Review: Samsung Galaxy Watch5 and Watch5 Pro

I find that it takes less than a day to tell whether you like a smartwatch. Looks matter, since it lives on your wrist after all, and so does comfort. Nail those two points and you're halfway there. After just a few hours of trotting around with one, you'll immediately be able to tell how helpful—or useless—it is. 

It took me less than a full day to start liking Samsung's new Galaxy Watch5 and Watch5 Pro, and now, after two weeks of having these wearables on my wrist, I think they're practically a must-have for anyone with an Android phone, especially if it's a phone made by Samsung. They make sense for just about any Android user who likes staying connected—and doesn't mind their wrist buzzing with notifications for most of the day.

Watch5

Photograph: Samsung

There are a few models to choose from. The Watch5 comes in a 40- or 44-mm case size, which cost $280 and $310, respectively. Those are the prices for the Bluetooth versions, which talk to the internet using the phone to which they’re paired. You can pay more for LTE versions ($330 and $360) if you want to stay connected to the internet even when your phone isn't nearby, but you'll have to shell out for an extra data plan for the smartwatch. 

The fancier Watch5 Pro has a 45-mm case size, and that means a bigger display, larger battery, and a higher price: $450 for Bluetooth and $500 for LTE. Both the Watch5 and Watch5 Pro have screens that are protected by sapphire crystal, a tough material that's resistant to scratches. The Watch5 Pro has an even tougher crystal, and its casing is made of titanium, making it more durable than the aluminum-cased Watch5. All of these watches are IP68 water- and dust-resistant and have a 5 ATM rating, indicating they can survive underwater at depths of up to 50 meters. 

The Pro is the only one with support for GPX, the data standard used to share mapped GPS routes. All the Watch5 models have built-in GPS radios, but the Pro lets you share GPS data with other apps, download cycling or hiking routes, and help you find your way back to campsites if you're lost. It was simple to download a GPX trail from Empire State Trail and upload it to the Watch5 Pro via Samsung Health; the watch showed me exactly how to get to the trail's starting point.

If GPX support doesn't matter to you, and you have small to medium-size wrists, you're better off with the less expensive Watch5. I tested the 44-mm version, and it's one of the most comfortable smartwatches I've ever worn. And I have large wrists. I left it on for every single minute of the day and night (except when it needed charging; more on that below), and I rarely ever gave it a second thought. Samsung reshaped the curve on the back of the case so that the sensors sit closer to the wrist, but I think this design is more ergonomic overall since it also helped make the watch feel nicer to wear. 

Watch5 Pro

Photograph: Samsung

The Watch5 Pro isn't as comfortable, but after some tweaking with the rugged sports band, I was able to make it sit more comfortably on my wrist, and I have no other qualms about the fit. (The Watch5 series have 20-mm bands you can easily swap out, so you can use whatever strap you want.)

These smartwatches have two oblong pushers on the right side of the case, and you can customize their functions. I set the top home button to open Google Assistant with a long press and open Google Wallet with a double press. You have only two options for the bottom button: Go back or open recent apps. A long press opens Samsung Wallet, and you annoyingly cannot change this. 

Samsung's smartwatch design has long been praised for its mechanical bezel, a ring around the screen you could physically (and satisfyingly) rotate to scroll through the watch's interface. On the 5-series watches, this feature has unfortunately been nixed in favor of a touch-sensitive bezel, which really isn't a touch-sensitive bezel and is more like the tip of your finger touching the edge of the screen to fly through the various tiles. I've come to hate it, because it's difficult to precisely get to the tile I want.

Overall, I like the minimal look; I've often found the sportier smartwatches a bit gaudy. More important for me is the fact that they're round. Listen, you can wear whatever kind of smartwatch you want, but in my eyes, a circle is superior to squares and rectangles. 

Photograph: Samsung

Battery life is arguably the most important component on a smartwatch. It truly sucks to glance down at your wrist only to see a blank, black circle staring back at you. Well, I have good news and bad news. The batteries on the Watch5 series are reliable enough to comfortably last through a full day and through the night for sleep tracking, but you'll still need to recharge them come morning. They're nothing like a Garmin, which can last for weeks on a single charge.

The 44-mm Watch5 usually hovered around 20 percent after I woke up the next day, and that's with two auto-tracked walks, checking and responding to notifications, GPS navigation when I rode my electric scooter, and sleep tracking. Thirty minutes of charging from 20 percent brought it up to 70 percent, which is good enough, but I wish it recharged even faster. The Watch5 Pro fares a little better, usually lasting to the end of day two after the same level of activity on a single charge.

These numbers are better than the Apple Watch's battery life, but marginally so. I should also disclose that my battery results are with the always-on display turned on, so the Watch5 will last longer if you don't enable that. I did not turn on continuous heart-rate tracking and left it at the default, which tracks your heart rate every 10 minutes while still. Turning it on will chew through the battery even more. 

As for health and fitness tracking, the most important thing to know before you buy is that the electrocardiogram feature (cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration) works only if you pair these watches with a Samsung smartphone. It's a really silly restriction. Technically this applies to blood pressure monitoring, but that feature has yet to be cleared by the FDA despite it being available in South Korea for years.

Everything else works with Android phones perfectly well. I wore an Apple Watch Series 7 on my opposite wrist while testing the Wear5s, and nearly every metric they measured matched perfectly with the Apple Watch, give or take a few digits. That includes heart-rate measurements, sleep tracking, blood oxygen levels, and steps. Even when I hit the gym and hopped on an exercise bike, the activity workout display on the Watch5 is almost a replica of what Apple provides on the Apple Watch (a good thing). I like that the Galaxy speaks up when I hit certain milestones, like after 30 minutes on the bike.

One of my favorite features of the Galaxy Watch5 series is the auto-workout detection, especially when it starts up automatically when I walk my dog. There's something about a watch counting my daily walks as a form of exercise that makes me feel a bit better when I can't do any strenuous exercise that day, and it actively encourages me to walk for a bit longer. It's really great at figuring out when I stop walking too, automatically pausing if I'm waiting to cross at a traffic light and starting back up when my legs start to move. 

Sleep tracking has been pretty accurate for me as well, and it now tracks blood oxygen levels and how much you snore when you're in the land of nod. It's good for evidence gathering because I can show my partner that I definitely did not snore last night. One new feature is a coaching program to improve your overall sleep. It requires a full week to gather data, so I've entered just my first week of a four-week sleep course.

It's been rather dull as it has me checking my sleep scores and reading up about sleep schedules, circadian rhythms, and trying to be stress-free before going to bed. Reading it all will certainly make you fall asleep. Next week is where things get interesting, as I'll get guidance on when to fall asleep and when to wake up. For the third week, it says it will try to help me curb bad habits like eating before bed or using my phone before sleep. The final week merges the efforts from weeks two and three. Like with any app-based program, you'll need willpower and discipline to follow through, and I don't really have that. I'll just have to see how it goes.

The Watch5 and Watch5 Pro are Samsung's second smartwatches running Wear OS 3—the new and improved version that's being developed in collaboration with Samsung and Google. The software has come a long way in being more responsive and helpful. 

Most notably, I love the turn-by-turn directions I can finally utilize with Google Maps. I've been paying everywhere with my watch via Google Pay. It's great that Google has added YouTube Music so I can listen to playlists while at the gym. And Google Assistant is finally usable. It's not laggy at all, and I've used it to control my smart home and to create calendar entries. Many of these features are available on last year's Galaxy Watch4, so you can save some cash if you don't care about having the latest and greatest.

But Wear OS still lags behind the Apple Watch in a few ways. It's supposed to automatically detect apps you have installed on your phone and download them on the watch, but it refused to do this, and I had to manually install YouTube Music, Google Wallet, Google Keep, and a few others. App support is a bit of a question mark too. Yes, you can respond to nearly all notifications and act on them in some way, but there's no Telegram or Facebook Messenger app, for example, so I can't hop into an existing conversation to send a message to someone. (I have to wait to get a message from them first.) Can we also get an equivalent to Apple's Noise app, please?

Barring those flaws, I'm mostly just happy that Android phone owners are finally getting better smartwatches that can rival the Apple Watch.