It’s also 5ATM and IP68 water resistant, classifying it as swim proof. The watch has great build quality and should last around two to three years before you’ll see noticeable battery degradation. At $200, the Galaxy Watch Active is a great value.
