Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic hands-on

Key Takeaways

today we're getting our first look at samsung's smartwatch collaboration with google with the samsung galaxy watch 4 and the galaxy watch 4 classic they're one of the biggest deals in wearables in quite some time because it's finally happening after years of trying to go alone with tizen on smart watches samsung is finally biting the bullet and collaborating with google on its smartwatch operating system so you definitely get the sense with these smart watches that samsung is hitting a little bit of a reset button with its wearables lineup yes there's the new wear s3 operating system which we'll get onto in a little bit but samsung has also taken this opportunity to simplify its smartwatch range so previously there were two lines the active and the regular and they both got kind of irregularly updated depending on whether samsung felt like it but now there's the four classic which is best thought of as a sequel to the watch three and the regular watch four which is a successor to the active two from 2019 which yes means they've skipped the three it sounds complicated but when you look at them next to each other it's a lot simpler basically the galaxy watch 4 is now the default and the galaxy watch 4 classic is a slightly more premium model the classic starts at 349 while the regular is 249 it's a little bit cheaper both are available to pre-order from august 11th and they're shipping on august 27th so in terms of hardware the classic has one of those rotating bezels that we've liked so much on samsung's previous smartwatches samsung wants you to think of this as the more premium of the two smart watches and it's made from better materials like stainless steel whereas the regular watch 4 is made of aluminium orb i'm sorry aluminum meanwhile the standard galaxy watch 4 is the one with a simpler design and materials but both of them have a pair of buttons on the side for present both are available in two sizes the watch 4 is a little bit more compact it's available in 40 millimeters and 44 millimeters while the watch for classic is 42 millimeters and 46 millimeters but regardless of which version you go for the screen sizes are the same it's 1.2 inches or thereabouts and 1.4 and the resolutions have also increased compared to previous models but while one might be the sporty one and one might be the classy one both of them share a lot of the same dna they're both powered by the same samsung exynos 5 nanometer processor both have 1.5 gigabytes of ram and both have 16 gigabytes of storage battery capacities vary slightly between models but whichever one you go for samsung reckons you'll get about 40 hours of battery life depending on how you use it there's lte on select models but if you're hoping for 5g then you might be disappointed samsung says that the amount of data smartwatches have to process is just a little bit too small to make it worth it but the bigger deal is probably the software these watches are running it's wear os 3 which is the result of a collaboration between google and samsung and it should hopefully combine the best of samsung's tizen os with the best of google's wear os on samsung smartwatches specifically the interface you're looking at is one ui watch which is samsung's skin sitting on top of google's wear os operating system think of it as one ui on phones which sits on top of android when it announces collaboration with samsung in may google promised a whole bunch of high-level benefits like better battery life faster loading apps and smoother animations but these have never really been problems for samsung smartwatches so it's kind of difficult to tell how much of an impact they've had just yet but there are other benefits here that are much more obvious like finally having google's apps and services on a samsung smartwatch and the most important one here is google maps because it means there's finally a capable native mapping app on the smartwatch itself now i know a lot of you are going to be wondering what that means for voice assistance given bixby's reputation and samsung doesn't have a fireman's view just yet it tells me that google assistant won't be available at launch but that it might arrive eventually i should also mention for the sake of both you bixby fans out there the samsung says its own apps and services aren't going anywhere so that means samsung pay and smart things which is great if you've already bought into samsung's ecosystem it'll also import some settings from your phone as well as installing watch apps automatically when you have the phone version installed which is frankly so much more simple than what tizen did previously there's still an app store on the watch itself though should you so choose and better yet this stuff isn't samsung only and should work on any android phone running android 7 enough so long as it has gms beyond samsung and google you also have to hope that having one fewer operating systems to target might mean better app support from third-party developers although it's not new for samsung smartwatches spotify has an upcoming which includes the option of offline listening and fingers crossed this is a sign of things to come [Music] so sensors health stuff the first bit is worth talking about is a new three in one health center which combines ppg ecg and bia sensors that means there's an optical heart rate sensor an electrical heart sensor and a bioelectric impedance analysis sensor which basically means detection of everything from blood pressure to atrial fibrillation blood oxygen levels and body composition but samsung's pitches that in addition to the technical individually can also detect it as a whole using its body composition analysis tool it's meant to give you a holistic view of your health ranging from everything from skeletal muscle to metabolic rate and bmi and the tracking doesn't stop once you go to sleep oh no samsung says that the watch can track your blood oxygen levels while you sleep and offers more insight into how your sleep has gone gently oh and it'll also track your snoring which seems rude but okay i'm broadly skeptical of sleep tracking features like these because it's when they offer any advice beyond hey you should go to sleep at the same time every night but maybe samsung's cracked it who knows samsung smartwatches have been our recommendation for anyone with an android phone for quite some time but it feels like samsung has hit a little bit of a ceiling with what it can achieve while it's still running its own software that's what makes this year's smart watches and google and samsung's collaboration in general so exciting it banishes so many of those little niggles like a lack of native google apps have been plaguing samsung's recent watches last year we said it was time for a change and this year we're finally getting it so thank you so much for learning about samsung wearables but they also have foldables if you want to learn more about those then chris well she probably has a video that's around here somewhere