Samsung Galaxy Watch6 Classic

Price: £369 from fave.co/3H4CRY2

2024-03-01 -

If you have an iPhone and want a smartwatch, then the Apple Watch is an easy choice. It’s not so simple if you have an Android phone.

Though the first Google Pixel Watch is a good wearable overall, it has poor battery life and forces you to buy into the Fitbit ecosystem for fitness tracking.

I’ve used both an Apple Watch Series 8 and Pixel Watch extensively over the past year and enjoyed both, so I have been pleasantly surprised to find that after a week with it, the Galaxy Watch6 Classic might be my favourite of the three.

It’s the best Android smartwatch by a distance, beating Google at its own game. With good design, top hardware including a clever rotating bezel and genuine two-day battery (with one caveat), it’s going to be hard for the upcoming Pixel Watch 2 to beat.

DESIGN

Many previous Samsung smartwatches have had a physical rotating bezel, but the company ditched it in 2022. Thankfully it’s back on the Watch6 Classic. It’s a great feature that I’m surprised more companies haven’t copied. It helps that Samsung’s version of WearOS is based around scrolling left to right, meaning you turn the bezel to scroll through tiles of useful information, or to scroll up or down in menus or screens of text.

I reviewed the larger 47mm version of the Watch6 Classic, but you can get a 43mm model that has a smaller screen and battery. I quite like the large look and feel of the stainless steel casing on my wrist, but you might want to try one on before buying as both sizes dwarf smaller arms. If that’s the case, you might be better off with the regular Galaxy Watch6.

The strap that Samsung includes in the box is a nice faux leather on the outside but rubberized on the inside so you can still sweat in it when exercising and easily clean it after. One quibble is the straps jut out quite far because of the angle of the lugs, which paired with the height of the watch itself means on smaller wrists there are big gaps where the strap doesn’t wrap tight to your arm.

DISPLAY

The 1.5-inch AMOLED display on the 47mm model I tested is excellent. It

has a peak brightness of 2,000 nits, and is perfectly legible in direct sunlight, a rare feat for any OLED screen. It goes right to the edges of the bezel, with no black space around the outside like you’ll find on the alsocircular Pixel Watch.

Colours look bright and sharp, and the software is based on a mostly black background, which looks good and uses less battery than if it were always white.

You can navigate around it using the bezel or your finger as it’s a full touchscreen. You have to tap on certain prompts or buttons at times, and I found things responsive.

Although squared-off smartwatches such as the Apple Watch or Amazfit GTS 4 Mini can display more vertical text on their screens at once, I prefer a circular smartwatch – even though text can get cut off if you are reading a full-screen text message or email. I rarely sit there reading lots on the watch anyway because it’s a fitness tracking and notification device. I’m not going to fire up an e-book on it.

I much prefer the circular, indeed ‘classic’ look that Samsung literally puts in the name of the product. It’s obviously a smartwatch, but it can pass as a traditional watch at first glance.

Taking calls on your watch is still not exactly the social norm, but you can do it with the in-built speaker, which also blurts out workout updates like an Apple Watch unless you turn it off (I did). You can’t play music out of it, needing instead to connect Bluetooth headphones.

PERFORMANCE

Despite using the new and updated Exynos W930 chipset and 2GB RAM, the Watch6 Classic can be a little laggy. Sometimes turning the bezel when the screen is asleep doesn’t immediately wake the screen, which then sputters into life and scrolls a few tiles into your menu to catch up.

The only difference from the last-gen chip is a slightly higher processor speed. Generally, the watch is responsive and feels fluid, though during runs I found there to be a lag when using the touchscreen both to swipe to music controls and to skip to the next song while using wireless earbuds.

This was with music downloaded directly onto the watch’s 16GB storage using the Spotify app. It’s a great feature that meant I could leave my phone at home, but with the lag it pushes the limits of the hardware when you actually come to use it. Otherwise, notifications arrived very promptly and in general day-today use I had no further qualms with the performance.

The heart rate sensor is continuous, so it tracks your pulse all day, which I like. This may affect battery life, but I kept it on as I find the data interesting.

FITNESS AND TRACKING

I’ve been impressed with the fitness tracking features of the Galaxy Watch6 Classic. If you really want the best in on-wrist tracking then you should still opt for a Garmin, but this is the best Samsung smartwatch yet for exercise tracking.

I really like the auto-tracking on the Classic, which kicks in after ten minutes of brisk walking by default.

You might want to turn this off if you find it annoying, but it ended up encouraging me to walk more often during the day to log short bursts of exercise. I found it much more motivating than the reminders to stand up.

Run tracking with the built-in GPS is also solid, and the data displayed during a workout is clear and useful, with pace, duration, heart rate and time all featured. I ran 5km with a Garmin Forerunner 265 on my other wrist, and the two devices varied slightly on overall distance and time, but the heart rate was consistently identical. I tend to trust the Garmin to be more accurate, but the Watch6 Classic was not far off.

GPS route tracking showed that it still thinks I’ve run through buildings, but this is as good as it gets on a device that isn’t solely designed for fitness. It’s certainly a lot better than the Fitbit Sense 2 when it comes to run tracking.

There’s a huge list of other trackable sports including open water swimming, cycling, and hiking that all use GPS to track your route. You also get Samsung Health’s walking or running coach that uses on-wrist prompts and audio feedback (via the onboard speaker or connected Bluetooth headphones) to get you hitting your goals.

For the first time on a Galaxy Watch you can also set and monitor personalized heart rate zones when working out. You can use presets or set your own, and the watch will alert you if you go above or below your set heart rate zone, which you might want to stick to for certain types of training. It’s good to see more specialist fitness features like this.

Connectivity is via Bluetooth 5.3, as well as Wi-Fi if connected via your phone. There’s also NFC for mobile payments, and GPS/GLONASS/ BEIDOU/GALILEO for global route tracking. I didn’t test the LTE model, but if your network provider allows it, this version can connect to 4G so you can use the watch when not connected to

your phone for data and call services. Though the watch is uncomfortable to wear at night due to its size, sleep tracking via Samsung Health is accurate and useful. After wearing it for seven nights, it assigned me a sleep animal, a new feature Samsung seems to have shamelessly nicked from Fitbit. I’m a lion because I go to bed at consistent times and for long enough, apparently.

SOFTWARE

The Watch6 series is the first to use Google’s WearOS 4 software, and it’s great. It’s still not as polished as watchOS on Apple Watch, but it’s as close as an Android alternative has come. The Watch6 Classic will work with any phone running Android 10 or later, but it doesn’t work with iPhones.

I like the ability to customize the tile menu to put things like media controls, Google Keep notes, calendar, and sleep tracking at the front of the stack, but it is a bit annoying to have to scroll through lots of tiles, so I kept it minimal.

You can swipe up from the clock face screen to access an icon grid of apps. WearOS is getting better at third-party apps, but it’s still slim pickings. I was happy with Pocket Casts and Spotify both being standalone apps and being able to download podcasts and songs

to the watch for offline play, but you’ll find yourself mostly using Samsung’s own apps like Health, Clock, and Weather, along with Google Wallet for payments.

It’s annoying you can’t change the Samsung Pay shortcut (press and hold the back button) to do anything else. Luckily you don’t have the same problem in replacing the button shortcut for Bixby (useless) with Google Assistant (great).

It’s more frustrating that the ECG, irregular heart rate notifications, and blood pressure monitoring will also only work on Samsung phones – but all three are also only available in certain regions according to local licensing, so you might not care anyway.

But if you have a heart condition and want the safety net of these features, you need a Samsung phone, which is user hostile. Android is an open platform, but Samsung wants you fully in its ecosystem. The only other thing that didn’t work for me on a non-Samsung phone was the Do Not Disturb status didn’t sync between watch and phone, which was annoying.

The blood pressure feature also requires you to own a separate, nonSamsung blood pressure monitor to calibrate it, so it’s useless out the box for most buyers even with a Samsung phone.

A new feature lets you switch to another phone without having to reset the watch, which as a phone reviewer I found a total godsend. You might not care as much, but it was quick and easy to do between phones.

BATTERY LIFE

The Watch6 Classic has a necessarily small 425mAh battery that Samsung says can last up to 30 hours with the always-on display (AOD) off, and 40 hours with it on. I found the former claim practically unachievable but managed to better the latter.

With the lovely AOD on, the battery life tanks if you are using the watch a lot. With 100 percent at 8am with some

walking tracking thrown in and no music played from it, the watch was at 36 percent by 9pm. When I woke up the next morning, it was on 9 percent – 24 hours and nearly dead.

Luckily, I could still go on a run that morning because a 20-minute charge got it up to 35 percent. A 30-minute run used 7 percent. On other days, the battery was better than this.

I tested the same sort of day with the AOD off, and at 9pm the battery was at a massive 80 percent. I didn’t have to charge again until the morning of the third day, over 48 hours later. The watch can achieve two days of battery life, but only with the always-on display turned off, relying on raising your wrist to wake the screen.

VERDICT

Despite holding back ECG and irregular heart rate notification features from nonSamsung phones, the Galaxy Watch6 Classic is the best Android smartwatch you can buy, besting both the regular Watch6 and the Google Pixel Watch.

The Classic has an excellent premium design, can stretch to two days of battery life, has a complete set of smart and health features, a very bright and sharp screen, and solid performance

The 47mm version might be a touch big for small wrists, but you can save some cash and opt for the 43mm instead at the expense of screen and battery size. WearOS 4 has great app selection, while the addition of 24/7 heart rate monitoring, better exercise recording, and an improved sleep tracking feature makes the Classic a smartwatch you’ll want to wear all day and night. Henry Burrell