Samsung Galaxy Watch 3
An attractive and featureladen watch, but it doesn’t improve on the original as much as we’d like
SCORE
PRICE 45mm, £349 (£419 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
In spite of its name, the Galaxy Watch 3 is only the second “true” Galaxy Watch Samsung has made. While the sporty Galaxy Watch Active 2 ( pcpro.link/313active) surfaced in early 2020, this is the first proper upgrade to the company’s flagship, which launched in 2018.
The Watch 3 comes in two sizes – 41mm and 45mm – and both run Samsung’s Tizen operating system, meaning you can use them with Android and iOS smartphones. The smaller model starts at £399 for the Bluetooth-only variant and comes in bronze and silver, while the larger model costs £419 and is available in black and silver. Another £40 buys you 4G, irrespective of which size you pick, so a 45mm 4G Galaxy Watch 3 costs £460.
The Galaxy Watch 3 is smaller and thinner than the Galaxy Watch despite having a larger display. Take the 45mm model I tested: it has a 1.4in AMOLED panel while being 1.8mm thinner and weighing 9g less than the 46mm original. The 41mm variant includes a 1.2in display and both have a 360 x 360 resolution. This makes for a noticeably less bulky watch than before, but the 45mm Galaxy Watch 3 still isn’t exactly svelte.
Samsung sacrifices battery size for the smaller chassis, with a 340mAh capacity compared to the 470mAh unit in the 46mm Watch. Samsung promises a typical life of over 56 hours between charges, but I squeezed in three to four days of use despite logging the occasional GPS activity. Both models support wireless charging, so you can charge them from any QI wireless charger, as well as the one supplied in the box.
Although the Galaxy app store is notoriously limited compared to both Apple’s watchOS and Google’s Wear OS equivalents, one of the main perks is that the operating system’s native Spotify app lets you store playlists for offline playback. Both sizes come with 8GB of onboard storage, of which you can use around 4GB to store music. Note, though, that you can’t transfer locally stored songs from an iPhone.
In terms of other features, the Watch 3 does everything you’d expect from a flagship smartwatch. It has GPS for tracking speed and distance, an optical heart-rate sensor, an accelerometer and it’s waterproof to 50m. New to this release: it can measure your blood oxygen levels using a built-in SpO₂ sensor, and it will now give you a sleep score.
Runners will be pleased to learn that the Watch 3 can estimate your VO₂ max and even offer advanced running analysis. Amazingly, the watch records asymmetry, contact time, flight time, regularity, vertical oscillation and stiffness directly from the wrist. Those are insights you’d normally associate with specialist running watches from Garmin, while the Samsung Health app offers plenty of info on how to interpret the data to improve your running form.
The Watch 3 works brilliantly as an everyday fitness tracker too, letting you see how active you’ve been and prompting you to move around if you’ve not done enough. It will also automatically start workouts after you’ve been moving for ten minutes, which is handy if you forget to hit the record button.
“I found it genuinely useful to answer calls without having to reach for my phone and call quality was clear via the tiny speaker”
Sadly, the Watch 3 still falls short of being a truly great sports watch.
For instance, there’s no option to manually set your heart-rate zones in the Samsung Health app, and you can’t use a Bluetooth heart rate monitor along with the watch’s native fitness apps. The good news is that the optical sensor is accurate.
There are plenty of non-sporty features. There’s NFC for making contactless payments via Samsung Pay, while a speaker and microphone enable you to make calls from your wrist. I found it useful to answer calls without having to reach for my phone and call quality was clear via the tiny built-in speaker – those I spoke to reported they could hear me well. Replying to messages from my Google Pixel using the watch’s canned responses was a cinch. Note this feature isn’t available for iOS users.
The last significant new feature is fall detection. After adding up to four SOS contacts to the Galaxy Wearable app, you can choose which one the watch calls should it detect a fall.
It’s disappointing that the Watch 3 uses the same 1.15GHz Exynos 9110 processor as its predecessor, but this doesn’t mean it feels slow. Navigating its widgets via the brilliantly tactile rotating bezel is both nippy and enjoyable, and all the info you might want relating to your health and fitness is easy to find. Samsung also lets you pick from a wide range of watch faces.
The Galaxy Watch 3 is a brilliant-looking smartwatch that does the basics well – you can even make the case that it’s the best smartwatch Android users can buy – but thanks to its elderly innards and limited app store, it isn’t the world-beating smartwatch it should be for the price. You can enjoy a similar experience with both the Galaxy Watch (the 46mm version costs £279 from John Lewis) and Galaxy Watch Active 2 (44mm for £269) and save a considerable amount of money in the
process. EDWARD MUNN SPECIFICATIONS 1.4in AMOLED display, 360 x 360 resolution 1.15GHz Exynos 9110 processor
1GB RAM 8GB storage 802.11n Wi-Fi Bluetooth 5 NFC accelerometer barometer gyro sensor light sensor optical heart-rate sensor SpO2 sensor 340mAh battery Tizen OS 46.2 x 45 x 11.1mm (WDH) 54g 1yr RTB warranty